Showing posts with label Giant Killers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Giant Killers. Show all posts

10 Very British Games for the Sega Dreamcast

The British are an odd bunch. We're not really a country (look we're not, you have to admit it. It's like someone got a bunch of nations together who don't really like each other all that much, told them the same rich pricks are in charge of them all and everyone was like "oh okay" and went on about their business. Other than the Irish, obviously), but we have contributed far more than our share towards modern culture (partly by being real arseholes to just about everyone else and insisting they consume our culture whilst invading them), have terrible cuisine, terrible weather and a really, really shit flag. Yet the internet (and by "the internet", I mean Americans on the internet) views all of us Brits as a bunch of posh people who live in country estates who apologise to each other every other second; generally a bunch of genial, mostly nice and horribly polite people with bad teeth. Of course, the Europeans don't see us like that, and instead see us for our true selves - a bunch of gammon-faced troublemaking binge-drinking tourists who invented the sport they're now better than us at. And of course by "us" I mean "the English" because somehow the Welsh and Scottish get a free pass from everyone else despite them both sitting right alongside us when we were arseholes to the rest of the world. So yeah, we're not really a very nice country all in all, if you can even call us a country. What has this to do with the Dreamcast? Absolutely nothing - other than the fact that there are several games on this little Japanese 128-bit wonder that try and come close to truly capturing the real essence behind "being British" - and those games are my target for the latest in my ongoing series of lists about Dreamcast things.

So, without further ado, let's take a look at the ten most "cor blimey, fish n' chips, bottla wateh, tea and crumpets, god save the king" games on the Dreamcast.


Disney's 102 Dalmatians: Puppies to the Rescue

Set mostly in London (aren't all UK-based video games?), this Disney adaptation contains Big Ben, posh English people and dogs. All quintessentially British. The little canine stars travel to various locations either directly modelled after real-life locations (or at least as far as "modelled" can be attributed to a Dreamcast-era movie tie-in) as well as some more generic locations with a British feel. As the game is based on a live action movie and not an actual Disney animated film (which was always a bit of a weird mix), there is some definite artistic license taken, especially as developer Toys for Bob are based in the distinctly un-British state of California, along with Prolific Publishing, who dealt with the Dreamcast port. This all results in a "Disneyfied" Britain that will be familiar to most of us but doesn't quite reflect the hard streets of London or the rubbish-strewn, annoying middle class walker-infested countryside we all love. At times, you half expect Mary Poppins to emerge from a chimney with a hopping Dick Van Dyke singing some ridiculous song behind her. Disney's bastardisation of British culture is something we should all bemoan, especially if you've ever visited the city of Bath and had to contend with the culture-shocked American tourists despondently trudging the streets who thought that everything would be posh, cultured and historic but instead have to contend with crackheads trying to sell shit-stained PS2 games from a carrier bag to people on the street. And that's just Bath - can you imagine their reaction if they visited Swindon?

This is Piccadilly Circus. Sort of. Points for the phone box, but it's slightly less busy than I remember it.

The first appearance of a red double decker in the article. Surely more will come?

The British countryside in all its glory. Sort of.

Britishness Rating: As British as Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins. Dancing chimney sweeps should, however, make a return.

British Town it Best Represents: London, I suppose. If you're American, anyway. 

In the Land of the Giants

When people talk about the rarest games on the Dreamcast, the same names tend to be bandied around. Friend of the Junkyard Racket Boy published a rather nice article focusing on the Dreamcast's rarest and most valuable titles a while back (click here to reveal it's delights), and we looked at a few of the more expensive PAL games right here at the 'Yard a few weeks ago...but here's the thing - a clear distinction needs to be made right now: 'expensive' and 'rare' are not the same thing.

One game that is forever being listed on eBay as 'rare' and commanding some ridiculous prices is Conker's Bad Fur Day for the Nintendo 64. It is a fantastic title and an example of Rareware of old at their finest, but as any well-read N64 collector will attest, Conker is not a rare game - it is merely desirable. Quite where the horrific price tag came from is anybody's guess (maybe someone saw the Rareware sticker and got a little confused), but the snowball became an avalanche and now Bad Fur Day has become the fodder of the more affluent collectors out there. Unless you own an Everdrive...but we won't go down that particularly grey alley.

