Olympic Gold - Sega Mega Drive/Genesis review

A game about athletics sponsored by a sugary unhealthy drink

Game: Olympic Gold
Format: Sega Mega Drive/Genesis
Developer: Tiertex
Publisher: US Gold
Year Released: 1992
Also Released on: Sega Master System, Sega Game Gear
Now Available on: Nothing

Well, the Olympic Games are over now for another four years. Didn't we do well? Sadly, I wasn't chosen to participate in them this year but I'm sure this will change in time for the Tokyo games in 2020. Between now and then, I'll pick a sport that we aren't that great at, practice it, and then go to Japan to represent Team GB. Maybe I'll pick ping pong. We don't really do that well in ping pong, do we? There's a gap in our country's skill set there. I shall plug it.

In the meantime though, I've been having my own Olympic Games in the comfort of my living room. Oh yes, the sofa Olympics, featuring Olympic Gold on the Sega Mega Drive. Olympic Gold was released to coincide with the Barcelona games of 1992. It was also released on the Sega Master System and Game Gear. Olympic Gold was the first game to be officially endorsed by the International Olympic Committee, with a new one released for every summer and winter Olympics since then, although this year's Olympics only appear to have been attended by Mario and Sonic and their friends. Back in 1992, this would have been unthinkable. Mario and Sonic in a game together. Never!

Olympic Gold opens with a map of the world and the names of each previous host city flying out of their location in the world, plus the year in which they hosted. If anything, it provides you with a quick geography and history lesson. You then get to choose the language that you would like to play in and then it's on with the games.

However, before you get to have a go at showing off your sporting prowess, a recreation of the Olympic stadium’s electronic scoreboard is displayed on your screen. It has the ability of producing amazing state-of-the-art (for the early 1990s anyway) graphics and animations plus in-game menus and options too. It also displays the scores, which is handy what with it being a scoreboard and everything.  

The game's menu, on the stadium scoreboard. Clever, eh?

From this magical multipurpose scoreboard, you can choose your in-game options. You can choose whether to practice a specific event, partake in a Mini Olympics, or go all out in the full blown Olympics. Mini Olympics simply lets you pick the events that you want to compete in, whereas Full Olympics requires you to compete in all of them. And by all of them, I mean seven events. Yep, just seven. Those Barcelona Olympics must have been over within an hour of them starting if the game is an accurate reflection of the real thing. Nothing like the two week affair we had over in Brazil this summer.  You then get to pick your skill level – either crap, not-so-crap or superhuman – displayed in this game as Club, National or Olympic. Then you get to choose who you would like to play as. Each competitor represents a country, and you can’t switch your competitor’s nationality. Too much red tape, apparently. 

Not really too sure what the difference between National and Olympic actually would be?

The opening ceremony is over. The flame has been lit.

The flamelighter makes his way down the stairs with

his hand on fire.

Regardless of what mode of play you have chosen, you are then swiftly thrown into the first event itself. Well, not so swiftly if you’ve chosen to take part in the full Olympics. You have to get through the Opening Ceremony itself first. Barcelona ’92 must have been on a tight budget, as it appears that all their Opening Ceremony consisted of was somebody lighting the flame and some doves being released. And not even a sign of that Freddy Mercury Barcelona song. Of course, you can always skip the ceremony by bashing one of your control pad buttons, something you’ll be getting used to as you play the game. 

So, what are the events and how are they portrayed in Olympic Gold? I’m glad you asked as I have the answers right here: 

Run Forrest Run!

100 Metres: Pretty straightforward stuff, this. Run in a straight line for 100 metres as fast as you can. Usain Bolt is quite good at this. I’m not. Olympic Gold employs the good old technique of getting you to press buttons as quickly as possible, a la Track and Field. You need to alternate between button A and button B. The faster you do it, the faster your runner runs. If you feel that it makes a difference, you can press C at the end of the race to push your head forward a little bit with the intention that it crosses the line before the head of one your opponents. Unfortunately, there is no option to dive over the finish line.  

