Hands on with World Championship Snooker 2008
Blade and I-play return to the table
Snooker ain't what it used to be. There was a time when most of the men on the circuit were overweight, and players routinely drank themselves into a stupor while they watched their opponents play. Nowadays, they go to the gym and drink water. It's natural selection: to compete at the top level, everyone has hit the gym eventually.
The same is true of mobile cue sports. While several publishers have released pool and snooker games on mobile, only two are lean and mean enough to stay at the top.
Of the two of them, I-play is the Ronnie O'Sullivan to Player One's Stephen Hendry (ironic given than Player One has an O'Sullivan licensed game); theirs is a flashy, fully 3D series of games that has plenty of star quality but occasionally suffers from lack of discipline.
I-play's World Snooker Championship 2008 is the latest shot in the match. Produced by multi-platform developer Blade Interactive, it boasts all the 3D jollies of its predecessors along with the obligatory embellishments and refinements.
There are 32 licensed players to choose from, including luminaries like O'Sullivan and John Higgins, and a handful of players you're less likely to have heard of, but who still earn more in a year than you will in your whole life. You have to unlock all but the feeblest of these through playing the Championship mode, lending the game a solid single-player structure.
The thing that cost I-play's latest cue sport title, World Championship Pool 2007, its Silver Award was the fact that its physics felt slightly gimped, with some collisions resulting in balls deflecting unconvincingly. Thankfully, this problem seems to have been resolved, as during the few minutes we put aside to play World Snooker Championship 2008 the physics seemed perfectly secure.
It's looking good, too, with motion-captured players and backgrounds all rendered shiny polygons. It's too early to say which mobile snooker game is going to take the latest frame, but I-play is looking to put up a stiff fight.
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