Retrospective: Team Buddies

Despite looking like a pseudo-LEGO game designed for ages five and up, Team Buddies required a degree of strategy to take out the enemy. It wasn't particularly deep but players could play the long game by stacking crates in combinations of four to get better buddies and heavy weapons - eventually storming the enemy base with an eight-crate tank - or instead rush the competition with a full squad of double-crate economy buddies, each armed with single-crate light weapons.

Of course the best laid plans often went to hell as friends ganged up to take down the best player - before breaking allegiances and destroying each other. I remember one game where it came down to me and a friend with just one buddy each. He had a commando buddy with a flamethrower, and I had an unarmed ninja buddy. It was impossible for me to win. So I spent the next five minutes running around the map with the faster ninja, pressing the swear button as I went, and the look on his face after securing a cheap draw was priceless.

When I eventually got around to sampling the single-player campaign, the smile was quickly wiped from my face, as although the game eased you in gently by rescuing farmers pigs, by the time you reached the eighth world the difficulty had been ratcheted up to nightmarish proportions. The penultimate level in particular, the dreaded Lava Palaver, tasked players with using a single medic buddy to save four aliens while simultaneously facing off against eight heavily-armed baddies.

Touch the lava and you're dead, get swarmed by the baddies and you're dead, and even running out of ammo will likely end in death. There was even an eight-minute time limit which, if you managed to reach it, often felt like a small victory in itself. By far the biggest annoyance was the camp Carry On-esque one-liners the medic kept spouting in the face of relentless baddie pursuit. Team Buddies took more than a single rental to finish, and I still consider meeting all the secondary objectives as one of my hardcore gaming achievements.

Today, playing Team Buddies with friends is still highly enjoyable and more maniacal than the majority of party games. The swearing is still as pointlessly stupid as it ever was, but the game has lost little of its colourfully abrasive charm and tactical edge. In particular the variety of maps, modes and weapons is still fairly impressive, with scenarios ranging from ice-grenade warfare in deathmatch to desperately trying to score points in the bedlam of bomb-ball.

It seems a shame then that an HD remake of Team Buddies will probably never come to pass, as Psygnosis has long since disappeared into the Sony collective. But should the platform holder ever decide to make it happen, with the added bonus of online multiplayer, then many more players could experience this zany gem from the twilight years of the PlayStation 1. Failing that, can we just have it on PSN?