The bloke in lane three appears to be hopping his way

through the hurdles

110 Metre Hurdles: Similar to the above but ten metres longer and with the added inconvenience that some imbecile has placed miniature bridges in your way. You can run through them, which slows you down and probably hurts, or you can jump over them, which is what the professionals do. I remember getting picked to represent my house group in hurdles in my school sports day back in 1995. I decided to go for a mixture of the two methods and came last. I don’t think I’d ever hurdled beforehand; I got picked simply because I was quite tall. In Olympic Gold, alternating buttons A and B gets your speed up, whereas smashing down on C causes your athlete to launch himself off the ground in the hope that he’ll gracefully glide over the hurdle in his way. What I found from playing this game is that I still seem to use the same tactics that I used in my 1995 Sports Day, with the same results. Maybe I need to change tactics. 

Catch this!

Hammer throw: For this event, you spin round and around and around a number of times until you’re spinning so fast that letting go of the hammer that you are holding onto causes it to fling a great distance. The greater the distance, the better. Pressing C gets your spin cycle started, bashing A and B makes you go fast and faster, and pressing C again releases the hammer from your grasp. And then you can watch as it plummets to the ground just in front of you. A bit of practice will result in the hammer going further, much to the crowd’s delight. 

D. Stead stares with intensity at Bully's prizeboard

Archery: Now, I play darts every now and again but don’t understand why it isn’t an Olympic event. Watching darts on TV at the start of every January is my New Year treat – a bit like an extension to the festive season. I’m sure it’d go down well in the Olympics. The closest they get to it is Archery, which I suppose is basically the same only with bigger darts. And no Bully’s Special Prize for the bullseye. They should do that in the Olympics archery. Somebody gets a bullseye and Jim Bowen shouts from the background, “It’s a Bullseye! You’ll love eating your food with this. You’ve won a luxury cutlery set and case!” Do people still have special cutlery sets? My mum and dad had one in a massive case with a velvety cover that spent most of its time at the back of a kitchen cupboard. It only ever came out for Christmas dinner. Anyway, archery in this game just requires you to press C to pull back your arrow, the D-Pad to attempt to aim your shot, and C again to fire. What makes things slightly more challenging is that as you attempt to line up your shot, you appear to be a bit wobbly. The first few attempts aren't too bad, but you begin quivering like a jelly after go after go after go. I’m not sure whether this is down to the strain on pulling back the arrow, or the wind, but it gives the event a whole new layer of complexity and excitement. 

Stead appears to be aiming for the area between the targets. Doesn't bode well

Not going to make it, not going to make it

High Jump: Run a bit with a pole, and then use it to launch yourself into the air, hoping to get over a horizontal pole placed at a height and landing successfully on a cushion. This isn’t easy to pull off due to the weird combination of button presses that you have to master. It goes from being a button bashing challenge to a coordination challenge. In fact, it’s probably easier to do it in real life. 

Stead dives elegantly into the blue waters below him

3 Metre Springboard diving: Probably the best event of the game, although that isn’t really saying much. You need to complete a series of dives of different techniques. In practice mode, you can view a demo of how the dive is done beforehand so you know what buttons to press and when. There are a number of dives to master, so it really is a case of remembering each combination for each dive. Easy to do if you’ve just watched it, not so easy if you’ve just done a load of other events and have a memory like mine. Still, it’s quite funny watching your athlete hit the water on his belly. In main competition, all required dives are chosen for you, apart from your final one, so make it a good one. I suppose this event is the only one that actually rewards skill, even though it primarily requires you to remember button combinations. 

Well, he crapped that one up, didn't he?

Just like my local leisure centre, only without a pensioner

doing widths instead of lengths

200 Metre freestyle Swimming: Similar to the running, only you don’t need to bash your buttons quite as rapidly, but you do need to get your timing right to flip yourself over to turn the other way when you approach the end of the pool. 

So, they are all of the events. Once you’ve completed an event in practice mode, you are taken back to the main menu where you can choose the event again if you want another go or pick something else. That’s a little something that niggled me. Why the game couldn’t just ask you if you wanted another go before taking you to the menu screen? In either of the Olympic Modes, there are usually multiple rounds of the same event. For example, in the 100 Metre sprint, If you finish in the top three in the first race, you qualify for the final. You have the option of watching or skipping the second race which decides your other three opponents. And then all six finalists run in the medal race. In other events, your score is totalled up after you’ve completed three rounds of it to decide the final scores and the medal winners. I'm not really sure how the high jump works. It just seems to go on forever until you mess up three times.

Not sure whether this is game based on Barcelona '92 or Berlin '36. Could be the latter. Hitler himself is

on the starting gun, and there is a distinct lack of diversity in the athletes.

