It's all about the hair.....
The mullet was a lie. Strong words, but true. According to his biography Andre Agassi, former tennis number one, played a series of pro-level games whilst wearing a hairpiece. His magnificent mane had begun to grow a bit thin a few years earlier, and understandably fearing its loss, he enhanced it with a high-quality artificial mullet made from yak pelt (that bit might not be true). For a while the plan worked perfectly; the hairpiece continued the tour racking up numerous tournament wins and several fatalities.
But plans have a way of turning against you and things reached ‘a head’ in the 1990 French Open final, where concern over the disintegrating mullet (its power exhausted) meant Agassi was distracted and lost the match to someone called Andres Gomez from Ecuador.
Following this Agassi decided to dump the toupee (personally aggrieving the nation of Australia where some 94% of men still wear a mullet) and went au natural. In a kind of reversal of the story of Samson, this was obviously the right move to make as he went on to become a regular tournament winner and was the first person to win all four Grand Slams and eight in total over the course of an impressive career.
During its tenure the hairpiece, with an eye on the finances (‘business at the front, party in the back’ as they say), gave Agassi’s license to publisher TekMagic who released the game on the Mega Drive in 1992. It was also released on the Master System and Game Gear as well as the Super Nintendo a couple of years later. With the benefit of hindsight, these games were the most obvious indication of the inherently evil nature of the proto-mullet, now thought to be the result of an experiment by Stasi police in East Germany in the 80s, and highlight just how lucky Andre was to be able to escape from its nefarious grasp.
The graphics look nice standing still, but the sprites move with a painful stuttering effect.
"I'll be Agassi!" .... "No, I want to be Agassi!"
A conversation that was no doubt repeated often in front of TVs in the early 90s. After a brief scuffle your older brother or sister has won the fight and has picked Andre. Who else is there? You have a look, and at that point the Crypt Keeper from Tales from the Crypt appears in the corner of the screen and beckons.. ”Welcome..mwahahaha “
Ron Pepper: (panting) “Give…me.. urrrgghh.. your.. shorts”
Apologies for the poor quality of screenshot but my hands were shaking. Put simply, these blow away the Mortal Kombat character selection screen in regards to their monstrous and inhuman looking visages.
The pretty good digital representation of Andre himself makes the rest of the characters look all the more horrendous by comparison. It’s almost like the artists were so afraid of accidentally drawing the likeness of another real-life player (and therefore running into trouble legally) that they made the other players look not even remotely human and instead like something from the Jim Henson reject pile. Apart from one guy who looks a lot like a young Dennis Quaid for some reason.
And what on earth happened with the names? These could be forgiven if the game had been created by a Japanese developer whose frame of reference was watching Escape from LA whilst drunk. But that’s not the case here. Really, Bob ‘bit’ Chin? And I assume by the time they got to Tiger Ball it was 5.30 on a Friday afternoon and developer had lost the will to live.
Review - Filbert Wang
A lot of people would have picked this game up off the shelf because of the license. All of them would have put the game into the cartridge slot and then within five minutes had a sick feeling in the pit of their stomach when they realised £40 of their hard-earned had just been flushed down the shitter.
Sports games (ones involving hand-eye co-ordination in particular; tennis, football, cricket etc.) rely on timing; Of the player being able to press a button and seeing their action represented on screen in a predictable manner. This is the one thing that they have to get right, and unfortunately Andre Agassi Tennis falls at this first hurdle. The awful input delay (when moving or hitting a shot) mean that it’s almost impossible to play and hit the ball with any regularity. Which is a problem in a tennis game. Having to feed punch cards with forehand/backhand instructions into the cartridge slot I am sure would have felt only slightly worse.
It’s a shame because the sprites are colourful and the game is well presented; they went through the effort of licensing the name of a tennis legend and you have a number of game modes that could have given the game some durability. But it’s all wasted in context of how the game plays and unfortunately it can’t even be recommended for a post-pub laugh with a mate; it’s just too frustrating.
Play Grand Slam Tennis (Jennifer Capriati Tennis in the US) or even Super Tennis if you have the Nintendo 16-bit machine. Both do a much, much better job of representing the game itself, and most importantly are responsive and fun to play.
Game Modes
Andre Agassi Tennis has a number of game modes, most of which you’ll be familiar with from other games of the genre; practice, tournament and two player, all of which do exactly what they say on the tin.
But one mode sticks out: ‘Skins Mode’. You’ll select this with some trepidation; what was the age rating on this game again, and surely not? But no, instead it’s just the regular game but you get money for your winning shots and games instead of points. Completely pointless and feels like they are painting one of the greatest ever players of the game as some kind of two-bit hustler out to steal your cash, so I’m not quite sure what the idea was.
The graphics are colourful and a two-player doubles would usually be fun. It’s just a shame the game sucks so badly.
Top Bloke
Perhaps wishing to re-balance cosmic karma from putting his name to a shite game Andre set up the Andre Agassi Foundation for Education, which has assisted with the education of some 65,00 children from impoverished backgrounds. He and fellow tennis legend Steffi Graf (who is also his wife) carry out significant fundraising for the foundation.
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