Back to the original point - rare Dreamcast games. Games like Rival Schools 2, Bangai-O and Cannon Spike regularly get a mention; as do titles like SegaGaGa and Mars Matrix. Whether it was down to low print runs or low sales figures, all of these are uncommon titles. There is one game however, that never gets mentioned in these 'rare games' lists. A game that I believe is so rare, it transcends the very lists it should proudly sit atop. This game is Giant Killers - a UK exclusive football (soccer) management sim released by Smoking Gun Productions in May 2001.
Before we go any further, I want to address the rather odd name of this particular title. In British football terminology, 'giant killer' is a name afforded to a team from a lower league who manage to create an upset and defeat a team from a much higher division. This generally only happens in either the FA Cup or League Cup and is the cause for much celebration/egg on face when say, a non-league outfit sees off Championship or Premier League opposition. There is a long history of bigger teams slipping up against sides they should easily have beaten (for further info see Manchester United vs Anyone during the current season), and giant killing is an oft-used expression on these shores. So that's the science bit done - anyone from overseas seeing the name Giant Killers would be forgiven for thinking UK Dreamcast owners were privy to some hitherto unknown David vs Goliath simulator...alas, the truth is a little less exciting.

What of the game itself then? Well, I have a little confession to make: I hate football management sims. I've never seen the point of looking at screens of stats and never actually getting to play the beautiful game for real. I love stuff like FIFA and all the behind the scenes tinkering that the career mode in said EA Sports flagship title offers...but if you take away the ability to actually play the game, my interest levels wane. By 'wane,' I mean 'vanishes altogether.'
That said, I had an open mind when I approached Giant Killers. I powered the PAL-exclusive title up and settled down into the manager's chair, ready to get stuck in to the day-to-day running of a full blown professional football club. The first thing I noticed when I started the game was that all of the teams are from the English leagues and the conference - there are no international leagues at all, and this has the rather odd knock-on effect that players cannot be purchased from foreign teams. As previously hinted at, I'm a bit of a novice when it comes to management sims, but Giant Killers has a pretty basic and beginner-friendly menu system. You switch between the different management screens via the icons at the bottom of the screen and follow the button prompts in each sub-area in order to set your starting 11, your substitutes, the rather limited gameplan and tactics, and also read emails from your chairman and board of directors. Compared to something like Championship Manager, this is management lite...which I must admit, is quite commendable on the part of the developer when you consider the rest of the Dreamcast's library and the target market for the system. I picked to play as Manchester City and it quickly dawned on me that this game is also very much a snapshot of the English game in 2001. Names like Shaun Goater and Danny Tiatto loomed out of the mists of time like miss-kicking leviathans...and the Dreamcast sponsoring on the Arsenal shirts in the backgrounds got me all dewy-eyed.

Once you've picked your starting lineup and tinkered with the slightly threadbare team tactics, you are encouraged to start your first game from the dug-out, and I must say that it's about as exciting as you would imagine: text-based commentary scrolls up the screen while crowd sound effects play in the background. There's no Premier Manager 64-style 3D representation of the game here - just text. It's quite detailed to be fair, but you'd have to be a hardened statto to get excited about this aspect of the game...and this is where the action happens.
There's not much more I can say about Giant Killers. It's a competent management sim from what I can tell with my n00b eyes, but it really isn't my cup of tea. The menus look uncluttered and the button prompts are helpful...but the lack of any real excitement or 'game' left me wanting to put King Of Fighters '99 back in my Dreamcast after about 10 minutes. This wasn't helped by the fact that I lost all but one of my first 8 games as the new manager of Manchester City - and that was a draw against Sunderland on the opening day of the new season. The shame.

So Giant Killers then. It stands alone as the only football management game on the Dreamcast (unless you count the Japan-only Let's Make A Soccer Team! as a proper management sim, and not an RPG), and also the only UK-exclusive title. That fact alone makes it pretty special in my eyes...it's just a shame I'm not really into this genre.

Price-wise, I've seen copies of Giant Killers fetch a few hundred pounds on eBay...but I paid £8 for this boxed and complete copy at a recent gaming expo so there's proof that you don't have to pay through the nose for genuinely rare Dreamcast titles.