World Cup Rugby 1995 - User Review
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EA SPORTS RUGBY WORLD CUP ’95 – SEGA GENESIS / MEGADRIVE / PC
Rugby World Cup 95 holds a sweet spot in my heart because it is how I discovered the great sport of Rugby. Being an American and not knowing a damn thing about the sport, I picked up the game out of curiosity, thus leading into a crash course about the sport. I eventually sought out local clubs and began playing.
Looking back, the game is still as fun as ever given the time when it was created In EA fashion (of the mid-90’s), the pitch was on a slanted angle and if you wanted to run directly up it, you held the keypad (up & right).
You had the basics of the game contained in three buttons: Kick, Pass, and Change Players/Sprint.
Passing consisted of the direction you were heading and nudging the keypad left or right to pass to the next player. Miss passes were an accident, but never really disrupted the flow of things.
Kicking was the real art form. A tap of the kick button (with no keypad direction) led to a hefty punt of the ball into space. If the player kicking was a forward, the kick would not go so far. If it were your flyhalf, he could put it a decent distance. The kicks for touch were much better. Holding Kick, your player would continue running in the same direction as before, aim the keypad at either touchline (up & left or down & right) and letting go of Kick, your player launches a missile of a kick accordingly. A grubber was achieved by holding kick and aiming up the pitch (up & right, of course) and it would scurry along into space. My favorite was the pop kick, (down & left) and it would carry nicely over the opposition, and if timed well with a sprint, you could gather it before it hit the ground.
Rucks were nothing short of a gamble. If you got tackled while pushing buttons in a desperate attempt to pass, chances are you would lose the ball, as you could not control the amount of players going in or out of them. If you were tackled with your own players near, it was a 75% chance you would recover the ball. A nice lesson: get tackled near your friends.
To this day, I’ve never set up a Maul intentionally in RWC 95. They are accidents and freak occurrences and did nothing to add to the game other than the chance to say, “Hey, I set up a maul!”
With all this in mind, gameplay was still fun. The main strategy was always to get it to the wings and then juke the opposition with cut-move towards the touchline and then run around them. This would work against lesser opponents, but once your friends caught on, you had to seek other ways to move forward.
The graphics were simple and to the point. A Dry pitch brought a nice yellowish color to the field of play just as Very Wet created a nice dark green, almost rendering the Springboks invisible were it not for the gold strips of their collars and tops of socks and white shorts. Some might have grievances that the All Blacks look to be played with a team composed of all islanders, and that the Wallabies are all blond headed and have been out in the sun, but not me. Once again, given the time and capabilities of video games, it was nice to see color added to skins and not everyone as white.
That said, the Sega Genesis/Megadrive version offered 30 teams with no real players, though the player names given banked toward the side of stereotypes. The Welsh team composed of mainly ‘Davies’, Fijians with more vowels in their surname than consonants, and the Irish with O’Anything. They were as funny as they were erroneous. The inclusions of teams like the Czech Republic, Latvia, and Sweden are mind boggling, but still cool, I guess.
There were animations after Tries, successful Cons/Pens and missed Cons/Pens, the last being the most silly, as a humanoid rugby ball would sail through the air, collide with the post and fall short, his face in pain whilst the words, “MISSED!” scrolled up over him. The try animations consisted of 2 or 3 different pixilated clips of actual tries from some top level club match – pretty cool actually, though there would be no chance in hell of identifying the teams and scorers.
As these were the days before memory cards, you had the 20 character password that always changed after every game played. Discarded scraps of paper with old codes would litter the floor and often cover the machine. Ah bless.
The game options were quite plentiful. You had the two initial choices of an Arcade or Simulation. No one got tired in Arcade, but in Simulation you would. Of course, there were no substitutes so you’d just have to deal with the walking wounded and play around them. There was then the choice of a Friendly, League, World Cup 95, and World Cup. Friendly and World Cup 95 were just that, but League offered you the chance to set up your own customized League with 4, 8, or 16 teams, and World Cup gave you the chance to select your own 16 teams for the World Cup. Not too bad considering some 21st century rugby games don’t have this option.
Overall, the game is still a joy and I always like playing it when I get the chance. It’s 16-bit, but it does the job, especially when friends are involved. I highly recommend it to all rugby video game enthusiasts, as it can be bought over the internet from well known websites, and is a great addition to the library, if not for the historical significance.
In addition to this, there is the PC version of the game which had the top 20 teams of the time, but actual player names. Topping it off, Bill McLaren gave commentary though he was held back a bit compared to what he did for Jonah Lomu Rugby. The graphics are much more slick, and the game is still fun, though I tend to prefer consoles over PC’s.
--The Caged Cajun
24 September, 2004