Rugby Challenge 2
Luisa Rodocker
We want to love Rugby Challenge 2. We want to unguardedly praise it to the heavens and heartily recommend fans of this sport splurge on a copy forthwith. The reason for this is entirely selfish: we like rugby and feel that it's under-represented in video games.
Every year FIFA, Madden and Tiger Woods games swagger into the market, but rugby sims are thinner on the ground. Unless Rugby Challenge 2 The Lions Tour sells well, it may be a while before we see its like again.
Still, we can only really suggest punters pick up a copy of Rugby Challenge 2 if they're either enraged Australians who want to virtually set the world to rights after the recent Lions tour, or if they never played the first Rugby Challenge game. The reason for the latter is simple: much of Rugby Challenge 2 is standing on the shoulders of its predecessor.
That's both good and bad, mind. Unlike the incredibly patchy official World Cup Rugby tie-in video game of 2011, the original Rugby Challenge offered a very decent gaming experience. Its controls were superb, its on-pitch action was almost as layered as its real-world counterpart and although it lacked a lot of official team licenses, its career and tournament modes with both deep and rewarding.
Developer Sidhe has kept a lot of Rugby Challenge's controls and mechanics in place here, and implemented some rather necessary changes.
Sidhe have also implemented to option of using in-game back-line strategies, although the exhaustive tutorials don't really explain how to use them very well. Kicking hasn't been touched much, which is both a blessing and a curse in a player-to-player game as finding touch and place kicking are both quite laughably easy.
Other faults from the first Rugby Challenge persist as well. The character models still look sub-par and the soundtrack is still awful; crowd noises are still generic and convey no sense of match atmosphere and the commentary is lousy.
Nick Cowen studied Classical Civilisations and English at the University of Witwatersrand and joined T3 as Editor at Large, writing about subjects including video games, gaming hardware, gadgets and consoles. You'll also find plenty of content by Nick on T3.com about video game industry events and shows."}), " -0-10/js/authorBio.js"); } else console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); Nick CowenSocial Links NavigationNick Cowen studied Classical Civilisations and English at the University of Witwatersrand and joined T3 as Editor at Large, writing about subjects including video games, gaming hardware, gadgets and consoles. You'll also find plenty of content by Nick on T3.com about video game industry events and shows.
Rugby: it's a lot better than football, isn't it? You can drink in the stands, play doesn't halt every five seconds for a petulant team riot against the referee and England are still World Champions (just about). If you don't agree with that then you're a) stupid, b) a hooligan, or c) probably both. (And if that doesn't kick off some healthy debate in the forums then we've pretty much proved that porn really is all the internet's good for.)
The other thing about rugby is that it's clearly nowhere near as popular as football, mostly because it's about a million times more complicated. So the fact that we've got not one but two new rugby games to coincide with this year's Six Nations tournament could be seen as something of overkill. After all, the population of rugby fans who also own consoles is going to be marginal at best.
Still, if you ARE a rugby fan - and this particular correspondent is - you've probably gone orgasmic over the current crop of digital egg chasing. So much so that it's now less of a case of "is Rugby Challenge 2006 any good?" and more a question of "is it any better than EA's Rugby 06?" And the answer to that is a crushingly emphatic no.
On the plus side, at least they've made Rugby Challenge 2006 easy to play. If you're going to give developer Swordfish Studios credit for anything, it's that it's taken the most convoluted ball sport known to man and turned it into a videogame that just about anybody can pick up and play.
You pick up the ball, you pass down the wings using the trigger buttons, you dodge the incoming tackles and you cross the line for a try. It's literally as simple as that. There are a few handy tutorials to get you into the swing of things, but providing you know how to hold a joypad the right way up you'll get a good, flowing game of rugby in no time at all.
Given Swordfish's long and impressive rugby heritage (this is the development team responsible for the legendary Jonah Lomu Rugby on PSone) you'd expect a fun, easy game, and that's what you get. The issue here is that it's too simple and as a result totally lacking in the depth.
