| ★ AMSTRAD CPC ★ GAMESLIST ★ CENTRE COURT (c) AMSOFT ★ |
| Hebdogiciel | AMTIX | Popular Computing Weekly |
Unseeded There is no way that this program is going to avoid comparison with Psion's Match Point for the Spectrum but I'm afraid that in my mind the Amsoft attempt isn't even seeded, which is a shame because it could easily have been excellent. To start with there is a nicely animated title screen of a ball bouncing on a tennis racket and the game looks like the Psion one, only with a side-on view of the court. Animation is not quite so good, with no ball boys, and ball movement is a bit slow, but to be fair it has to be to give you a chance to line up your player. Hitting the ball is easy, enjoyable even, and the outcome depends on your proximity to it when you take a swing. You soon get the hang of being able to send shots roughly where you want them - with the lamentable exception of at the programmer's head. Why? Well I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that the choice of keys has to be so awful and bunched up because sometimes you want to fit two people on the keyboard at once, although user-definable keys would have been nice. It would also have been nice if they had mentioned that the keys to use are on the numeric pad and not the main Qwerty board, although I agree it is a minor point. I'll even accept that it wasn't a bug that made the program crash the first time I played it and completely reset the computer the second time; after all bad tapes do slip out occasionally. But I found it inexcusable that, after loading the third time, I made the error of selecting a demo mode only to discover that nowhere on screen or in the inlay did it mention how to return to the option to play a game.
After fruitlessly pressing keys I left it to see whether the demo would end. It didn't; 57 minutes later I turned it off to load again. Whatever happened to user friendliness? Tony Kendle , Popular Computing Weekly |
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Page créée en 025 millisecondes et consultée 3958 fois L'Amstrad CPC est une machine 8 bits à base d'un Z80 à 4MHz. Le premier de la gamme fut le CPC 464 en 1984, équipé d'un lecteur de cassettes intégré il se plaçait en concurrent du Commodore C64 beaucoup plus compliqué à utiliser et plus cher. Ce fut un réel succès et sorti cette même années le CPC 664 équipé d'un lecteur de disquettes trois pouces intégré. Sa vie fut de courte durée puisqu'en 1985 il fut remplacé par le CPC 6128 qui était plus compact, plus soigné et surtout qui avait 128Ko de RAM au lieu de 64Ko. |
