World Championship Snooker 2003 Review

21 Apr 2008 at 18:31:06 by Paul Younger
Systems used to review this title: (PS2)

Codemasters, purveyors of petrol-driven entertainment that they are, have made a decent attempt at bringing the sticks, balls and subdued lighting of the noble game onto the PS2. Just like snooker itself, you have to admire it but you don't have to like it.

For the record, we'll summarise snooker with this jolly primer:

Potting, snookers, safety shots. Waistcoats, bow ties, cues and chalk. Baize and pockets, backspin, baulk.

If this all sounds like madness then please consult your nearest screen shot. Did I mention bow ties? For historical reasons it is expected of snooker players to behave and dress like gentlemen, so there's no chewing or spitting of tobacco, nor any crotch-grabbing in the style of baseball players.

Of course snooker is not just about whacking balls around. In spirit it's very much like a game of chess or a samurai sword fight: you have to think ahead, worrying not only about your score or how you hit the next ball but also your final position. Will you leave a shot on for your opponent?

Enemy Mine

At first glance World Snooker 2003 looks all too easy. Shocking rookie-type mistakes from the AI worried me that this was going to be painful, but I was proved wrong. Opponent quality does indeed improve as you progress; in later rounds of a tournament you'll see better safety shots, fewer openings, excellent positional shots and devious, dirty snookers. The errors will be more believable - long pots, accidental in-offs, unfortunate self-snookering. In short - convincingly professional snooker.

Stiff Opposition

Contrast the AI players' skill with their animation and you might wince. The robotic 3D characters slide about stiffly, although they look fairly OK when stretched over the baize, fingers shuffling over the cue. To speed things up I turned off all player animations, which often led to a "my opponent is a ghost" effect as a disembodied cue proceeded to take the frame. Even better, you can fast-forward through each shot animation as well as the commentary/replay that might follow.

There's the odd bit of slow-down, but not enough to be annoying. The 3D animation of all the rolling balls is mostly smooth and quite realistic, but sometimes it gets a little bit jerky. More chalk in the eye comes from the camera angles, which are promoted as TV-style. As soon as your shot fires the camera will go somewhere arty like inside a pocket, and watch your ball drop in. When it works it's fine, but it often misses the action completely and freezes on a dramatic shot of the cushion. Only your ears tell you that the balls are still moving.

Hark The Herald Punters Howl

Crowd reactions are sparse but convincing, and the audience sounds well mannered (i.e. mostly quiet) and well informed. If you snooker yourself a groan of sympathy will sound out. Warm applause greets a brave long pot. These automatons sure know their snooker (but do they have a SOUL?).

Various venues offer distinctly different moods. The clubhouse is garish, cramped and horribly lit, but when the public appears the game takes on a much better atmosphere. Darkness around the table keeps the focus on the green and on the action. The TV cameras in darkened corners and the overhead spotlights do a good job of taking you there, to that special place (I don't really know where I'm going with this).

Pick Up And Pot?

The controls are mostly easy to use. I saw a number of people (humans, in meat space) pick up and play with only the most basic check of the button layout. No problems there. The sticks are used well to change aim and angle as well as camera views. L1 acts as a dampener to give fine control as you swivel into position.

Don't Eat The Yellow Arrows

You can of course set the help level, which affects the length and appearance of (drum roll please) the aiming guide. Yellow arrows scissor against white arrows, both hinging on the target ball. The direction and projected path will change as you apply backspin, side and degrees of power on the shot.

Too Weak, Too Strong, Just Right

Our one complaint is with the "hit strength" power bar, which is heavily top-ended. The first few grades all amount to zero force, so your carefully sneaky snooker attempt will result in "foul, and a miss" being intoned by the possibly undead referee (in fact one ref sounds like a vampire's butler). Further up the power scale each increment has a much greater effect, so overcooking can be a problem. With patience, however, the gauge will come to heel and you'll be producing smooth, a*ured strokes. No, really.

Virgo Rising

Much annoyance can be had from the commentary, which bounces between Dennis Taylor's warm Northern Irish burble and John Virgo's head-shaking wisdom. Mr Virgo has a real-life habit of claiming he knew all along what was going to happen, and has brought it whole to this potted commentary. The duo's glib statements add colour when they hit the mark, but often miss, and when they do it sounds nasty. Let's say you've potted a red and are going for the black. You pot the black. John comes out tutting :"A TRUE professional would have gone for the BLACK".

Who are these people and why am I talking about them? Well, they both provide commentary on TV and therefore bring an immediate sense of place with them. Yes, it feels just like real snooker because good ol' Dennis is murmuring in the background. Dennis is a former snooker great, famous for his wacky spectacles and bright smile; Virgo is a twinkle-eyed TV presenter famous for his beard and his trick shots. Which reminds me...

Games Within The Game

Roll up, roll up for the Trick Shot show! A whole game subsection is devoted to John showing us various little entertainments, after each of which you're invited to emulate the great master. Voice-over tips are offered as well as a full-on 3D representation of the bearded one himself showing you how the pros do it. It's not bad fun, but purely as quick relief - a sideshow to the main event.

Plenty of other "please don't run away" mini games are on offer, and some are actually quite good. One of my favourites is the "protect a pocket" game, in which you can only pot inside a designated pocket (glowing blue). With each ball sunk your opponent loses a pocket; it will glow red to say "No Entry" and in fact will bounce balls out with ferocious speed. Quite funny and one of the few things you can do on a PS2 that you can't on a real snooker table (although you could try shoving a pint glass down each hole).

As 2-player diversions these "party mode" mini-games are much more attractive than actual frames of snooker, which are necessarily going to bore one player at a time. Just like in real life it's no fun watching your opponent clean up the table over the course of 20 minutes. Hence the inclusion of 8-ball and 9-ball pool, quick-fire frames and so on. The pool games are awkward additions, I feel, especially in multiplayer. Time and again while passing the controller back and forth to each other my buddy and I were asking ourselves: "Why don't we just go down the pub?".

Final Frame

The deep, vast core of this game is definitely the single player career mode. It offers long hours of solitary fun and frustration. (Confession: I often quit and restart the career after losing a frame. There's no quick reload that I could find). Most of the frustration comes from being beaten; only some of it from inappropriate comments, overly fancy camera-work and the slip-slidey power bar.

As for the joy of it, then it comes on two tracks. First, you can entertain the reasonable delusion that you're not too bad at snooker, which is nice for a ham-handed, jelly-elbowed incompetent like your reviewer. Second, the feel of being locked in a one-on-one duel is very strong and can be rewarding: coming back from 57 points down to win the frame; sneaking up behind your opponent and breaking your cue over his head; slamming his fingers under a piano lid. It's all good (although those last two aren't actually in the game).

In short, the thrills and spills of of snooker, the calculation, the tension, the softly mouthed swear-words are all here in World Snooker 2003. Although a worthy single-player game, for 2-player it really can't touch the real thing.

P.S. Wot No Tony?

My patriotic pride drives me to protest the absence of Tony Drago (the Maltese Dragon) from the roster. As one of the more pulse-raising and popular snooker players around, he should have been there to evoke those heart-felt cries of "Come on, Tony!!" from the crowd.

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