Perfect Ace - Pro Tournament Tennis

Published by Oxygen Entertainment
Developed by Aqua Pacific
Platform: PC CD-ROM & PlayStation 2
Released - Out Now
Price : £29.99 (PC) £39.99 (PS2)

The summer's here and the time is right (no not for dancing in the streets) but for tennis games. Here at Deaf Gamers we have two tennis titles awaiting review. The first we'll look at is Perfect Ace Tennis from Oxygen and Aqua Pacific. In this review we'll look at both the PC and PlayStation 2 versions as they are exactly the same.

Perfect Ace features 32 'photo-realistic' players and 16 different tennis courts. The only problem here though is that players are completely fictious and not the most beautiful of creatures if we're being completely honest. It's not quite Quasimodo tennis but it isn't far off. The tennis courts are not really completely different either. You have the usual four different surfaces, grass, clay, carpet and hard courts but other than that the courts are all slight variations on each other with some being indoor and some being outdoor etc.

The gameplay options on offer are simply comprised of a single match, tournament and championship. What's really missing here are tutorials. There are 3 difficulty settings and 3 game speeds. Being a cautious gamer I tend to begin on the lowest difficulty setting. Unless you are a small child, who has never played a game before, or hopeless, I would avoid playing at this level though as the AI is really rather thick and fails to see the ball quite frequently. The medium difficulty setting is a little better but most gamers will put the difficulty on hard to get some kind of challenge.

If your only option is to purchase the PC version then you'll be disappointed to learn that it is a blatant straight port. The only graphics options are to choose between a resolution of 640x480 16bit colour or 640x480 32bit colour. What really hurts though is that the game looks like a PSone game running on an emulator. The PlayStation 2 version looks better but not as good as it could do.

As you would expect with a sports title, Perfect Tennis is fine for deaf gamers. The match commentary is not subtitled but in all honesty it's rather poor so you're not missing much. Text appears on the screen to show when a ball has gone out and the score is shown frequently. The text is easy to read but then again it would be when you're confined to a resolution of 640x480.

In all honesty though Perfect Ace is not a bad tennis game. The problem really stems from the fact that overall it's a basic game that does nothing to distance itself from tennis titles that are much older and much cheaper. Virtua Tennis can be bought for half the price on the PC and Virtua Tennis 2 has been out for a while on the PlayStation 2. In it's favour though it's very easy to start playing and would make a decent multiplayer game. Most are going to prefer a game with real tennis players though.

Overall Game Rating: 5.5/10
Basic gameplay modes, no tutorial, erratic AI and fictious players put a damper on the the game but overall it's not a bad tennis game but there are many better ones out there.

Deaf Gamers comment:
No subtitles but it doesn't cause any problems.