The third month and the 14th day relates to 3.14 which is pi to three significant figures. To its credit, Matchpoint’s uncluttered control setup makes it supremely easy to pick up.Pi Day: March 14th is Pi Day. Your player’s movement is heavily assisted so that you only need to nudge the thumbstick in the general direction of a returned ball and they’ll be automatically guided to the ideal position in order to meet it. This allows you to keep your focus squarely on your opponent’s side of the court, where you can steer around a dinner plate-sized reticle and pull off a standard array of tennis shots with a level of pinpoint accuracy that goes beyond Djokavic to border on Jedi levels of precision. It’s a rally system that’s certainly reliable and offers you plenty of freedom, but it’s also one that’s a bit too easy to master since it’s all reward and very little risk. The window for timing your shots is exceedingly generous, and you’re not really penalized in any way for overcooking a shot or serve. There are probably computerized ball machines that have made more unforced errors than I have in my 20 or so hours played – you almost have to go out of your way to actually hit the ball outside of the lines, and can pull off crosscourt shots at impossible angles without batting an eyelid. So yes, Matchpoint successfully makes me feel like some sort of hard-tuned tennis terminator… But when you’re confident you can nail a passing shot from almost anywhere it results in rallies that have about as much tension as a tennis racquet strung with spaghetti. The ability to paint the lines so effortlessly is also detrimental to Matchpoint’s career mode, since it makes the progression system seem almost entirely unnecessary. While my created player began with modest levels of shot power and spin, his accuracy was laser-guided from the outset. That meant that from day one on the tour I was hitting about 50 clear winners for every one that landed wide. The size of the aiming reticle and your unerring ability to hit it remains consistent throughout, and even with the difficulty dialed up to the highest setting I stormed my way to seven consecutive tournament victories and was world number one within the first few months of my career this despite having completed just one of the stat-boosting training mini-games along the way.Īdmittedly it’s something of a blessing that these training mini-games can be skipped, since they’re either utterly mundane (like when you have to play a game of Simon Says for groundstrokes) or clumsily implemented (like the drill for serving aces that puts you up against a receiver standing so wide of the service box they may as well be signing autographs). But completing these simple training drills is about as deep as the management aspect of Matchpoint’s career goes, which made me feel pretty uninvested in my player’s success. There are no sponsorship deals to consider or injury niggles to take into account, and instead you basically just roll from one indistinct, unlicensed tennis tournament to the next, snatching up more silverware than a sticky-fingered butler in Buckingham Palace.Īt least I assume the trophies are silver, because Matchpoint doesn’t actually ever show them to you. While the animations of the players are smooth and the courtside detail is crisp, there’s a noticeable lack of life and no real sense of occasion imbued in each competition, with every tournament culminating in the same static result screen. There’s no trophy presentation after a final, no handshakes between players, no statistical overlays in the broadcast presentation, and the small handful of faces in the crowd are so heavily reused it’s almost as though the stadium tickets were having a “buy one get two free” promotions for sets of identical triplets. Similar cosmetic limitations are also inflicted on your created player. With just a handful of heads and haircuts to choose from, and no option to customise service motions or grunts of exertion, it’s almost impossible to produce anyone other than either John or Jane Smith from the United States of Generica. Even worse, while the 18 licensed professionals in Matchpoint each come dressed in branded gear from the likes of Nike and Adidas, the clothing and equipment available to your player is of the strictly no-name variety.
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