PSN PSone Roundup Review

The PSone is legendary for being the first games console to accrue a library of over sixty squintillion games, most of them utter bish. Even so, the percentage that made up the cream of the crop still represents some of the finest games of their era, forever caught between the simplicity of the 16-bit days and the "ooh, look, we can do 3D!" thrill of the new.

With that in mind, the latest four titles to pirouette gracefully into a download tutu for the PlayStation Store are a curious bunch. Now that more third-party publishers are offering their old wares, the quality is definitely taking a dip. We've got two from Ubisoft and two from EA to peruse, and while one from each is a worthy option for the still-reasonable GBP 3.49 (EUR 4.40) that Sony are charging, the remaining two are the sort of sloppy seconds that you'd probably pass up even if you found the original discs for 50p at a car boot sale.

Rayman

• Publisher: Ubisoft
• Developer: Ubisoft
• Price: GBP 3.49

Maybe it's his creepy Moomin-like demeanour but, despite Ubisoft's best efforts, their beloved limb-deficient mascot has never really taken root in the gaming consciousness the way they seemed to hope. Despite numerous spin-offs aimed at turning him from mere platform-jumper to Mario-challenging gaming icon over the years, it's rather telling that the most successful games to bear his name these days have sidelined the armless one in favour of raving rabbids.

Like many heroes of his generation, ol' Rayman rather lost his way when the 3D world came a-knocking, but this welcome opportunity to turn the clock back to his very first 2D appearance reveals a charming and addictive little platformer that, had it arrived on the SNES, could possibly have given that fat plumber a run for his money.

Not just a poor man's Plok, then. (Image from the Jaguar version. The internet's rubbish these days.)

Instead, it bounced from Jaguar to Saturn before finally landing on the PlayStation. The style, however, reminds me most of the old Amiga platformers that used to pour out of Europe - whimsical characters, Smurf-esque touches and enough parallax scrolling to make an ST choke.

There's really little here to surprise a seasoned platform player. You collect blue things, confusingly called Tings, which makes you sound a bit like a rasta if you're explaining it to someone. Rayman can attack by winding up his disembodied fist and letting it fly across the level. There are secret bonus areas where you have to collect tings against a time limit. The aim is to rescue as many Electoons as you can find, imprisoned as they are in cages by the fiendish Mr Dark. The game cannily lets you progress without finding them all, but the game can only be completed by going back and doing the job properly.

It's cleverly designed, as you'd expect from Michel Ancel (he of subsequent Beyond Good & Evil and King Kong fame), with secrets and rewards hiding in all the right places. The major complaint I'd level against it is the respawning bad guys, who pop back all too soon and make repeated exploration something of a grind. Apart from that minor nuisance, Rayman is about as polished a platform game as you're likely to find for the price.

8/10

Command & Conquer: Red Alert

• Publisher: Electronic Arts
• Developer: Westwood
• Price: GBP 3.49

With work on Red Alert 3 mysteriously halted for the PS3, the addition of this game to the PlayStation Store seems rather cruel. Still, for those who downloaded and enjoyed the original PSone port of Command & Conquer, this prequel offers more of the same and a little bit more besides.

Cha-chiiiiing!

It's set in an alternate universe where the course of history was changed forever when Albert Einstein travelled back in time and erased Hitler from existence. Without Nazi Germany to weaken his forces, Stalin proceeds to conquer Europe - with a little help from a certain Kane and his Brotherhood of Nod. Factor in the infamously cheesy C&C live action cut-scenes used to spin this wild yarn, and you've got something that's more entertaining than it really should be.

In gameplay terms, there's not much here that isn't already on offer in the previous game. New vehicles and new maps, obviously, but it's pretty much business as usual. The most notable changes are a more intriguing balancing act between units, forcing you to do more than just sling everything at the enemy, and a skirmish mode which offers 16 maps designed for fast, aggressive play outside of the objective-driven story missions. The big feature which made PlayStation owners sit up and bark - hard-wired linked multiplayer - obviously doesn't work on the new hardware, what with the internets and all that.

