ZX Computing


Olympiad
By Atlantis
Spectrum 48K

 
Published in ZX Computing #30

Olympiad

I'm at a loss as to how I can review this game constructively, other than to say that it simply isn't very good.

Olympiad is an attempt to produce a budget sports game along the lines of Daley Thompson's Super Test and includes five 'events' - Weight lifting, Canoeing, 200m Sprint, Skeet Shooting and Discus. For some of the events, all that is involved is pressing a single button when the powermeter is at its height. The powermeter is a small clockface in the top left corner of the screen, around which a dial rotates constantly and, when it reaches the twelve o'clock position (the highest energy level) you just stab the Q button. This is how you play the weight lifting and sprint sections and it doesn't give any of the excitement that the joystick/keyboard pounding style of Super Test provides.

The Canoeing section simply involves moving the canoe left/right across the screen in order to avoid the rocks that scroll upwards from the bottom of the screen. I completed this section without making a single mistake on my first attempt, so it can't really be described as much of a challenge.

Olympiad '86

The skeet shooting is the only part of the game that has any complexity to it - you actually get to use five controls for left/right/up/down and fire when positioning your gun's sights.

The graphics aren't too bad, but they aren't good enough to make up for the lack of involvement in the games themselves. The program doesn't seem to accept joystick control and, when someone suggested that it might be simple Basic or compiled Basic, I tried to break the program just by using the BREAK key. At which point a message flashed up saying "Show Off!" and then program crashed! No points for user-friendliness.

I'm afraid the only thing that Olympiad has got going for it is the budget price, but even then it's not as good as some of the budget software from many other companies.