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If my life depended on saying something good about Summer Games from US Gold, I'd probably have to admit that it enabled me to do things I've never done before... like swimming through concrete.

It's rare that a program makes it to market with so many "features". You might be even more surprised when I tell you that I saw a pre-release version of the package and told US Gold about the bugs.

One or two minor ones have been removed, but the vast majority have been left in on the grounds that they appear in the original American version.

Swimming through concrete is just one of the delightful possibilities. If your opponent establishes sufficient lead over you in the 100m freestyle you can be forced to swim a whole length backwards. Now that's what I call freestyle.

In the swimming relay, when one swimmer turns the other does too, even if he hasn't reached the end of the pool yet. The same goes for the hand-over - it's a case of "one in, all in".

Mind you, it might as well be like that because you can't tell who's who anyway.

So the swimming's not too good, how about the running? Well, in the 100m dash the screen scrolled forward so that neither player was on screen. It's pretty silly going through all the running actions when you can't see the runner.

Even the general organisation of the program is awful. Despite the two joystick option, if the event involves one player at a time then all players must use joystick 1.

What's the point of having two joysticks - and telling the program about it - if you've still got to pass joystick 1 around?

There's also far too much disc-flipping to make for comfortable play. The program occupies two sides of the disc and frequently seems to need something on the other side - no matter which side it's reading at the time.

I could continue in the same vein, but why bother? As a famous Australian wine critic once said: "This is one for laying down and avoiding".