Here's yet another multi-event sports game, but one that doesn't involve any waggling or keyboard-bashing. It features five sports: weight-lifting, canoeing, 100 metres, skeet-shooting and discus. I don't think most armchair athletes are going to find much here to interest them.

Weight-lifting is the first event. You have to lift gradually heavier weights to reach a qualifying level. The lifter is poorly drawn and animated. Your method of making lifts is even worse: a pointer spins around a circle at the bottom of the screen, and when it's pointing straight up you have to press Fire to stop it. Get it right and it's a good lift, miss it and you lose one of your three lives. As the weights get heavier, the pointer spins faster.

The second event, canoeing, has better graphics but familiar very simple gameplay. Your canoe (a kayak, actually) appears in the middle of the screen, viewed from above, and the occupant paddles with just two frames of animation. Rocks appear at the bottom of the screen and move up it. You have to move left and right to avoid them. If you hit a rock a life is lost, otherwise you have to complete a certain distance down the course.

The 100 metres is next. Here the animation is better but the gameplay just as bad. The run stays in one spot on the screen while the crowd jerks by behind him. To make him run faster you have to press Fire in conjunction with a spinning pointer, as in event one, but this time you have to keep repeating it to keep the speed up and make the qualifying time.

The fourth event is skeet-shooting, although by this time you'll probably want to do a bit of author-shooting. A cursor and two trees appear on a screen and from the bottom of the screen a grey brick will spin up. You have to put the cursor over it and press Fire to destroy it before it flies off screen. A set number of skeets have to be shot, but hitting more gets you more points.

The final event (heavy sigh of relief) is the discus. You first have to set the power of the throw With the familiar spinning pointer and then the angle by stopping a number that. gradually increases. This time a white spinning brick moves across screen and you hope it passes the qualifying distance.

Then it's back to: the first event. Go through it all again with the qualifying getting tougher until you lose all three lives.

The graphics are dismal, the sound is hopeless, the gameplay is horribly simple and even at £3 it's a waste of money. The fact that it is budget software is no longer - an excuse for bad product like this.

It's a funny old business, this computer-games lark. Just when you think you've seen the worst game imaginable, someone goes and brings out something much, much worse. You'll laugh at the graphics on this one, weep at the waste of three quid and fall asleep over the gameplay. I'd have preferred a waggling game, and I hate waggling games.

40

If you shelled out three quid for this, I should think green is the word.

P. It's cheap.
P. It's quite tough as you progress.

N. The graphics are bad.
N. Very little sound.
N. Very simple gameplay.
N. Little variety in your task.