If you win an event, you are presented with the gold medal and a snippet of your national anthem is played. When I say you are presented with the medal, all you get is a screen with a picture of it in an open box. There are no podium posing and medal-biting shenanigans here.

GBR appear to have done suspiciously well in this games, with

Pam Kidman topping the table. Zebedee Smirnov competed for

EUN. Who's EUN? Ooooh, former Soviet countries apparently.

No sign of China though.

After you've completed all of the events, the final medal count is tallied up and the Olympic champion is decided. Woohoo! It really isn't that exciting, but there is a small bit of tension if you are doing well and want to maintain your position at the top of the leaderboard. Just a small amount. Nothing like the real thing. At least I don't think it's like the real thing. I'll find out in 2020 when I'm in the ping pong.

The problem with this game is the events aren’t really that much fun. I’ve never been a big fan of games that just require you to press buttons as fast as you can or memorise combinations, so this game just isn’t going to do anything for me. And I don’t think I’m the only one. Saying that, I do remember playing this game back in 1992 with a friend and quite enjoying it. But only for a short while. It wasn’t a game where we played through the whole Olympics and then said, “Let’s do it again!” 

Dave Stead is late off the starting blocks. Will he make up time? Probably not.

Presentation-wise, the idea of using the scoreboard to drive navigation through the menus was quite good, and was probably quite novel in its day too. In Europe, the game was sponsored by Coca Cola, so in between each event, the Coca Cola blimp sometimes goes past. That isn’t too bad, but what is annoying is that the “Always Coca Cola” jingle plays each time. I don’t really have anything against in-game sponsorship providing it doesn’t take over the game, but the tune just grates. When the game was originally released though, I thought it was amazing. I couldn't get over the fact that a video game had a familiar brand logo and jingle in it. I wet my knickers when I played James Pond: Robocod and there were Penguin chocolate bars on one level. Strangely enough, the American version of Olympic Gold didn't feature sponsorship. 

Wanna take a ride on my pole? Fnar fnar

Graphics are functional and purposeful, but aren't really very nice to look at, appearing quite basic and somewhat 8-bit in style. In the events, each competitor is identical to each other. The only way of recognising your character is that you wear a different coloured outfit, a bit like when you forgot your PE kit at school and had to wear something from lost property. Sounds are average too. I've already mentioned the annoying Coca Cola tune, plus the rest of the in-event music is nothing to write home about, not that I've ever written about music that I've heard when I've written home. I don't think I've ever written home actually. Maybe I sent my mum and dad a postcard from Gran Canaria when I went on my first non-family holiday, although I doubt I wrote about the music there. If I did, I would probably have mentioned that DJ Otzi's Hey Baby (Ooh, Aah) song seemed to be on repeat play. One whole week of listening to that non-stop every afternoon around the pool. It drove me crazy it did. It was no wonder I had to keep wandering over to the all-inclusive bar for a drink. So, yes, the music in Olympic Gold wasn't up to much, playing away in the background as you hammer the life out of your control pad. Nor were the sound effects which were limited to short bursts of white noise to simulate crowd noise and a few other sounds. That said, they don't really intrude in the game's goings-on, and I don't really think they would have made the game any better even if they were amazing.

Baby I'm a firework! One of those cheap ones from Asda

that they begin selling two months before 5th November

Olympic Gold wasn't an awful game, and there is a certain amount of fun that can be had with it, especially with multiple players. The controls are responsive, but as the game sort of dictates that buttons need to be pressed as quickly as possible or in a certain order, it means that it isn't really that enjoyable to control. The seven events chosen for the game aren't the best or most varied, but when playing them through, you kind of want to get the event you're on over and move onto the next. In a way, you're wishing the game away. There really isn't any incentive to master the events so there isn't much replay value in it. Olympic Gold doesn't have any long-lasting appeal, and it's short term appeal is also limited too. Fortunately it doesn't take long to get through the whole thing, and then it's back in its box, or wherever it came from. Nowadays it's something to look back at more out of curiosity than as a game. Still, it was better than the next game based on the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.    

RATINGS

Presentation – 78%

A digital scoreboard is pretty much all you see through most of the non-gameplay sections. But it's effective and works quite well.

Graphics – 77%

Fairly bog-standard graphics which don't really stand out in any way. Would have been nice to see a more diverse mix of competitors. 

