Final Match Tennis

~ FINAL MATCH TENNIS ~

Human

HuCard

1991

There are those who swear by Final Match. With a sparkle in their eye, they'll tell their tales of sleepless nights spent on FMT tournaments, of never-ending delight delivered by a tennis title that outclasses all others. Me, I haven't ever drawn up any FMT brackets, haven't congregated with assemblages of fellow fans... haven't even lost a wink of sleep to the thing. I do like it well enough, but I view it merely as an example of what can happen when a design team competently puts together a product that excels in the one area that matters most. As for what that one area is, well, it is not visuals. From afar, FMT looks a lot like a number of archaic NES and Gameboy efforts...

...though, in all fairness, it makes a better impression when one has the chance to actually sit down with it; the finest aspects of the art and animation can't come through in screen captures. I offer no such qualifiers regarding the audio, however, which is 8-bit fare all the way. And do not expect your default single-player FMT experience to be rewarding, as a good serve-and-volley game will have your computer-controlled opponent tripping over his own feet point in and point out.

Options at the onset are not aplenty, covering and extending not the slightest bit beyond a variety of court surfaces, a training mode, a number of selectable players, and tournament competition.

But FMT answers the call with its gameplay. It's a very fast, very lively affair that controls wonderfully, making it grand entertainment for friends in the mood for batting a tennis ball around sans any flaw in play that could possibly lead to frustration for either party.

But my friends and I, well, we prefer Davis Cup, which is more realistic action- and appearance-wise, deeper and more rewarding on the whole. Still, even those tennis-game fans who share my views on how FMT stacks up to its peers, on how much of its strange cult-hit-ish rep is truly deserved, probably won't for a moment consider it anything less than a competent alternative to everything else that's available, especially since it typically costs a mere four or five bucks.