Still, it's another basic yet surprisingly effective slice of early RTS action and if you lovingly scooped the guts out of Command & Conquer and slurped them up like a greedy sow, you'll be equally satiated by this offering.

6/10

Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six

• Publisher: Ubisoft
• Developer: Red Storm
• Price: GBP 3.49

You have to admire the ambition on display here, even if the end result is clunkier than RoboCop in a tumble drier. One of the first PC shooters to emphasise squad play and painstaking stealth over mindless mayhem, Rainbow Six's complexity would seem like an ill-fit for a console that was still struggling with the likes of Doom and Hexen.

Red Storm had a good stab at it though, even if the game was reduced by necessity in almost every area - not least the reduction from six playable soldiers to three, thus rendering the title a bit pointless. There's not even a rainbow.

Much like the PC version, you select the armour and weapons for each team member, and then choose their entry point into a series of tricky terrorist situations. What you can't do is set waypoints or delegate control of the other members to the AI. Instead you have to hop between them, advancing a little bit, clearing an area and then moving to another squad member to slowly work your way through each environment. You can use flashbangs and frag grenades, and even pick locks along the way. That's all pretty sophisticated considering that the cry of "you can't do FPS on a console" was already loud and shrill in 1999.

Couldn't even get hold of a picture of this one. This is the US box, though. Woo.

Trouble is, back then, they were right. For all its attempts at depth and complexity Rainbow Six on the PSone is not pleasant to play. Twitchy aiming is the main culprit, along with an inverted Y-axis on the analogue camera that can't be changed. This means that while creeping about and being a bit Andy McNab is all very well, you're likely to come a cropper once you encounter some actual "tangos", since they can shoot you to death in about half a second as you're struggling to flick the crosshairs in the right direction.

The shockingly barren environments and gruesomely angular characters certainly don't help compensate for this fatal flaw - in fact it often feels like you've been sent to ruthlessly assassinate everyone in Dire Straits' Money For Nothing video. Which, on reflection, is no bad thing. The game, however, is. A bad thing, I mean.

3/10

Street Skater

• Publisher: Electronic Arts
• Developer: Atelier Double
• Price: GBP 3.49

Here's another PSone game that tried and failed to do something different. Our old friend Wikipedia is vague on the exact dates, but my increasingly garbled memory keeps telling me that this is the skating game managed to pre-date Tony Hawk's Pro Skater by at least a few months. That one series is still going strong while the other is long forgotten should be a major clue - this is a compromised skateboarding effort that ultimately fails to capture the spirit of the sport in the same way as Neversoft managed.

Once you've chosen your character and board, you hit one of the courses - from LA to New York - and race against time to amass the required amount of points. These are earned, of course, by pulling tricks and this is where the first of several stumbling blocks crops up to nudge the game off balance. While the game boasts "over 200" tricks, in practice it's a blunt and shallow system that leaves you with no control over the tricks themselves.

If this is where skating games began, you can sort of understand the Jackass stuff later on. Though not condone it.

Ollie onto a rail and you grind along it automatically. Press the trick button and a direction while in the air and you trigger the animation, with the game lining you up for the landing. You can't even build your jumps by holding down the button, or grab the board. All the genuine skating flourishes that made Pro Skater such a revelation are absent here, and the result is little more than a stunt-based racing game in which you control a skateboarder rather than a car.

The controls aren't exactly intuitive, responses are sloppy and there are persistent camera issues which make navigating narrow sections or tight turns a real kerfuffle. It's really not clear why this has been chosen to join the "classics" on the PlayStation Store, since it was greeted with apathy on its release and has long since left the extreme sports spotlight to more deserving games. Give this one a miss, and hope Activision joins the fray sooner rather than later.

3/10