Advantage Tennis

An early MS-DOS tennis simulation that tried to pass itself off as something between a game and computer training software. Advantage Tennis is a case where the developer — and I'm curious who that even was — had enough confidence to sit a player down and say: here are your courts, players, and physics. Figure out the rest yourself.

The game throws you into a tennis career with the ambition to win Grand Slams. Almost nothing is simple. Shot selection, timing, ball placement on the court — it all happens through menus and numerical inputs. You don't get pixel art players moving across the screen. You get numbers, court diagrams, and instructions. It's more of a simulation than a game for people who want to have fun.

Playability? As boring as sitting at a computer doing math. You enter data, the computer calculates, you wait. Occasionally a text message appears telling you what happened. The graphics are absurdly primitive — black lines and white backgrounds are so depressing you feel like you're in an aerobics sorting center from 1985. Sounds? Minimal. The game seems embarrassed to exist.

Still, it has its quirky charm. There were more games like this in the early nineties — computer simulations without graphical flash, where it was purely about strategy and numbers. Advantage Tennis ranks among the most backwards of them all. If you're not interested in retro purity and want to give it a shot, you can get through one match in about fifteen minutes of calculation and waiting.

It's not fun for everyone. If you have a sentimental attachment to computers from an era when a monitor was an unnecessary luxury and all games ran in the terminal, you might remember it fondly. Everyone else would rather play literally anything else. Fascinating as an artifact from when developers thought floppy disks had infinite space — just not for graphics.