Playing every PS1 game - European Super League, Everybody's Golf, Evil Dead

European Super League

Long before the mere mention of a breakaway European Super League would risk an international incident, it was still enough of a pie in the sky idea that it was an interesting diversion imagining how it might actually go down if - and when - European football's collection of juggernaut investment-vehicles-cum-football-clubs decided to finally pull the trigger and nuke the game.

Marcel Desailly reacts with confused shock after being sent off for almost detaching a man's legs.

That's clearly what was in mind with European Super League. It's a very unremarkable football sim, but what's striking now is the selection of teams chosen to actually front up this virtual crime against sport. There are the obvious - Barcelona, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, Juventus et al; the suspect-but-we'll-allow-it - Bayer Leverkusen, Benfica, Marseille; and then total 'dude what' entries in the form of Olympiacos and, er, IFK Göteborg. The Premier League is afforded merely two berths out of the sixteen available, and they go to Liverpool and Chelsea. One has to remember, too, that this is pre-Abramovich Chelsea (just), where their typical Premier League finishes were around the 4th/5th/6th segment. Liverpool were similarly middling. The story is that EA Sports had a few things to say about encroaching too much on their golden goose. The licences are all there otherwise, though - the teams, players, kits, and even the shirt sponsors, though EA Sports had managed to pip them to being the first to swing that too a few months earlier.

They didn't manage to get Carlsberg past the censor, though.

European Super League is a very quiet game, which is less than ideal for what purports to be an imagining of a diamond-encrusted greatest show on earth. There is no commentary, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but there is also no background jingle when going through menus, or and real sound effects at all. The ball, when kicked, sounds (and actually acts, but that's a separate problem) like it has had a knife driven through it pre-game. On the other hand, the crowd noise is sometimes the best I've experienced on PlayStation; they've obviously gone out and recorded actual fan noise and chanting, something I'm not sure you really got until the PS3-era FIFA games. Sometimes, the stadium is a indiscernible from a library (and Arsenal aren't in the game, so it can't have been that).

All the stadiums are accurately modelled, which takes some doing.

I've been undergoing a minor awakening while playing all these old football games. Aside from Actua Soccer 2 they have all been pretty rubbish. Some have been so dreadful you wonder how they got away with it. I await having the go through the FIFA games with interest and trepidation. European Super League just doesn't do very much very well. Passes go nowhere. Trying to effectively tackle (without performing a two-footed piledriver through your opponent's calves) is a futile effort in just trying to run and bump into the other player enough so that the ball breaks loose. When you don't have possession, it's a mission even working out which of your own men you're currently controlling. Crosses are slow and floaty, and your team-mates never seem to possess the intelligence to get on the end of them. It's just not any FUN.

A golf-style swing-o-meter system for swerving corners is pretty cool, though.

I played this on the afternoon that Manchester City finally got found guilty of 100+ of their financial offences. It's a good time to remind myself that it wasn't that long ago that Manchester City, Manchester United, and a few other Premier League teams almost actually did this European Super League nonsense, and then fully got away with it, barely having to even eat a slice of humble pie. I guess we'll see what happens. Florentino Pérez still has enough left in him for one last go.

Kept my attention for: 45 minutes
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 4/10

Everybody's Golf

Despite having a bit of a strange title, Everybody's Golf tied up the console's golf game market by 1997. It's one of those goldilocks-zone games which manages to be feature dense for the golf enthusiast whilst remaining straightforward enough to be played by someone with barely a clue what they are doing (which most definitely would have included me in 1997).

Nail both the power and accuracy and your caddie will compliment you.

Who needs alcoholic womanisers on their front cover and a million-dollar deal with the PGA Tour to licence their courses and players? Just make it all up, and give everything a feelgood cartoonish vibe. It clearly works, as they're still pumping out Everybody's Golf games almost 30 years later. Cartoon characters also don't crash their Cadillacs into trees while high on painkillers (allegedly).

The game hides wind speed from you until you've hit your first shot.

My main gripe with Everybody's Golf is that much of the game's content begins locked away, requiring vast amounts of grinding in order to piecemeal unlock the bulk of the playable golfers and courses. There are ten golfers available with which to knock around, but you start only with two, and are afforded two of the six total courses until you sacrifice enough time at the altar of tournament mode to be able to play anywhere else. The courses aren't all that different to each other, anyway. To unlock a new golfer, you must first defeat them in a 1v1 matchplay over 18 holes.

One down, seven more to go.

