Amiga Power
1st May 1991
Publisher: The Hit Squad
Machine: Amiga 500
Published in Amiga Power #1
Daley Thompson's Olympic Challenge
Way back since the days of Supertest and the like on the Spectrum, Daley Thompson has had us frantically waggling our joysticks through many a sporting event. Olympic Challenge was the tie in with the last Olympics (so it's a re-release from 1988 then) and, despite all those fancy digitised graphics, training sessions and in between screens, underneath it's still just a plain old waggler.
Things start off (rather annoyingly every game) in the gym where the idea is to prepare yourself for the following events. There are three exercises for you to try (or should that be hurt?) your hand at - weight-lifting, sit-ups and squats. Here, a nice digitised piccy of the big D himself does all the lifting, sitting up and squatting for you whilst you (yep, you guessed it!) waggle away feverishly, hopefully filling up that bottle of Lucozade at the top of the screen (as it will apparently effect your performance in the events).
The usual running, jumping and throwing Decathlon events come next, featuring nice graphics, but unfortunately rather one-sided gameplay - you simply weld your joystick to the floor, superglue your hand to the shaft, make lots of groaning noises and waggle for your life. Some of the events (if you get that far - you have to qualify in each one to get onto the next) involve such complicated manoeuvres as pressing fire to jump and, (shock horror) waggling slowly, but all in all there's not much to it and boredom sets in extremely quickly.
There's no way of practising each event either, so you're bound to spend most of your time training and very little on the actual competitions themselves. What a downer, eh? Three years on, Daley Thompson's Olympic Challenge still has a bit of instant appeal, but soon gets very repetitive and boring. There are a lot better ways to spend eight quid.
The Bottom Line
Hopelessly old fashioned waggling gameplay. Even the great man's face on the box won't help it sell.