A centuries-old game arrives on Bill Gates’ favorite entertainment console and offers almost everything anyone could want from a billiards simulation.
World Championship Pool 2004 (WCP) boasts regulation competitions of 9-ball, 8-ball, straight pool and snooker, a career mode in which a player can earn money to upgrade his clothing and equipment and online capability to challenge another pal in a far away locale.
Amateur physicists and geometry majors will appreciate the ease in which a shot can be lined up and the accurate reactions of strikes and rebounds. The game’s Aiming Aid uses semi-transparent triangular wedges that indicate the distance the cue ball and struck ball will travel along a path. Once a shot has been lined up, the player controls power and cue elevation and puts English on the cue ball to work on running the table.
WCP then throws in some of the world’s highest ranking pool players to compete against in pool’s most prestigious events. I’ll take Jaleco’s word for it because my billiards Hall of Fame inductees do not go past Willie Mosconi and Minnesota Fats.
While concentrating on the table, the graphics look solid, but a pixel massacre occurs when the camera moves around to capture the action. The on-screen players who walk around and take shots look stiff in their movements, almost as if they were conceived for a much less powerful gaming system, and the people sitting in the stands move like cardboard cutouts.
Additionally, anyone captivated by the title needs to turn off the woeful announcing, which causes a major distraction because it butchers the English language and rambles repetitively.
Mastering a couple of dozen trick shots can be fun, but for some reason the game’s developer felt the need to take a perfectly good sports simulation and ridiculously embellish it with some extras to appeal to a more radical segment of the gaming demographic.
WCP works great but adds “bonus games” to boost its potential. Do I need to play a round in which hot spots on the table jettison the cue ball into the gallery if I accidentally roll over them? Do I really need exploding balls timed to go off and scramble a shot I took time to carefully line up?
Not really, especially because the affordable WCP succeeds at so many levels.
Still, the game never will replace holding a stick and really sinking a ball into the far corner pocket. That moment only can be experienced the right way on a Saturday night in a Wisconsin tavern.
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