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The SportTime International Sports Festival comprises five events: Soccer, Water Polo, Volleyball, 4 x 400m Relay, and Swimming. After selecting the members of your team, you must decide which events to compete in - there's also a practice option.

The rules to all the different events follow the real-life games; for example, in Water Polo the object is to score more goals than your opponent within four quarters of five minutes each (game time).

Once all the games have been played, each of the participating countries compete in the playoffs, with the eight remaining countries (there are 32 to battle with) battling against each other for the coveted Gold, Silver and Bronze medals.

Poor quality characters, in terms of both definition and animation (check out the fatty footballers in the Soccer section!) and flat, unrealistic sound effects are the order of the day. Couple those with some of the most stubborn gameplay ever to surface on a C64 and what are you left with? A lot of money spent on a badly executed program, that's what.

Uurgh. The first thing that struck me about International Team Sports is the agonisingly long time each section takes to load from disk. If the waiting doesn't put you off playing though, then the appallingly implemented events most certainly will. Cassette users, think yourselves lucky.

Presentation 50%
Nice box and manual, terrible multi-load.

Graphics 36%
Poorly defined and animated sprites.

Sound 29%
Sparse, unrealistic effects.

Hookability 37%
The players are irritatingly unresponsive.

Lastability 45%
The options help to prolong what little appeal it has.

Overall 40%
Nice packaging, shame about the game.