Sound – 72%

Although the game features plenty of music and sound effects, the tunes that play in the background of each event are forgettable and the sound effects are rather lacking in quality. In European versions a horrible rendition of the Coca Cola jingle plays between each event which is nothing but an annoyance.

Playability – 73%
The game feels like it's going to be quite good at first, but the button-bashing nature of some events and memory tests of others soon reduce the fun factor. It's not too bad with multiple players though.

Overall – 72%

Not a terrible first entry to the official Olympic Games series of video games, but not great either. The variety of events is limited, and the game just isn't something you'd have much desire to master. There isn't really anything to it to make it appeal. 

Tennis Games on Atari consoles - Wimbledon Special: Part Two

In the second part of our Wimbledon special, we look at more digital versions of tennis. Today we go through the games that appeared on Atari's consoles, from the Atari VCS all the way up to the Atari Lynx. We tee off by revisiting the Atari VCS.

Tennis Games on the Atari VCS/2600

Atari's wooden box played host to hundreds of games, most of which bore little resemblance to, um, anything. Still, it attempted to replicate tennis and the sport featured in three games. It probably featured in more, but I don't know what they are. Here are the three games that I do know.

Video Olympics - Atari (1977)
Video Olympics was one of the launch games for the Atari VCS. It was basically Pong on a cartridge, with 50 variations on the theme which apparently mimicked such sports as football, basketball, ice hockey and, of course, in its simplest original two-bats-and-one-square-ball mode, tennis. Tennis without a net but with bouncy walls. At the time, there were countless consoles that played clones of Pong, with switches and dials and stuff to change the parameters of the game. Video Olympics was probably a way of Atari ensuring that its new VCS console was at least able to offer whatever was already on the market in one tidy package, providing pretty much every variation of Pong conceivable. The problem was, even in 1977, Pong and its many mutations were already old and dated. This game will provide some nostalgia value for, oooh, two minutes. Then you'll wonder how the video game industry ever got off the ground. Still, it's not too bad with two players.

Beep. Beep. Beep. Deep sounding beep. Who needs sound effects when you can have subtitles?

Tennis - Activision (1981)

This is the first game on the Atari VCS to look like a real tennis game, getting released two years before the next one. It's fun at first but gets tedious very quickly. You can't swing your racket, meaning that it's a simple case of getting your player to be in the same place as the ball in order to return it. Unless you are able to catch the ball at the end of your racket, it ends up going straight back to your opponent which results in endless games. A good first attempt to bring tennis to the masses, but it hasn't stood the rest time. You can play it for yourself in your browser through The Internet Archive's online console service. 

Pink is beating blue. Gosh.

Realsports Tennis - Atari (1983)

 

Atari attempted to recreate tennis using a viewpoint which is still favoured today. They also even attempted to give you the ability to influence the kind of shot that you were trying to pull off, not that it really worked that well. This is actually a fairly fun game but like a lot of VCS games today, it gets boring pretty quickly. The graphics are quite good, although the music sounds a bit like somebody has been pressing random keys on their Casio keyboard. It is quite surprising that it took Atari until 1983 to release a tennis game for their console, five years into its life. Realsports Tennis is easily the best tennis game for the Atari VCS, but that's not saying much seeing as there are only three, and one of those is Pong.

Those rackets look like the player's arms have come out of their sockets

Tennis Games on the Atari 5200

 

So, fans of tennis weren't too well served on the Atari VCS. What about the console's successor, the Atari 5200 Super System? Well, things got worse. There was just the one tennis game released for it. And that was.....

Realsports Tennis - Atari (1983)

This game is called Atari. No, Tennis. Realsports Tennis

In addidtion to its release on the Atari VCS/2600, Realsports Tennis also appeared on the Atari 5200, a game designed to make use of the console's "fantastic" controller. You controlled your little man using the joystick, but aimed your shots using its number pad. Needless to say, the game is pretty much unplayable. You could ignore the keypad and just use the joystick. This just results in you having a playful knockabout with your opponent with never ending relays. Not quite as exciting but far less frustrating, although it's unlikely you'll ever win a point.

This looks like an exciting game

Tennis Games on the Atari Lynx

Oh well, seeing as nobody actually owned an Atari 5200, the fact that Realsports Tennis was so bad wasn't that significant. The Atari 7800 did even worse. It didn't even have a tennis game. Nor did the Jaguar. The Lynx did though. In 1993, Jimmy Connors popped up on Atari's rather splendid little battery guzzler.

