WORLD CLASS RUGBY REVIEW - October 1993
| Ah, how I remember the happy days when I used to go to Five
Nations Rugby matches at Murrayfield when I was at school. The tickets cost 50p (which was
a pittance even back in the dark, prehistoric days of the early 80s), and we got to sit in
the schoolboy enclosure, which was a few rows of benches which were actually in front of
the terrace fences, right on the edge of the pitch. It was impossibly stirring, you got to
sing all manner of rude songs at Dusty Hare and Bill Beaumont without getting a clip round
the ear from the teacher (because he was singing louder than any of you), but the best bit
of all was at the end, when about 50 stewards would attempt to stop several thousand
highly exciteable kids from rushing onto the pitch in that slightly pointless and
unfathomable way that they always do at the end of rugby matches. Sadly, that particular
section of the proceedings isn't simulated in World Class Rugby, but it's pretty much the
only thing that's missing. Several people have tried to claim that this game does for rugby on the ST what Kick Off did for football, but I think that's being terribly unfair to it - this is, as well as being a highly playable game, a superb simulation of the sport, and as accurate as you could possibly hope a computer rugby game could be. It's got tactics (there's a wide selection of American Football-style preset moves that appear in set-piece situations), speed, and even a meaningful physical aspect, as you have to waggle the joystick rapidly to win scrums and rucks. Like real rugby at its best, World Class Rugby plays like a mix of football and American Football, with all the free-flowing unpredictability of the former and the grunting primal face-offs of the latter. As well as being a great simulation of rugby and a highly playable game, World Class Rugby's even an accomplished piece of computer software in its own right. The graphics are chunky and solid, presentation is pretty but easy to follow (compare to some sports games, especially football management ones, which are so desperate to look slick and sexy that they cover the screen in totally incomprehensible icons which you have to keep looking up in the manual to make any sense out of the game at all), and you can view the action from any of three viewpoints (top-down Kick Off style, a lovely 3D John Madden Football lookalike, or a Sensible Soccer-esque blimp view, where everything's really tiny but you can see a big area of the pitch at once), all of which scroll in eight directions to fine effect. The controls are instinctive and very easy to grasp, and there's even a four-player mode if you've got a joystick adaptor. But hey, that's enough gushing, let's be balanced and professional and look at the downside. Damn. I can't seem to locate a downside. I suppose £14.99 is a bit steep for a budget game these days, but when you look at the quality of most of the ones which seem to be around at the moment, an extra fiver for something of genuine quality like this seems, quite literally, a small price to pay. I like this game enormously. It's far and away the best rugby game ever seen on a computer (and indeed, a recent conversion to the SNES sees it tying up the console market as well), and probably one of the top three sports sims full stop. Why not give it a try? Sorry. |
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| By Audiogenic
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