Previous Next

For your money you get six different sports - swimming, diving, cycling, show-jumping, shooting and a marathon - covering 21 individual events. You also get a meaty ring-bound instruction booklet and some foamy stuff. Give your pet gerbil the foam padding so that, although you end up with some pretty feeble sports sims, at least he gets somewhere snug to sleep.

You can either work your way through the game as a whole or you can practise individual events. First up is the marathon. Obviously, this isn't a straight waggle - sitting in front of your ST frantically waggling your joystick for 26 miles would hardly be fun. Not to mention knackering.

Empire have elected to make it a management event instead - you control the effort, speed and rhythm at which your athlete runs, along with requests for liquid and energy refreshment. The marathon, you see, continues between events. So allowing for the weather, the course and your runner's condition, you can nip off and try another event, checking occasionally to see how he's doing. This one good feature is, sadly, let down by the rest of the program.

The sheer lack of fun is the fundamental problem with International Sports Challenge. Plainly, none of the events are entertaining possibly because the packaging takes itself far too seriously. For example, a whole fouor pages in the manual is dedicated to diving. You don't need to bother with this because we gave you a demo version of the diving bit with Cover Disk 37.

The manual explains how the different diving events are divided up, what the dives look like and how they are accomplished. Then you discover the control method - first stop, a pulsating circle at its maximum radius - for maximum power - then you have to move a ball around the outside of the circle so as to closely follow the path of a moving ball orbiting inside the circle. What has this got to do with diving? You spend your entire time staring at this small circle, with the diver's actions becoming of supreme indifference to you.

The swimming is no better. Methodically move the joystick back and right for strokes, push the Fire button when your ST requests you to breathe. Different strokes require different speeds of waggling - and that is really all there is to it. What crap. At least Empire have gone for something different with the cycling and show-jumping - namely solid 3D graphics. This makes a welcome change from the flat, badly animated and, quite frankly, insulting graphics you see in the other two events. The cycling is still awful, though. Looking like something out of Stunt Car Racer and Powerdrome, the walls of an oval track scroll smoothly towards you. All you have to do is keep a steady left-right motion with the joystick for maximum speed and move up and down the track to cut corners and avoid - even overtake - your 3D solid vector opponent. The fact that you can't crash into the walls or spin off the track only accentuates the game's terminal lack of realism and high boredom factor.

Like the cycling, the show-jumping gives you a first person perspective of the proceedings. You sit on a horse whose head appears in the middle of the screen. You move the joystick forward to "accelerate", back to "brake" and press Fire to jump. You make the old nag gallop around the arena, jump the jumps in order and score faults if you miss or knock off the barriers. The only bit requiring any skill is getting the timing right to line up with the jump. Well it's quite interesting, but after the first few attempts your initial enthusiasm soon falls away.

The shooting is the best event, but it's still not a patch on a similar section of Hypersports that came out on the Spectrum a decade ago.

The entire compilation is dated beyond belief. Is there really any room for these multi-event doobries on your ST today? The market for these games peaked when the vastly superior Olympic Challenge came out in 1988. International Sports Challenge may offer a selection of slightly different events but, to even consider it, you have to be one orange tangy bit short of a Jaffa cake.

1. There's quite a mixture of events, but they are all highly unplayable and terminally boring. For a sports sim to reeive praise in 1992, it has to do something noticeably new. International Sports Challenge doesn't.