Carl Lewis Challenge, eh? Sort of "step outside Carl, I reckon you're crap", perhaps? Or maybe, just maybe, this could be a sports game to cash in on the Olympics?
Not that I'm sick to death of the bloody Olympics or anything. Well, OK, so I am. You see, as I sit writing this, the Olympics have just wheezed to a halt. And they really are pointless.
All bloody day on every channel you could watch Brazil and Poland battling it out for the Gold medal in weightlifting. Well that's just soooo relevant to my life.
I don't care who's the best at Judo in the world? Especially if you have to watch BBC1 until midnight to find out. And who won? Which country got the Olympic prize? Nobody. Because there isn't one. It's pointless. And crap. And I don't like it. So there. So can Carl Lewis Challenge help alleviate my Olympaphobia?
No, it's carp as well. Which is very, very worrying because Psygnosis should know better. SO here's what Carl Lewis Challenge entails, and just why it's so Stilton-like.
There are three ways to play the game. There's a management option where you set the training for the Olympic Squad and then just watch them compete. Boring. There's an arcade option, which we'll come to later. And there's the 'proper' game which is a mix of the two.
The arcade bit them. Well, it's a waggler. Sort of. You can actually choose the control method, so if you can't stand waggling you can use the rhythm method instead (snigger).
This is, to be honest, a very nice idea. It's just a pity that no matter how you control the game, it's still gubbins. The thing is, if you opt for 'rhythm' then you have to concentrate too much on the 'rhythm-o-meter' and miss your cue to jump hurdles and stuff. Thoughtless.
The problem here is size. You get five events, but they're so similar that you feel really cheated. There are two running events, 100m and Hurdles, a throwing event, Javelin, and two jumping events, High and Long Jump.
All of them involve waggling for a bit and pressing Fire at the appropriate time, unless you opt for a different control method in which case it's pressing Fire in time to a moving meter and pressing up every so often. It just conjures up all those Olympic images, doesn't it?
It suffers from exactly the same problem as Aquaventura a few months back. It's a tiny game made to look bigger by repeating everything over and over again. You get to do each event five times, fact fans.
Four qualifying heats and the finals. Lose one of the qualifying rounds and you can't enter the finals. It's really saying something that we were actually glad to fail events so we wouldn't play them again.
The two-player game won't let you race against each other, and at the end of your ordeal you get to see all the scores and a nice Game Over. Well thanks a bunch.
The graphics are digitised, but lacking any character at all (no faces you see) and the animation is at best stilted and at worst (on the high jump) something the kids would do on Rolf's Cartoon Club.
A pathetic attempt, really. Dig out your old Speccy and play Daley Thompson's Decathlon instead, believe me it's the superior game. Five samey and record-
As a budget game this would be crap, as a full price it's abysmal. That's two strikes in a row, Psygnosis. What's going wrong?