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 | AFL Premiership 2005 Playstation 2 IR Gurus/SCEE  If you've heard anything about 'AFL Premiership 2005' it probably hasn't been very good. This game is a huge disappointment. For years football fans have been waiting for a somewhat decent simulation of their favourite sport. Every other sport seems to be covered. You can get sensationally playable NFL games, soccer games - hell, even the complex mechanics of cricket have been translated effectively to gaming. Granted AFL is an exceedingly complex game but even some of the more basic game interfaces are not there. From ground up this game is a disappointment. The logo and screen animations are second rate and there are no decent menu options. These things at least should have been perfected even if the mechanics were faulty. The player modeling is also second rate and it would be nice to see better fan animation than cardboard cutouts. The actual game system is simply terrible. The marking system seems to rely at times on timing the X-button, at others on random chance. Often your player will be behind his opponent by five metres and still impossibly and incredulously end up with the ball. Perhaps the worst is the tackling system which doesn't seem to follow any physical rules with the collision programming so poor that players usually run straight through each other. The only half-decent things in this game are the stadium animations and the commentary of Christie Malthouse, Denis Cometti and Dermot Brereton. However, even the commentary is ridiculously flawed. Ms. Malthouse will inform you that the weather conditions are perfect when in fact torrential rain is pouring from the first bounce to the last. Dermot will sometimes repeat the same commentary two or three times in quick succession and Denis seems at times to comment on plays that occurred 30 seconds ago. Really I can't warn gamers away from this half-baked product enough. If this was a game on the original Playstation console I might call the animation and game engine admirable but considering the potential of the PS2 this game is simple appalling. Add to that that this game retails at around $90 and I can't with any conscience recommend that anyone ever buy it. Even at $30 'AFL Premiership 2005' would not constitute value for money. It will certainly never be put in my PS2 ever again.  | |
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