Game Reviews

World Championship Pool 09

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World Championship Pool 09

When I play pool, I'm quite accustomed to the balls not going where I want them to go. After one or two drinks they seem a little bit more obedient, then after four or five they're back to doing their own thing again. No matter how much I try to blame it on the cue, inside I know this happens because I'm basically rubbish at pool.

Video game pool is different though. It doesn't rely on your ability to hit a cue ball in the centre or take a shot without nudging a ball on the table with your elbow. It's a given that your character is capable of doing that without instruction - the skill comes in lining up your shots, adding spin to the ball and selecting the correct power. The balls go where you expect them to - they're not suddenly struck by a bout of nerves which sends the cue ball flying skywards.

Or so you'd expect.

But sometimes, in World Championship Pool 09, I'd swear it was me at the table and not some random bloke who I've called Kath. Because the balls are prone to taking you by surprise, stopping like they have brakes for instance.

It's a shame these occasional inconsistencies pop up, because World Championship Pool 09 is otherwise a reasonable pool sim.

It not only has a wide range of play modes - a Career mode, where playing well earns you points to then allocate to your character's different stats, a Challenge mode, and time-based Survival games - it also gives you a choice of three different games of pool - 9-ball, US 8-ball and UK 8-ball.

It looks good, too, if a little bit flat for a 3D game. If you want, you can watch your character (and your opponent) wander around the table and lean down to take a shot. If you decide life's a bit short for that, you can also choose to turn it off. But, either way, the 3D visuals give you optimum control over the viewpoints used when taking a shot. Pressing '3' flicks between four different camera angles - including a top-down overview of the whole table and a sort of 'cue-cam', which replicates the angle you'd normally be playing a game of pool from.

You can move the camera about from within these viewpoints, and you'll find that you do because World Championship Pool 09's 'positional play helper' (PPH for short) isn't quite as helpful as its name suggests. The arrows on the PPH don't give an accurate enough indication of where the ball will land, they don't give any indication of what applying spin will do to the shot - leaving that bit of black art very much a trial and error experience - and, on top of that, having a sort of 'ghost' cue ball showing where the ball will go doesn't look that elegant.

Looking at the overall game though, there's a lot in there. 32 'official' championship players for a start (for the handful of people who'd recognise them). And also a two player pass-the-phone mode.

Probably the stand-out feature though is being able to 'level up' your player, like you've just wandered into a strange RPG pool hall. Pulling off particularly good (or flukey) shots rewards you with a stat point, which is allocated to one of three stats - accuracy, position and power. The more championships you play, the more of a pool god your character becomes.

It's not all bad news then. The aforementioned problems just mean you need to spend time learning the game's quirks, and bow to the feeling that the balls occasionally have a life of their own. Which will be a more familiar sensation to some people than to others.

World Championship Pool 09

A competent pool sim packed with play modes - and it looks good too. But the dizzying camera angles and less-than-spot-on aiming system over-complicate taking shots, and the ball physics don't always feel true to life
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Kath Brice
Kath Brice
Kath gave up a job working with animals five years ago to join the world of video game journalism, which now sees her running our DS section. With so many male work colleagues, many have asked if she notices any difference.