Hands on with Wimbledon 2008

It would be a lot easier if we could go back to the days when no Brits were any good at tennis. Wimbledon, I mean.

Before Tim Henman got good, we were resigned to the fact that a home player would never win our flagship tennis tournament. Yet once we had someone who - in theory - was good enough to go all the way, every year became the same story of absurdly raised hopes dashed.

And to be honest, we get enough of with football.

Anyway, the emergence of Andy Murray means there won't be any respite this year at Wimbledon. Still, one way to ensure a Brit wins is to play the tournament yourself, on a phone.

Gameloft has the official Wimbledon mobile game licence, and as soon as it was unveiled, I got hands on with Wimbledon 2008. As I hoped, it's based on the company's excellent Tennis Open 2007 title, which came out last year.

You can play an exhibition match, play through the Wimbledon tournament itself or dive into the Career mode, which is a Virtua Tennis-style mix of training, playing and globetrotting. A neat touch is the lingo - Gentlemen's Doubles, anyone?

The licence doesn't appear to extend to real player names, although the inclusion of Swiss, Cypriot, Argentinian and Croation players hints at some basis in reality. No Brits, shockingly, but in Career mode you create your own player, and GBR is an option for their nationality. Phew.

The game is certainly accessible to play though, thanks to its two-stage control system. When your opponent hits the ball, you first move to the right position on the court, using your keypad.

When you get there, your player stops, and now the number keys control your shot placement - so '1' is a shot into the top left of your opponent's court, '3' is top left, and so on. Holding down the button wellies the ball harder, while a double-tap hits a slice shot.

It works very well, just as it did in Tennis Open 2007. There are neat touches too, like the servometer measuring the speed of your serves, and the way the path of the ball is tracked in mid-air.

I mentioned the Virtua Tennis comparison for the Career mode - it's a pretty shameless clone. Training consists of mini-games, such as a serving one where you have to knock down targets (NOT skittles though. It's not quite that shameless).

Succeed, and your skills get a boost, while winning tournaments takes you up the rankings. It looks sure to provide plenty of depth - and given that this game is based on a single tournament, it's good to see that brand constraints haven't stopped Gameloft including a proper global circuit in the Career mode.

We'll save the rest for the review, but rest assured that from our hands-on so far, Wimbledon 2008 is shaping up to be significantly less disappointing than our annual quest for the first British winner of the real thing since 1977.