That's the other problem. Golf is a game which will take you a whole afternoon (or a morning if you're keen) to play, and even when you take out the walking bits and condense it down to videogame form, it can take a while to get through 18 holes. Modern games have realised this and tend to offer you the chance to just play a selection of half a dozen of any given holes on the course if you don't have the patience. Everybody's Golf forces you to sit with matchsticks holding your eyes open until you've damn well completed all 18 before you can collect your points and do something else. Even more criminally, there doesn't appear to be an option to just quit the game and return to the main menu - you have to reset the console.

You come to yearn for the validation of the peppy Well Done message if you pull off a half decent stroke.

Those are the only moans, though. It's a fast, slick golf simulator with all the bells and whistles available to fiddle with if you are so inclined - draws, fades, topspin, backspin, tossing grass into the air to gauge wind direction, even a mini-golf mode to practice putting. If you get yourself hooked, you can quite easily pour a very long time into Everybody's Golf's game modes. The soundtrack is pretty cool, too.

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

Everybody's Golf 2

With some of the recent sequels I've gone through - Driver 2 and Dino Crisis 2 are drawn to mind - I've tended to come away with the opinion that they weren't as good as the original; typically because amid all the hype around the fact the developers had struck gold and were about to do things 'bigger and better', they ended up losing track of an important facet of the original which actually made it good. It's easy to fall into the trap of just 'doing everything that sounds cool' or zeroing in too much on one particular criticism and sacrificing things that were actually pretty good in order to 'rectify' what people viewed as an error.

There are a new set of golfers to have a swing with, though I think I actually slightly preferred the uncanny valley look of the original artist's offerings.

Well, Everybody's Golf 2 does none of that. It takes everything that was good about Everybody's Golf, and just keeps it, adding new bits and pieces around the periphery. There's an argument one could make that just making the same game again risks coming off as a bit uninspiring, and even lazy, but EG2 does enough to just about sidestep that particular accusation.

There are spectators now; gone is the disembodied clapping from nowhere.

The roster of golfers has been totally swapped out with a new set of buffoonish caricatures of what people think golfers look like, and the courses (which were admittedly pretty dull in the original) are also redesigned, though you probably wouldn't notice unless the game told you. The central concept of grinding through rounds of golf to unlock new characters and whatnot is still there, though it is probably not quite as grind-y.

Your caddy still praises or chastises you for good/crap play.

It's worth mentioning how both games are a bit of a technical marvel as well. The game manages to load in 300-500 yards worth of golf holes in a short enough time to never need to bother with a loading screen (contrast with the excruciating load times in the Please-Wait-em-up Actua Golf). Furthermore, what players don't tend to think about with golf games is the fact that it has to actually draw that 500 yard course too. You can't exactly have fog-of-war and pop-in in a game where the whole point is looking far off into the distance. Granted, that is why the courses have such piddling number of polygons, but it's something I do think about even with modern games.

Some of them want to be used by you.

The short of it is that Everybody's Golf 2 makes Everybody's Golf redundant. Unless you are attached to the static-looking characters of the original, there is no need to play it once you had EG2 in your hands. It's exactly what you want a sequel to be.

Kept my attention for: An evening
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 7/10

Evil Dead: Hail to the King

I'll admit that the Evil Dead films aren't a movie franchise I have ever had an interest in. It's Bruce Campbell making one liners while swinging a chainsaw-hand about?

Stand in place, aimlessly swish your weapons, and tank hits. Gameplayᵀᴹ.

This game is bloody awful. You are teased into thinking that this might be a Resident Evil clone with the tank controls, fixed camera angles, inventory management and even a damn item box mechanic lifted shamelessly from Capcom's playbook, but you quickly learn that it's more of a low-rent Devil May Cry, except without the slick controls, or feeling of enjoyment. It's terrible.

The high-quality pre-rendered environs in question:

The game invites you to clunkily lumber around, waving an axe and/or chainsaw (neither of which ever feel like they're doing more than gently caress an enemy) by hammering away a the X and square buttons while being mobbed by endlessly-respawning gangs of teleporting low-poly undead. They will hit you, you will take damage, and you will pathetically swing at thin air with 40% of your attempts. Enemies leap about and take forever to 'die', but what's the point? They just respawn again moments later.

Your time would be better spent reading the manual to just about anything. Treat yourself.

The environments are grainy and empty, the humour is cack and the 'press triangle to deliver a one-liner' stuff is cringe. The dead do speak, and they have instructed me to never play this game again.

Kept my attention for: Longer than it had any right
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 2/10