Power Serve Tennis

Feast your eyes on this baby. Power Serve looks beautiful and plays even better. This totally 3-D tennis game offers several views to choose from during play, and eight characters that you can use.

Unfortunately, there's no official license for this game, so don't expect to see names like Seles, Sampras, or Agassi. But if you look closely at the players' faces and names, I think you'll see some similarities. Playing under pseudonyms in Power Serve are Chang, Sampras, Agassi, Edberg, Capriotti, Graff and Sanchez-V.

One of the early PlayStation sports titles, Power Serve Tennis does little to bolster the system's image. With cheesy graphics and pathetic controls, this rudimentary tennis game trips over its shoelaces.

In the Net

Power Serve's vanilla features provide little pizzazz. Instead of real-life pros, you choose from eight fictional players with the same four swings and four serves. On the hard, clay, and grass courts, you take on singles or doubles exhibition matches.

Don't expect anything as fancy as a tournament, though.

Although Power Serve's tough action moves at a speedy pace, its bargain-basement features add up to simplistic tennis. Besides, much of the challenge comes from the awful controls. Your player runs and stops smoothly, but identical swings sometimes connect with the ball and sometimes miss. You'll face hours of extreme frustration before you connect regularly.

Double Fault

The graphics continue this game's losing streak. The drab, shapeless backgrounds barely resemble a tennis arena, and the polygonal sprites, though smooth and realistic, look too chunky.

Although Power Serve provides seven perspectives on the action, all but two make chasing the ball harder and more disorienting. Worst of all, the animation often stutters when your racquet connects with the ball, making swinging even harder to master.

On the bright side, solid ball sounds and good crowd noise inject a realistic feel. However, the horrible, jingly music and distant, computerlike announcer quickly undercut that advantage.

Tennis fans should stick with 16-bit gems like Jennifer Capriati Tennis. Power Serve is obviously a rush job that takes advantage of the PlayStation's polygon graphics, but it doesn't even come close to living up to 32-bit potential.