One of snooker’s legends gets something off an offhand treatment with this budget title, developed as a phone app and then dumped to the PSP later
Ronnie O’Sullivan’s Snooker (PSP, P1 Sports, 2012)
Where to Buy: No longer commercially available (discontinued with all PSP Minis in 2015), try Internet Archive
How to Emulate: PSP Emulation Guide
Review by: C. M0use
I’d never heard of Ronnie O’Sullivan prior to playing this, but apparently he’s been a dominant snooker legend since the 1990s and is still going today. I kinda wonder how the licensing conversation went for this one, though … “We’d like to make a video game about your life! For, uh … the PSP Mini. What other games have we made? Uhhh … have you heard of Phil Taylor Power Darts? It was, uh, for Nokia phones … yeah, you know, the old ones with the little screens. Well, anyway we did that and a poker game. Also for the Nokia phones.”
Well, none of this is poor Ronnie’s fault, but it’s just a weird and terrible budget game. The “main mode” has kind of an interesting structure for a celebrity-focused game, as you’re dropped into a series of major matches from Ronnie’s career dating back to starting out as a teenager, complete with a little text commentary from him on the situation. But the gameplay is a weird style I’ve never seen before in any kind of billiards game, more “strategy” than “action” if that makes sense.
So the first confusing thing, at least for me, was the setup of the pool table. All this time I’ve thought “snooker” was just another colorful UK colloquialism for billiards or pool, turns out it’s actually a distinct rule set with its own ball setup. Basically first you try to sink a red ball, then follow that with one of the other colors, and keep alternating. There’s always a helpful reminder of the next target ball in an upper corner, and with that you can pretty much figure it out on the fly.
The gameplay simply has you rotate through possible angles on the available ball with the L and R buttons, however, rather than allowing you to freely aim. This and adjusting the strike point of the cue gives you a map of exactly where the cue ball will head, and a more vague indication of where the balls it contacts are going. When you’re ready to fire off your shot, you manually adjust your preferred power level. I know some people don’t like stopping the sliding bars in these games so this might sound preferable, but I feel it takes away a core component of tactile involvement / arcade action that makes the game actually entertaining to play.
The end result is just plain boring and a little slow and clumsy. The whole thing made a lot a more sense when I got online to do background research for this review, learning this was first developed as an early iPhone app. So the control style was likely chosen deliberately to avoid arcadey interaction with those early touch screens, then later it was just kinda dumped haphazardly to the PlayStation Network to try to get a little more sales mileage out of it. Whatever the case, it’s not worth bothering with.
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