Playing every PS1 game - 4-4-2 Soccer, 40 Winks, 4x4 World Trophy & 5 Star Racing

4-4-2 Soccer

Until around about when FIFA RtWC 98 and ISS Pro started to nail the formula for 5th-gen football games, it was a bit of a free-for-all. The likes of Actua Soccer and Adidas Power Soccer did a tidy enough job, but there was also a lot of guff. Enter 4-4-2 Soccer.

It really isn’t nice to look at.

I actually love a lot about this game, aside from the actual ‘playing football’ bit. This core part of the game is bad; borderline unplayable, even. You can’t pass the ball accurately, shooting is a lottery, the graphics and sound are poor, and it all becomes impossible to enjoy. On the other hand, the ‘not playing football’ bits actually have a scope that I don’t think any other football game was offering, and I know that some bigger name series never have. The number of fully present-and-correct domestic and international teams with which you can play is wild. There are 70 (seventy) different nations on the roster, including the likes of Fiji, Jordan, North Korea, Syria and Uganda. Feel free to play a friendly game as one of those heavyweights against one of the honestly hundreds of domestic teams from said nations. Is there another game available even today where you can match up Zambia v Hadjuk Split? I’m convinced there isn’t.

Ferencvaros would not appear again in a football game to my knowledge until FIFA 2022.

If you don’t want to play a friendly, there is the ‘Championship’ mode, which offers a breathtaking level of customisability. You’re invited to pick a team and compete in a league with 19 other randomly selected domestic sides (from any nation, so Anderlecht v Bangor becomes a realistic prospect). You start in the fourth ‘division’, and can work your way up to the top (or at least so I suppose, given how actually playing the games is so beset by grief). By default, all the squads from 1996/97ish are set up, but you can also just say bollocks to all that and create your squad from scratch using the player database, and taking a fixed sum of money to put a team together a la fantasy football. You can simulate your games (though they tend to all finish 1-0), or even just play as every team in the league and grind out each fixture yourself. It’s the PES Master League years before it was a thing.

The REAL European Super League.

You can also set up a tournament, with a choice of a 64-team knockout, a European Championship or a World Cup. If you want to figure things out, there is a ‘practice’ mode which puts your 11 men on a pitch with no opposition and leaves you to it to recreate the Ossie Ardiles ‘shadow play’ joke. There are also settings for pitch condition (ie. how muddy things are) - few competitor football games did any of this stuff.

So it’s a huge shame, then, that the ‘playing football’ bit is rubbish. ISS Pro was to come out a few months later to show everyone how it’s done, and nobody would ever hear about 4-4-2 Soccer again.

It did finish 0-0 I suppose.

Kept my attention for: A few hours
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 2/10

40 Winks

There are a few games for the PS1 which one remembers as being something of a big deal at the time, but over the years has been more or less entirely forgotten. I’d totally forgotten about 40 Winks too until now, but back in 1999 this game was marketed hard. Noise was made about this being the PS’s Mario 64, and the double page adverts in various magazines bigged up a funky looking ninja costume and the ‘spooky nightmare’ aspect of this 3D platformer.

Turns out one is a girl and one is a boy. This impacts certain places you can access in some levels.

Well, the ‘spooky nightmare’ description would fit if the game was merely three levels long, as that is where the ‘nightmare’-themed stages come to an end and things move to a different setting (there are six in all). The ninja? One of a handful of different costume power-ups you can pick up along the way, along with a jester, caveman, and a superhero-rocket-jump-guy that defies precise description.

Caveman guy can bash up enemies a bit quicker.

In keeping with the feeling that this was intended to be a serious Mario killer for the PS1, more or less all parts of the game are polished and well thought-out (aside from the jumping, which can get fiddly and frustrating sometimes), and the approach is more centred around problem-solving and navigation rather than combat and traditional platforming. You go into each level with the objective of finding and retrieving one or more miniature gerbil-looking creatures (think the brown turd-looking plot devices in Croc), and once you have them, you’re cordially invited to just quit the level as your job is done. Levels aren’t entirely linear and often require access to locked-off areas to which you backtrack a bit later (maybe once you have got yourself a ninja costume). At the end of each ‘world’ you get to fight a boss, which all follow the familiar platformer work-out-the-pattern-and-attack-at-the-right-moment schtick.

Each ‘world’ has its own special rocket race, where winning nets you…nothing in particular.

All the pieces are there for a great game. But I got a bit…bored. I didn’t finish it, and moved on after about half of the levels. I think that the primary reason for that is that this sort of game just doesn’t particularly appeal to me as an adult 25 years later, but it does make me wonder if it might also have something to do with why the 40 Winks IP went nowhere. While the wide range of level theming is interesting, the actual act of playing the game does get a bit samey (and maybe a bit slow) after a while. There’s nothing much here that hadn’t been done before.

Making one set of levels based around swimming was a very brave move, as the controls are fiddly.

