0 to Z of Playstation 1 Games - All Star Watersports

     

All Star Watersports is a sports game released late on in the Playstation 1’s life cycle, releasing exclusively in Europe on the 14^th of March 2003. The game was developed and published by Phoenix Games

The game offers the player the choice of four different Watersports based sports with Surfboarding, windsurfing, Jetski’s and bodyboard’s. before you get to that though you have to select the player characters are just single named characters with what looks like far away screen grabs for their profile pictures.

The game has four different game modes Freeride, Big Air Competition, Beach Contest and Extreme Trick, with three difficulty choice Amateur, Kook and Pro. You can also choose different beaches to use in your chosen discipline, although these don’t really look much different from each other with the player mostly seeing just water as they focus on the oncoming waves, occasionally dolphins will pop out of the water.

Late Playstation 1 release and a budget title as well so no story or story mode present.

With this being such a late release in the Playstation 1’s life cycle, reviews from critics for this game are impossible to find with pretty much all of them having moved on to the PS2 long ago. So we rely on the GameFAQs user ratings, with a total of 7 users rating this game resulting in a pretty dire average rating of 1.29/5.

A majority of 3 users have rated this game at an abysmal 0.5/5 with another 2 users rating the game at a 1/5, another user was slightly more generous giving the game a 2/5, with the final user by far the most kind to the game with their 3.5/5 score.

On to the games difficulty where a total of 6 users have rated this category, with 2 users each rating this game as having a simple difficulty level or a just right difficulty level, the remaining two users rated the game as each and tough.

The games lifespan has had only 4 users rate this category, with 2 spending less and an hour with the game, another user spent 2 hours with the game while one user did seem to get some longevity from the game spending 8 hours with it, this averages out at 2.8 hours spent with the game.

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, which unsurprisingly don’t stock this late budget and European only release, likewise eStarland.com and Retrogames.co.uk don’t stock this title either. So we head off to Amazon.com who as well don’t stock this title.

We now head across the pond to the co.uk version of Amazon in the hopes of finding this elusive budget title, which we do a limited supply however with just 7 copies on the market. With prices for a very good quality  used copy available for £2.41 with free shipping.

This converts to $3.10 in the US, in the Euro zone countries you will be looking at a price of €2.62, while in Australia it will cost you 3.91 Australian Dollars. A like new copy is available for £3.53 as well as a new copy which can be picked up for just over £7, an overpriced new copy is also on the market for £39.97.

Heading over to Ebay.com now where a handful of copies are available, as with before I have set my shipping location to the UK, where a disc and manual only copy will set you back $2.55 this also comes with free international shipping. As does a complete copy for $4.21 it claims to be in very good condition however closer inspection of the case does show scratches and a possible crack.

Another very good condition complete copy, this one is actually in very good condition is available for just $4.47 this also comes with free international shipping. A brand new copy is also available, this new and sealed copy is priced at $38.40 which leads me to believe that the Amazon cheap new copy could be well underpriced, this new copy comes with free international shipping as well.

Written by

P J Gibbon