A brief tangent before the actual game review if I may;
I came pretty late to the PlayStation party. It wasn’t until
October 1998 that I finally got my grubby mitts on one and the system only had
about 18 months of relevance left at that point. The funny thing was that
originally I hadn’t even wanted a PlayStation. The gaming machine that I hand
picked to succeed my Super Nintendo was a very different one indeed.
Yes, in the cool winter months of 1997, I had decided that I
wanted a SEGA Saturn!
The reason for this was twofold. Firstly, I’d recently
played one that summer. One of my mothers friends lived in Middlesbrough
and her son had a Saturn with SEGA Rally. I spent most of an afternoon playing
that game into the ground and left the house enchanted with the SEGA machine.
In addition to this, Virtua Fighting had made it’s way to English Arcades and
it’s combination of 3D graphics and (for the time) revolutionary fight physics
had blown my tiny little mind. Yup, I wanted a SEGA Saturn, and to the top of
my Christmas list it went.
Ah, Christmas 1997, what a depressing one that was. I
stupidly had placed all my eggs in the Saturn basket, and low and behold I
didn’t get one, thus meaning the gifts I did get were a crushing disappointment.
Looking back on it now with adult eyes, it wasn’t the disaster that 10 year old
me thought it to be, but I was just an idiot child at the time and reacted as
such.
Ultimately, my parents didn’t like the idea of spending a
sizeable sum on another gaming machine for me, when they were already of the
opinion that I played my SNES too much. They had even gone so far as to
deliberately lock my SNES away in the attic one summer as they didn’t want me
playing it throughout the summer holidays. In fairness to them, they had made
their stance on the matter of gaming quite clear and I should have seen it
coming.
The matter was worsened for me on account that the children
of the child minder me and my sister went to had wanted a PlayStation for Christmas and had actually got
one. Thusly, I was hit with a double whammy of not getting what I wanted but
also having to deal with another set of kids of who had on a daily basis. I
didn’t react well. In fact, I’d say I reacted appallingly.
As a general rule, I didn’t tend to nag my parents for
things as a child. I broke that rule in 1998. I now wanted a PlayStation,
mainly because no one else I knew had a Saturn and thus I felt it would be
better to go for the system that everyone else had (Because then I could borrow
games from them)
So I nagged, and nagged, and nagged and nagged. It was a
little toe rag basically. As luck would have it, SONY reduced the price of the
PlayStation in late 98, meaning it was now more affordable and my parents
eventually relented and bought me one.
And thusly, I forgot all about the SEGA Saturn. It became a
victim of childhood hubris. However, it lingered at the back of my mind for the
remainder of my childhood and into adulthood. Recently, I saw one online and
thought about purchasing it, but eventually chose not to.
However, the thought of buying a Saturn still lingered. Not
soon after deciding I wasn’t going to get one, I passed by a shop in Stockport called “Retro, Reload”. It’s a store that sells
retro games and consoles, and would you know it, they had a SEGA Saturn for
sale with three games for £37.50.
Reasoning that I’d probably never see an offer as good as
that, I went away to mull over whether I should get one. I went to YouTube to
look at videos relating to the Saturn. I’d recommend to anyone reading this to
visit Adam Koralik’s YouTube page. He gives very detailed reviews of retro
consoles and I found his Saturn one very helpful.
Eventually, I decided to bite the bullet and picked up the
Saturn. I’ve been picking up cheap games on Amazon and eBay since. One such
purchase was SEGA Worldwide Soccer 97’
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SWS-97 (Shortening stuff is Keewl!) is a difficult game to
review. It certainly isn’t a bad game by any means but it isn’t an especially
good one either. I can say with absolute certainty that it’s the best Soccer
game I’ve played so far on the Saturn, but that isn’t really saying much.
The other Soccer games I’ve already played on the console
are FIFA 96’, Euro 96’ and FIFA 97’. All of them are bad and Euro 96’ is by far
the worst in that it has terrible graphics, wretched game play, no customizable camera angles and no options
to change the difficulty of the A.I.
SWS-97 does at least have a number of camera angles which
all come with 3 different levels of zoom. There are also varied levels of
difficulty on offer, so you can gradually get used to the game over time and
find your own learning curve.
The graphics aren’t amazing but are decent enough for a game
that was originally released in the autumn of 1996. The players give off the
illusion of being 3D models but on closer inspection look to be 2D models that
have been designed to look as if they are in three dimensions. The game overall
looks a bit rough around the edges to a modern set of eyes, but I like the
visuals on the whole.
The sound effects from the crowd are standard, but sound
decent on the main. Gary Bloom provides match commentary and I must say that
for a game made in 1996, the quality is very good indeed. Commentary on early
football games was generally quite poor, but Bloom’s commentary sounds very
smooth and I think it really adds to the match experience. The only time it
sounds a bit choppy is when he reads out the team names prior to kick-off, but
aside from that it’s good stuff.
SWS-97 is unlicensed, so the players have fake names and its
international teams only. This was standard fare for most football games around
this time period. I think FIFA had only just started using real teams and
player names. The usual heavy hitters of the period such as Brazil, Argentina
and Germany are present,
while minnows such as Liberia
also make it. There’s also an edit mode if you feel like renaming the players.
There are plenty of game modes on offer as well. There is
exhibition mode, league mode, straight knock out cup and also The Worldwide
Cup, which sees you go through numerous qualifying rounds in order to reach the
competition finals. There is also an option for up to 4 players to take part in
multiplayer mode with the player adapter.
The game play has both strengths and weaknesses. The players
move smoothly enough and the three button set-up of the Saturn controller works
well with one button for shoot, one for short pass and one for long pass.
Passing does take some getting used to, as the ball will just stop moving after
it’s gone a certain distance. This is something you’ll have to take into
account when controlling the receiving player. On more than one occasion I
played a pass to a player on the wing but the player would actually out run the
pass and the ball would just sit there on the pitch for a few seconds before I
either had the player run back to collect it or a computer controlled player
snatched it for itself.
Crosses into the box are usually quite accurate but you have
no real control how far they go and to which player they target. It’s also very
hard to direct a resulting header or volley that comes from a long pass.
Normally you just have to press the shoot button and hope it goes in.
Shooting itself is problematic in that you can’t really aim
your shot in any fashion. It doesn’t matter where you press the d-pad or where
your player is facing, most shots seem to always be aimed right at the opposing
sides goalkeeper. This is by far my biggest complaint with the game as it makes
scoring very difficult. You have to either hope the keeper will rebound the
ball back to you for a follow up shot or get as close to the goal as possible
without the keeper tackling you and essentially run around him before shooting.
Things got so silly in one play through that I was shooting
from a diagonal angle hoping that the ball would bounce off the keeper and into
the net. The most annoying thing is that while you can’t direct your shots, you
can direct your passes, so at one point I was getting as close to the goal as I
could and then passing the ball into the net, as this allowed me to have some
decision in where the ball was actually going.
And this is ultimately why the game doesn’t get a higher
score than I ended up going with. Again, this game is not actively bad. In
fact, the game has a lot of positives going for it and it can be enjoyable game
to play. However, certain aspects of the game play are counter intuitive and
can make the experience itself frustrating.
As a result, I’ve gone with a final score of 6 out of 10
Below I’ve attached a YouTube video of some game play and
also Adam Koralik’s excellent video on the SEGA Saturn
Thanks for reading
Peace Out
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