Maybe one day I’ll give it another chance, but right now all I’m thinking is how much thought and how many man-hours of work went into creating this game and all its associated promotional material (and there was clearly a lot of care put into it), only for it to just be forgotten about.

There is a lot of high quality pre-rendered 3D storytelling between levels. Definitely better than most stuff on PS1, and PS2 as well.

Kept my attention for: A few days
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 7/10

4x4 World Trophy

This was released outside of PAL as Test Drive Off Road 3.

A racing game where it very quickly becomes apparent that it would be more appropriately called Moon Racing: The Game. In the world of 4x4 World Trophy, gravity has only a vague pull toward the earth, leaving cars flying around in all directions at the most trifling road bump. It’s quite ridiculous, but entertaining at the same time. The 4x4 vehicles you race are obviously set up to try and emulate off-road driving and have chunky suspension, but sometimes they more resemble bouncy castles.

40mph is enough to launch this 1997 Jeep Cherokee 100ft through the air.

In the PS1 era, racing games with more than a small handful of tracks were a relative rarity. Many games would cheat this a bit by adding a reversed or mirrored version of the track, or put it at night, and pretend it was a full-fledged extra racetrack. Well, 4x4 World Trophy does this too, but only after giving you 11 unique tracks in very distinct locations, which is a lot to be starting off with - compare with Gran Turismo which also squeezed 11 tracks out, but two of them were variations on others (and another one was the boringly pill-shaped test track).

Part of the challenge is keeping your vehicle on parts of ‘road’ that you won’t get stuck in.

The courses are lengthy and challenging, varying between two-lap loops and point-to-point races. The game makes a decent fist of emphasising that you’re out in the country; there are usually several routes from A to B and you often find them by just cannon-balling your car along the track by the seat of your pants. The game excels at this - flying around the corners and obstacles making it look like you’re pulling off intense feats of driving.

Speeding around UNESCO World Heritage sites is all part of the game in 4x4 World Trophy.

There’s a rudimentary car-buying system (you can tell we were in a post-Gran Turismo world) where you save up points earned in races to either ‘tune up’ your car (read: improve its handling and acceleration somewhat) or buy better ones. I guess the idea is to slowly level up from a weak car to a better one, but I was able to get to the final ‘level’ of races with the banger I bought at the beginning without too much effort on the medium difficulty, buying a top-level car so that I could just try it more than anything.

The ‘off road simulation’ is good on the whole, but let down by a stupid mechanic where you can get your car stuck in the mud without warning. When this happens, there is sod all you can do until you let off the accelerator and wait a seemingly random amount of time until your car sorts itself out and lets you get going again. Usually by this time you’ve been overtaken and find yourself a fair way back (there is no rubber band AI to be found here, so don’t expect to catch up), and have no option but to suck it up, as there is no option to restart. It’s not any kind of learning curve or risk-reward thing; it’s just game-breaking and annoying, and can happen several times in the same race.

A strange track has you driving around an abandoned New York City, five years before The Day After Tomorrow was released.

Once you do win the 4x4 World Trophy, you get, er, nothing. Some extra tracks get unlocked in Arcade mode. Cheers then. Probably fun in two-player or to return to for a blast at the arcade mode, but that’s about it once you’ve completed the main game.

Kept my attention for: A few days
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 6.5/10

5 Star Racing

By 2003, the PlayStation 1 was a spent force. I’d already owned a PS2 for a year by this point, and I definitely wasn’t an early adopter - it came to the UK in 2000 and by the end of 2002 I felt like a lot of people I knew had also upgraded. By November 2003 - which is when 5 Star Racing was released - the PS1 had received its last proper game (Jinx, made by Sony themselves to throw PSOne buyers one final bone) and all that was left were annual FIFA updates, which had long since ceased being more than a new season’s roster, and ‘budget’ games like this; the sort that your gran would get for you after seeing it for £10.99 in Tesco and thinking that this is the sort of thing the yoot are interested in now.

Developers fully understood the PS1 platform at this point. Budget games weren’t supposed to look this swanky.

So you can’t expect much from 5 Star Racing. It has five ‘game modes’, which are all actually the same thing - a single race against AI opponents. In each ‘mode’ you get a different car and can choose a different track - ‘easy’ or ‘hard’ - but there is no actual difference in difficulty between them. The game itself actually looks good - in comparisons with the likes of TOCA it comes out on top. But TOCA came out in 1997, and had a game attached to it.

It lifts as much as it possibly can from Gran Turismo within the little scope the game has.

There’s nothing more to say about 5 Star Racing. There are no cars to unlock and nothing beyond the five different races on the main menu. For a tenner in 2003 it was probably worth a fling with.

Actually no, it probably wasn’t.

Don’t be deceived; the only difference between modes is the single choice of car (on the right).

Kept my attention for: 45 minutes
Did I finish it?: I guess
Overall: 3/10