Balle De Match

Copyright : DL Research | Reviewed by : Malc Jennings

Balle De Match is Psions answer to the increasing amount of sports games that arrived on the shores of 8-bit land in the 1980s, this one is a tennis simulation with an arcade style appearance (more on this later) but there was a pretty huge shortage of tennis games for this particular machine and those that did make it weren?t exactly great.
Is this one any different? find out below...

Graphics

Considering the time of release and the almost BASIC type appearance of the introduction and name entry screens this game looks pretty nice indeed. Colours are nice and bright (though very few colours are needed or used in tennis games), from the moment the game starts you can?t help but feel you are playing a more expensive title (Decathlon for example) and it really looks like an arcade conversion - a good one at that. Animation is on pretty much top form for the time of release and we seriously doubt that anything better in this particular year and genre was released for some time to come. A very very nice job by Psion and the not so well known DL Research.

Sound

Sound is pretty basic though, there is no introduction music or in-game music for that matter and what sounds do make an appearance aren?t overly active nor good. Again if we look at the year of release it?s not that surprising and considering that almost complete silence is demanded in a real game of Tennis it sort of makes the game that little bit more authentic, having said all that we doubt Psion thought this at the time of writing and simply couldn?t be bothered.

Gameplay

As for gameplay, if you know how to play Tennis or better still if you enjoy playing these games then we don?t need to explain the overall idea. For those that don?t, you simply hit the ball back and forth until one person misses and a number of points is awarded, sounds simple but it?s not all that easy in real life or in the computer simulation world.
We here at CPC Zone very rarely hook up a sports game in emulators and never in the current generation of hardware do we play this genre, after playing this CPC classic we suddenly realised that it?s not as boring as we first thought - sure Wimbledon is about as exciting as watching dust rest on top of your TV set but the computer game isn?t half bad. There is a distinct lack of programming errors, dodgy control systems or even bad animation so, sadly for some readers - we can?t complain.
Certainly if you?re a fan of Tennis in general we highly recommend you give this one a go as it plays like a dream.