Jimmy Connors Tennis - UBI Soft (1993)

Hey Jimmy. I still don't know who you are

Jimmy Connors's Tennis on the Lynx wasn't a bad little game. It lacked a lot of the realism of the SNES equivalent, opting for simplicity and accessibility instead. There are some frustrating elements to the game. Missing your serve results in a fault and you never get to serve from the far end. Not great, but not major criticisms. The graphics are good and the game also features some nice sampled speech. Of all of Atari's consoles, this is easily the best tennis game for them. That's not saying much though.

Not too sure what that yellow square is but it looks out of place on a tennis court.

 

Great Sports on the Sega Master System

Fairly early on in the life of the Sega Master System, Sega released a series of sports simulations to entertain armchair atheletes. In the order of the alphabet they were Great Baseball, Great Basketball, Great Football, Great Golf, Great Ice Hockey, Great Soccer and Great Volleyball. Of course, claiming that anything's great usually means that it isn't, with the obvious exception of Great Britain, which is great. And possibly Great Yarmouth. As for Sega's "Great" sports games, it would have been much more truthful to call them Not-so-great Baseball, Bloody Awful Basketball, Absolutely Shite Football, Below Par Golf (see what I did there!?), Pucking Unplayable Ice Hockey, Crap Soccer and Terrible Volleyball. But doing so might have hampered sales somewhat. Even so, Sega did sometimes mix up the names a bit. Some games were apparently "Great" in one country but not in another, or games went under the same title in different countries, but were actually different games. Join us as we look back at this not-very-famous series of games to remind ourselves of why some games are sometimes best left in the past, and also attempt to make some sense of their names.

Penalty! Referee! Oh, wrong sport.

Great Baseball
To be fair, Sega's version of America's favourite bat and ball game wasn't that bad. It's certainly not great by any stretch of the imagination, but is at least moderately fun for a short while. Getting into a game is nice and quick, perhaps a little too quick as before you know it, somebody is throwing a ball at you at 100 miles an hour. There's no need to faff around with options and team selections, parameters, preferences and all manner of crap like many sports games of today require you to do. You simply choose a team from the A or the N league, whatever they are, pick a pitcher and away you go. As per the rules of baseball, you take it in turns to bat and pitch. Three strikes and you're out. Oh! So that's where the saying comes from! Well I never. The view when pitching and batting is from behind the pitcher, and looks quite impressive too. When the ball has been batted into whichever random direction it wants to go, the view switches to an overhead one, allowing you to see the playing field, and the little players running around the bases. There are actually two modes of play, one which allows you to control the fielders, and one which doesn't. Things get a bit fiddly when trying to control the fielders, so it's best to let the computer do that so you can concentrate on throwing the ball back to the bases, and to each other, and back again. The game is peppered with little samples of speech, some of which sounds like it is actually based on real words. The crowd noise sounds like a jet engine taking off though. Little tuneful ditties break up the action, and give a jolly feel to the game. The graphics are also quite good. I'm not sure if pushing the d-pad in any direction when pitching or batting actually has any effect on the ball, but pressing it anyway makes you feel like you're contributing some skill to the game.

This version of Great Baseball was released in Europe and the USA. An earlier game also called Great Baseball was released in Japan. It was a bit slower-paced and didn't utilise the behind the pitcher viewpoint, but it was fairly similar otherwise. Japan also receive a modified and much improved version of the European/US Great Baseball, which was known as The Pro Yakyuu: Pennant Race.

Rounder! Rounder! Rounder! Rounder!

Exciting!

Great Basketball
So, we've had rounders. Now netball. As with most of the "Great" games, there is minimal setup required to get you started with a game. In Great Basketball, options are pretty much limited to choosing whether you are playing by yourself or with a chum, and then choosing a country or countries to represent. A nice little national anthem plays for each nation you pick. Gameplay is arcade-style in, er, style. It's fairly easy to score points, and the game is quite fast-paced, but it's just lacking in variety and any sense of excitement. The ball feels a bit floaty and there is no real skill involved in throwing the ball. It's also too easy to foul other players. Sometimes you can manage it without even pressing a button. A tune plays throughout the game which isn't actually that annoying, although it sounds like the snippets of speech have been sampled from some extra-terrestrial species. They definitely don't represent anything heard on this planet. Graphics are colourful although it's often difficult to make out who's who. Again, like Great Baseball, Basketball is fairly fun to play for a short while, and is quite enjoyable with two players, but not necessarily because it's a good game. It's one of those so bad it's good kind of games.

