0 to Z of Playstation 1 Games - AFL 99

        

AFL 99 is a sports game based around the Australian Rules Football and based on the Australian Football League, the games was developed by Electronic Arts and published by EA Sports for the Playstation 1 and Windows, the game was based on the 1998 season and was released Exclusively in Europe on June of 1999 the game released six months after the PC version.

The game features all 16 Australian League teams, as well as over 600 AFL players, players have a total of over 500 different animations for a more realistic game, commentary is provided by Bruce McAvaney and Leigh Matthews, the game also provides stats on the 1998 AFL Premiership season.

Two teams contest the ball on an oval playing field trying to kick goals, players can run anywhere on the the field as long as they bounce the ball at regular interval, unlike Rugby and Football (Soccer) there are no offside’s.

Passing the ball can either be done by hand either forwards or backwards or by kicking, if your player catches a kick without it bouncing you can take a mark, which is a free unimpeded kick, the alternative way to get the ball is to tack whichever player has the ball.

Australian Football sports game no story or story mode present.

Reviews for this game are hard to come by only two critics scores have survived since the game released 18 years ago and one thing is clear the Playstation did not get the best end of the deal unlike the PC version which has review scores like 90 and 82, the Playstation port only managed a 59 from Hyper, while Game Blitz was slightly more generous with their score of 65.

With the lack of critics reviews we now head over to GameFAQs for some user ratings and stats, starting with the average user rating, where a total of 6 users have rated AFL 99, they have given the game an average rating of 2.67/5, with two users each giving the game either a 2.5/5 or a 3/5, one user gave the game a lowly 1/5 while one other user was much more generous than anyone else awarding the game a 4/5.

On to the games difficulty which is hard to gauge with only 3 users rating the difficulty, with 2 rating the game as tough, while the other user rated the game as just right when it comes to difficulty, the games lifespan also has the same problem with only 2 users rating this category with a 50/50 split with one rating the lifespan at 8 hours while the other rates the game as a 40 hour game, averaging out the games lifespan in 24 hours.

This is the part of 0 to Z where is visit five online retailers and see what the availability of the title is, and what price you would be looking at if you wanted to pick this title up, the sites that I will be using for this are Amazon.com,  eStarland.com, retrogames.co.uk and Gamedude.com I know the last one is very location specific, but from a podcast I listen to I’ve heard they have a huge stock of older games, I will also be including Ebay.com as well

So lets get down to business with Gamedude, and alongside eStarland.com to no surprise the Europe only release is not available at either, moving on to Retrogames.co.uk who do stock the game however at the time of writing the the game is currently out of stock, the usual price for the game is £9 which converts to $11.59 in the US, in the Euro zone countries it will cost you €9.85 further afield in Australia it will set you back 14.61 Australian Dollars, while in Bermuda the game will cost you 11.59 Bermudan Dollars.

No surprise the dot com version of Amazon does not stock this title, so we head over to the co.uk version where the game is unavailable I have search and search and I can not find a single copy of AFL 99 on sale, plenty of other editions of the game but sadly not this one, the same for Ebay.com, again other AFL titles are on sale but no AFL 99.

So we now head to the Australian version of Ebay.com where we find the game and 8 copies on sale, one thing to note none of these have the postage specified so it will likely vary considerable depending on your country, pricewise the minimum you are going to pay for a copy is $14 Australian Dollars, this converts to $11.11 in the US, in the Euro region countries you are looking at a €9.45 outlay, in the UK it will cost you £8.63 while in Bermuda the price is the same as the US $11.11 Bermudan Dollars, a brand new copy of the game is also available this will set you back $95 Australian Dollars.

 

Written by

P J Gibbon