I’ve come to love the tennis game on my current phone, the Sony Ericsson K810i (which is an excellent phone by the way). The game is creatively named Tennis Multiplay, is developed by good ol’ Sega and features beautiful 3D tennis. The gameplay is great, but the game as a whole is far from complete which led to a score that hopefully doesn’t reflect my tennis abilities… -111 points!?

The game menu is horrible. Not graphically, but with regards to content. I mean, if you can’t spell “Options” you really shouldn’t be making games. And when you hover over items (e.g. “angle”) to see what they actually mean, you get information such as

The return angle of the ball has changed

Hmm… Ok..? I know what it means, but if you don’t have any valuable information to provide me with, just be quiet…

I thought I’d seen the worst of the game when I had finally reached the final game in the final tournament (beating 24 players). I lost the game marginally and Tennis Multiplay still suggested me that I’d go back and read the (very incomplete) basic instructions. But no!

The menu system is so incomplete, but as always, it’s gameplay that matters. So I’ve been playing it quite a lot and I’ve won a lot of tournaments. Every time you win a tournament, you get five points that you can invest in any of the five skills available, e.g. the angle mentioned above. And when you don’t distribute the points, they’re just added to the total score shown at the top. But the programmers… Well…

As is written in blue in the top right corner, I have the score of -111 points (or Point -111p as it says)… I must really suck at tennis (or they weren’t counting on anyone achieving scores higher than a signed byte)… I have a hard time believing that Sega actually put their name on this game…