Playing every PS1 game - Action Man, Actua Golf, Actua Hockey 2, Actua Tennis, Actua Pool

Action Man: Mission Extreme

While the 90s was a time when more or less anything aimed at a sub-30-year-old audience got slapped with some flavour of the moniker ‘extreme’, I distinctly remember the perception, even in my 10 year old brain, that the Action Man toy line’s use of the adjective was excessive. Googling some of the doll - sorry, ‘action figure’ names now shows it’s not false memory syndrome - we had Rescue Extreme, Ice Extreme, Cutter Extreme [Action Man with an, er, angle grinder] , and - not even ‘Extreme Sport’ - ‘Sport Extreme’.

God knows what this is for, but it doesn’t accept typical DOS commands.

So it’s no surprise that the inevitable Action Man video game was given the name Mission Extreme. What also feels inevitable is that said video game was going to be pants. Well, it turned out to not be total pants.

Paraglider sold separately.

The game actually looks pretty good. The fully 3D ‘main menu’ (it seems that global hero Action Man lives in a drab one-bed flat) is an adventurous idea pulled off, and some genuine cinematography has been (has attempted to have been) applied to cutscenes.

Duke Nukem meets Solid Snake.

Outside of the rather out-of-place top-down driving missions (think a very poor man’s Grand Theft Auto 2), the game concepts lift liberally from Metal Gear Solid, down to the systems in place to equip weapons and items (scrolling down the screen on the left and right). Similarly to MGS, progression takes place via navigating your way through a series of rooms in the Big Bad’s not-so-secret-after-all base, picking up keys to open doors and using bits of kit to complete objectives.

Boss battles are rather turgid affairs.

Un-similarly to MGS, doing so is pathetically easy. Enemies barely notice you and ‘die’ in a few hits from your handgun - but this being a kid’s game, downing an enemy rather counts as ‘capturing’ them, and you are invited to ignore their death throes resulting from being riddled with jacketed hollow points at close range.

Action Man (target demographic 3+ years) guns down yet another screaming villain.

I got up to the second ‘boss’ level and got a bit bored. The camera is terrible and you can rarely see where you are going, and constant loading screens are a frustration in a post-SSD world. But as a kid in 2000 you might have got some mileage out of it.

Kept my attention for: A few hours
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 5/10

Actua Golf

This is the only one of the three Actua Golf games I’ve picked up, as part of my efforts to not waste too much time playing essentially the same sports game with one or two tweaks repeatedly for each annual entry.

It’s the familiar three-button-press swing system.

Golf is one of those sports I love playing despite being extremely underwhelming in terms of ability (just like with the other sports, then). It’s a game that is so simple in its base terms - hit this ball into that hole over there - that it becomes hard to translate the activity of attempting it (it’s actually very hard to hit the ball into that hole over there) into a videogame with a handful of buttons and an absence of depth perception. That’s not to say nobody was attempting it; I’d actually wager that golf games were probably the most common sports game around in the years before developers managed to crack the formula for a good football game.

The game makes the most of the 3D environment with a vast array of camera angles.

So what’s special here? Well, the facts of the matter are that this is not a question answered by pure gameplay. Much like 3D Baseball, this other bat-and-ball sport dominated by Americans with funny names got its first fully-3D outing in a game with Actua Golf. As far as I can tell, anyway. My short burst of googling tends to indicate that only other 3D golf game in 1996 was a Japan-only game called Eikō no Saint Andrews, which was released a month later than Actua Golf, and on the N64. Courses themselves became 3D in the mid 90s, but 3D modelled golfers, and a free camera which can be whizzed around the course to get a good view of where you’re hitting would not become a standard fixture until at least 2000. Yes, outside of Actua Golf and one or two others, fully 3D golf would have to wait until the PlayStation 2. So yeah, getting this in 1996 was a novelty.

There’s a certain charm to the rather blocky 3D animations.

Unfortunately though, in another similarity to 3D Baseball, it suffers from carrying itself on its ‘3D’ credentials while lacking much substance beyond that. There are only two courses, and they’re both rather dull. The game is slow, slow, slow. Golf itself is a slow game, and the peaceful nature of being out in the countryside is something a golf simulation needs to capture (unless you’re going in a totally different direction with something like the arcade power-drive-‘em-up Everybody’s Golf), but here it feels every few moments you’re being forced to sit through another loading screen. Bit off more than it can chew in 1996? Maybe.

What you spend about 30% of your time doing.

It’s also worth talking about the obnoxious difficulty of this game. Without wired controllers and a CRT television, the old-fashioned ‘swing-o-meter’ precision timing was always going to be a fool’s game, but even being slightly off perfect results in a terrible hook or slice, with the late Peter Alliss (good on comms but seriously lacking lines) sticking the boot in by haughtily informing you of the schoolboy nature of your shot before it even makes it out of the tee box. Putting is almost entirely guesswork.

Isn’t the course design a wee bit dull?

If you want to play anything other than one-off exhibitions, you have to complete the Amateur Tour mode before being allowed to enter the Pro Tour Mode (the difference being an irrelevance due to the lack of any real-life players included in the game). You start the Amateur Tour mode with a handicap of 28. The problem is, to complete it and unlock the Pro mode, you need to drop your handicap to 0. There is simply no way anyone is managing that without weeks of practice and/or flagrant abuse of memory card reloads.

It could be that Actua Golf 2 and 3 improved on this, but I won’t know without playing them and I don’t plan to right now. The only other golf game I’ve played on the PS1 is Everybody’s Golf, and this is nowhere near it.

Kept my attention for: A few evenings
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 4/10

Actua Ice Hockey 2

Similarly to baseball, my understanding of the rules of ice hockey is on the more limited end of the scale, so I didn’t spend too long with this one.

Remember TFI Friday?

The lore behind this game is that it was originally meant to be fully licenced, but late in development whatever agreement was in place got rescinded, which is why you find yourself rather strangely competing in the ‘GHL’ with PES-style fake player names, and even more strangely, in-game pictures of real players are randomised instead.

Decent quality graphics for the era.

It feels like a good game, despite my not really knowing what I’m doing, with responsive controls and complex animations. I didn’t work out whether there was a way to start fights with other players. I’d have to play the EA Sports NHL games to know how it compares, though, and we’ll see if that ever happens.

Kept my attention for: 45 minutes
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 5/10

Actua Pool

Rendering balls in 3D is a highly computationally expensive task, due to the number of polygons needed to produce a smooth effect. The PlayStation, with its piddling 1MB VRAM, was no exception, so what you see in every pool or snooker game will actually be 2D sprites paired with some fancy scaling calculations to give a 3D effect. Gremlin’s Actua games made a point of using 3D where possible, but will have found themselves unable here. You do get a nicely modelled 3D hand and arm, though, which you don’t usually get in cue sport games.

It actually gets in the way a bit.

I thought Actua Golf was hard, but this is obscene. By default, you don’t get any handy indicators for where the cue ball will go after your cue poke, and instead just have to try and eyeball it. Good luck with that.

Get used to it.

It’s just too hard. Making tiny cue adjustments is an exercise in frustration as there is no ‘fine tune’ option (that I could work out), so giving more than a light tap of the button has your cue swing around. There is a ‘training’ mode that sets up shots for you to try out, but it only really serves as a demonstration of ‘yeah this is really quite difficult isn’t it?’.

I lost to an overweight farmer with his jeans pulled up around his chest.

You miss a shot, and then get to watch as your opponent clears up the table. Rubbish.

Kept my attention for: An hour
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 2/10