The fact is, very little has been done to improve things since Swordfish's last rugby effort (the reasonably entertaining World Championship Rugby, released nearly two years ago just in time to miss the whole England World Cup furore). By altering the scrum and maul controls from button-bashing to reaction tests Swordfish thought it must have made things infinitely more tactical, but it's completely missed the point. It's not the technical rugby aspects that needed improving (they're far too involved to properly recreate in a game); it's the running, passing and kicking areas that needed work and virtually nothing has been done to better them. Where are the shimmying runs, the hand offs, the tactical kicks into touch and the up-and-unders? Yeah, you can kick the ball in Rugby Challenge 2006, but next to just recycling the ball out to the wings it's virtually redundant.
The other big problem with Rugby Challenge 2006 is that it's hands-down one of the ugliest sports game ever to appear on this generation of consoles. Getting thirty-plus men to move smoothly on screen at once is always going to be a challenge, but did it have to be at the expense of so much player detail? Seriously, it looks like half the players were baptised in the chip shop by mistake. The audio isn't much better either, John Inverdale's commentary amounting to nothing more than a few perfunctory observations at best. This really is aesthetics by the numbers.
At least there's plenty of content to Rugby Challenge 2006, far more so than ever appeared in World Championship Rugby. The World and European club competitions are still there, obviously, but it's the addition of the Premiership, Celtic and Super 14 teams to the scrum that really add weight to the package, especially if you're a regular rugby watcher (it's like FIFA suddenly remembering to include Arsenal if you're after a football analogy). There's a decent range of cups and leagues to plough through, a throwaway "classic match" mode and a passable take off of PES's Master League for those looking to indulge in some long-term gaming. Not groundbreaking, but you gets your money's worth, certainly.
Whether you'll want to physically play it all depends. Once you've figured that the best way to score is still simply a case of getting the ball out to your fastest winger it kind of takes the 'challenge' out of Rugby Challenge 2006. Even two-player games are a let down, with most matches decided by a combination of who has the stronger pack and the swifter backs. It might be a great title for those who never played a console game before, let alone a rugby console game, but this lacks too much of the real sport's depth and complexity to be anything other than a five minute distraction. If I were a rugby bore, I'd probably finish with some pithy comment about kicking this one into touch.
A huge thanks to all our rugby Mo Bros & Mo Sisters who have raised over 100,000 this year. Epic! Where will your team finish in the league table?
On Saturday Mo Bros Rugby are playing a charity game down at Richmond. If you're in the area come on down.
Are you hosting an event for Movember?
There's a huge party in Clermont-Ferrand this weekend. Yesterday the players of the ASM Clermont Auvergne rugby team came home from England to celebrate their victory over La Rochelle (by a dominating score of 36 - 16) to claim this year's Challenge Cup. The annual tournament brings together 18 of the best clubs from three major leagues -- England's Premiership Rugby, France's Top 14, and the international Pro 14 -- plus 2 more teams from the Contintental Shield tournament representing the second tier of European Clubs.
It was an exciting match for Clermont Auvergne fans. Greig Laidlaw (from Scotland) accounted for half of all the ASM's points, and the Guardian newspaper described the action as " a Barbarians-style cavalcade of ambitious offloads and daring thrusts interspersed in equal measure with errors and colossal hits". It's the third such European championship title for ASM Clermont Auvergne, tying them with England's Harlequins for the most wins ever. (The crowd on hand was a record, too, with more than 28,000 people present in the stadium at Newcastle.)
So I was happy to have a front-row seat in the Stade Marcel Michelin earlier this month when ASM Clermont Auvergne kicked off a new season against the visiting team from Agen. The day had started chilly and gray, so I took a jacket, but as game time approached the clouds blew away and the sun cast the stadium in warm autumnal light.
The score at halftime was Agen 16, ASM Clermont Auvergne 15, so there was some inevitable grumbling in the stands during the break. When they returned to the field, though, it was clear something motivational had happened to the ASM players; they exploded for 2 quick essaies in the first 7 minutes of the second half and ended up with one of the biggest wins in club history, with a final score of 67-23.
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