Beijing 2008 review (various)

The first thing I think of when faced with the prospect of reviewing, or even just playing, an athletics game is "Will it be better than Daley Thompson's Decathlon?"

It'll look better, certainly (well, you'd hope so) but will it have evolved from the days of repetitive button-hammering and a decathlon game with only six playable events?

Anyway, back to the present - slapped in front of me by a busy reviews editor was Beijing 2008 from Sega, the game I've been wrecking my wrists with for the past few days.

There are effectively two main game modes to contend with when you first don the digital lycra - 'competition' and 'Olympics'.

The former lets you participate in events with up to four players (eight if you venture into the digital world and play online).

'Olympics' is more focused, giving you a schedule of events to plough through, organised into 'days'. To move on, you have to achieve a specific goal in an event - for example, just qualifying for an event is enough early on, but later you'll have to be medalling in all of them.

Pseudo-RPG elements have been shoe-horned in to allow players to 'upgrade' their team's abilities at the end of each 'day', and there's also fatigue to consider.

As for the events themselves, the list is pretty standard - running, swimming, diving, archery, gymnastic events and so on.

The running events involve the age-old button-mashing (although analog stick-waggling is now an alternative method of control), with a little 'start' mini-game adds a little tweak to the generic mechanic.

As with most athletics games, some of the events are fun to play and offer a genuine challenge to perfect - the javelin, for example - and some are just frustrating and confusing.

Essentially, this is the Olympic game to choose this summer, even if it isn't breaking that much new ground. The rise of the analog stick has at least allowed these games to branch out from the button-destroying of yore.

As usual, this sort of thing is best played as a 'party' game. Get a few friends round and start waggling those joysticks . in the game, of course. What else did you think I meant?

6.5/10

Gavin Layton