Playing every PS1 game - American Pool, Andretti Racing, Animaniacs, Anna Kournikova Tennis

American Pool

The first pool game since the rather turgid Actua Pool, this one is another Midas Interactive straight-to-the-bargain-bin budget title.

We go again.

Much like other Midas games, it’s basically a 00s-era Flash game pressed to a PlayStation disc. There is some rather bizarre midi music that plays on the main menu, but everything else is by the numbers and unmemorable. You have a few game modes which in fairness allow you to play from a good few different versions of pool (8-ball, 9-ball etc), but there is little complexity or depth to what’s going on. I spotted some sort of reference to powering up abilities a la RPG-style, but lacked understanding on how you would go about doing such a thing.

Sums it up really.

Actually, it’s just rubbish.

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

Andretti Racing

The fun part of this whole process has been finding games I’d not played before that were actually quite good and which I had been missing out on all this time. So far I can only really count two - Actua Soccer 2 and Alone in the Dark 4 - but I think this one might be a third. The difference with this one though is that unlike the other two, I’d never actually heard of Andretti Racing.

Up to 16 cars rendered on screen at once.

This is a surprisingly deep racing game for 1996, when simulators like Gran Turismo were yet to arrive and ‘simcade’ wasn’t a word yet. Its competitors were arcade ports like Ridge Racer and early stabs at realism like Formula 1, which funnily enough was released at the same time as Andretti.

Where Formula 1 focused on simple realism in F1 based around the mechanics of driving and racing, Andretti Racing is somewhat unique in that it tries also to create a realistic ‘motorsport broadcasting’ experience. The career mode involves watching many short live-action FMVs of the ‘EA Sports studio’ discussing and hyping up upcoming races and your performance in the championship.

It’s pretty damn cringey now, but this sort of FMV stuff was partly what was selling PS units at the time.

What about the racing? I was honestly expecting a standard mid-90s ‘hold the accelerator and bounce off walls to win’ experience with dull AI and two or three tracks, but it’s nothing like that. We have, in 1996, a PS1 racing game with plenty of tracks (including 15 other cars rendered on them at the same time), challenging AI, semi-realistic controls and handling, fully modelled vehicle damage, tyre wear, fuel depletion and honest to God pit-stop race strategy.

You couldn’t even do this on Gran Turismo.

Few games would even try most of this stuff until at least the times of the PS2. The FMV hosts tend to hint at rain and weather conditions, but I don’t know whether that was just for show or not as in my experience the tracks tended to play similarly.

There are only two gripes I have with the game, and they’re pretty frustrating ones. The first is that collision detection is totally out of whack. Move your car too close to the edge of the track, or another vehicle, and watch your car theatrically ‘bump’ and lose a wedge of its speed, despite your belief that you still had plenty of room. This is annoying if you’re trying to keep tight to some sort of racing line, or overtake - the AI cars zip from left to right frequently and don’t really care about bumping into you.

Smash into a wall and watch your vehicle disintegrate.

The other problem is a suspicion of rubber band racing AI. This normally doesn’t really impact your game (and can work for you as much as it works against you), but in a game where you have to time pit stops, having your pit-stopped opponent catch up with you at obscene pace before you manage to pit stop yourself kind of defeats the point of the game mechanic.

There is a ‘training’ mode…which turns out to just be a collection of short FMV interviews. Cheers then.

Still a fun racing game that would hold its own against all comers over the next 5-6 years.

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

Animaniacs: Ten Pin Alley

The licenced game I can’t imagine anyone asked for, Ten Pin Alley is a pretty basic bowling game where the hook is that the characters chirp irritating one-liners in between each shot, and needlessly 3D-generated Pinky & The Brain FMVs cut in from time to time to provide a loose plot exposition (presumably involving a plan to take over the world through the medium of skittles).

Compete against neckbearded cartoon charcters.

It’s quite easy, and not very interesting. Bowl, repeat. Advance to the next round and do it again. Hitting strikes is trivial if you’re quick enough with your fingers.

“Sorry, we ran out of polygons to render the rest of the room”

There’s nothing really more to it.

Kept my attention for: An hour
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 3/10

Anna Kournikova’s Smash Court Tennis

One of those I’ve never played, but do remember that it was meant to be pretty good. There aren’t that many tennis games on the PlayStation, but my expectation is that it can’t be as lackluster as All Star Tennis 99, whose efforts to paper over the dull gameplay by introducing a mode which swapped tennis balls for bombs only served to make things worse.

Your hopeless flaps at the ball as it flies past you are perfectly animated in 3D.

It’s damn hard. Too hard, unless I’m doing it wrong. You’re punished for mistiming your serve, bad positioning, choosing the wrong shot, all sorts. After about 45 minutes I was able to win a few points. Maybe there’s a knack to it and it gets more rewarding as you get better. If that’s true, I can respect it.

Play on courts in some rather bizarre locales.

I don’t have that sort of attention span in this process though. It’s decent enough; the art design is good and I can imagine playing 2-player doubles would be funny. It probably is the best tennis game on the PlayStation, which speaks to the lack of competition.

I don’t know what all the newspaper clippings are about but it’s a fun UI.

Kept my attention for: An hour
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 6/10