Have you ever fancied the honor of standing on the winners rostrum, your national anthem chillin' the bones of the opposition and totally thrashing all the tannoys in the stadium? How about becoming a household name, right up there with the likes of Andrew's Liver Salts and HP Sauce? Well there's no gain without pain, so lace up your running shoes, step on to the track and strut your stuff.

In Megasports you are cast as a young hopeful in the world of international athletics. Your aim is plain and simple - win as many gold medals as you can. In order to pick up one of these illustrious objects you must, needless to say, come first in the relevant events (big surprise).

These events are many and varied. (32 at the latest count) They range from Hot Dog aerial skiing to the Long jump, stopping off at cycling, kayaking and equestrian activities along the way. As you may guess Megasports doesn't stick solely to winter or summer games, it can mix it with the best of them. Can you though?

If you're all alone you can play against the computer which is a reasonably good laugh and pretty challenging, but the game really comes into it's own in multi player mode. The Spectrum version can accommodate up to four (count 'em) players so if you decide to throw a party and the musical accompaniment goes up the wall you can break out Megasports and everyone will go wild.

Mega Sports is made up of four different multi sports packages previously released by US Gold so you may have seen some of them before, though surely not this many. Most of the events were a good laugh when they first appeared and that feature has stayed intact. The fact that there are 32 events to master means that you won't get bored for quite a while, and when you do there's the four player mode to keep you more than interested and get that competitive spirit going.

This compilation has a very hard task to achieve; that of trying to breathe life back into an over-exhausted game genre on 8 bit systems. All of the events included look very similar to (and in fact some of them are) sims which were available eight years ago... after all how different can pole vaulting look? But the chief challenge in these games has always been figuring out how to gain more points than you opposition. With this in mind the four player option adds a great deal to the proceedings. When there's four of you battling it out for the top spot things get very intense.

One of the funniest things about Mega Sports is the individual sport's addictiveness. You may sneer at the simplicity of some of these sims and the graphics and sound might send you hurtling into fits of laughter but the fact remains that you can end up spending hours at a time truing to get a dodgy little sprite to do a double backward somersault and a spread eagle and still come back for more. It's a bit sad but we're all human after all. Multiply this by 32 (though you're bound to dislike some of the games) and then include three friends and you have what adds up to a fair amount of lastability.

Unfortunately as hard as Megasports tries to improve on the sports genre via 32 different events and a four player option, most of the events have been seen many, many times before. It really won't take long to master any one sport but you'll have a laugh while you're going about it.

Overall, Megasports is a gallant effort to get one last hurrah from the sports field. It's fairly decent compilation for a while but it won't last forever, even in four player mode.

Label: US Gold Memory: 48K/128K Price: £14.99 Tape Reviewer: Paul Anglin

At first I though that as far as Mega-sports was concerned it was flogging a dead horse time. But I was pleasantly surprised. This is really enjoyable to play and is a great multi-player game. Definitely worth putting on your running vest once more.