There were no weird naming shenanigans going on here. Great Basketball was Great Basketball everywhere, apart from Brazil where it was Great Basket.

The USA are beating URS. URS? Ursula? Oh! USSR.

Hut hut! Twenty-eight! Fifty-six! Time out!

Great Football
This is Sega's attempt to bring American Football to owners of their 8-Bit box of tricks. They really shouldn't have bothered. It's terrible. There's a choice of what are probably made-up teams from the good old A and N leagues again, and that's about it. In one player mode, you only appear to be able to play in offence, and picking your tactics is a case of waiting for the formation selection screen to scroll through each formation, stopping it when it highlights the one you want. That's if you can figure out how to stop it. I can't, so I just have to wait until it gets to the last one. Surely it wouldn't have been difficult to program some sort screen with manually selectable menus. Gameplay itself is limited to either running with the ball, or throwing it to somebody else and letting them run with it. Okay, that's pretty much what American Football is, but in reality the sport is usually much more interesting than it sounds. The problem is, this version of American Football just isn't much fun to play at all. The sport itself is very much stop-start, but there's too much stopping and not enough doing anything in this game. Oh well.

The same version of Great Football under the same name was released worldwide. Poor world.

Looks like a load of firemen in a field of sheep.

Fore!

Great Golf
Probably the best of the Great series of games, which isn't really saying much. Great Golf is a fun, if simplistic, round of the Royal and Ancient game. It features two modes of play, Stroke Play and Match Play. Stroke Play is your typical get-around-the-course-in-as-few-shots-as-possible mode, whereas Match Play, which requires a minimum of two players, sees the winner declared based on who wins most holes. There's also a club selection screen. Graphics and sounds are average, with the viewpoint from behind the player taking a short while to display, and sound featuring a few effects, short tunes and the odd bits of sampled speech. Gameplay itself allows you to check the wind direction and speed, set your club, stance, direction and power. That's about it. The ball appears a bit floaty, and if you're playing solo, things get dull quite quickly. Incidentally, this was the very first Master System game I ever owned other than the built in Hang On and Safari Hunt, and I have fond memories of playing this with family and friends. Great days.

This version of Great Golf is the version released in Europe and the USA. An earlier game with the same title was released in Japan, but failed to make it out of Rising Sun land. It was an isometric version of the sport. The European/US version of Great Golf was released in Japan as Masters Golf.

Enough of this shit. Get me to the nineteenth hole.

No it isn't.

Great Ice Hockey
There's not a lot I can say about this. It's only compatible with Sega's crappy trackball controller, the Sega Sports Pad. If you don't have one, and probably 99% of Master System owners didn't, then this game was useless. Apparently it's not much better even with the correct accessory. Things don't sound or look that bad, although you can't really go wrong if your task is to draw ice. But how it actually plays is anyone's guess although I'll bet our cat on it that it doesn't play well. It mystifies me why somebody didn't think to make the game work with the Master System's standard controllers, you know, the ones that came free with every console, therefore the ones that everybody owned. Bizarre.

Fortunately, Europe were spared of the horrors of Great Ice Hockey as it failed to get released there. It did get a release in Japan and the USA.

Where the puck's the puck? Oh, who cares. I can't even play this game.

Lots of effort went into designing this title screen

Great Soccer
Sega managed to turn the Beautiful Game into something quite horrible here. You control your players up and down a pitch and attempt to tap the ball into a goal using a terrible aiming system. Your players move slowly and are unresponsive, and they don't seem able to keep control of the ball. As accurately as this reflects England's 2014 World Cup team, it just isn't much fun at all. Like all of the Great games, getting into the game is quick and easy. But having simple and accessible menu screens does little to redeem things. Graphics are depressing, the sound will offend your ears and you'll be turning this game off within minutes of turning it on. Do I not like that.

Again, there were two versions of Great Soccer. This time around, Japan and Europe received the vertically scrolling Great Soccer game mentioned above. The USA's version of Great Soccer was equally as bad, but scrolled horizontally. It was released in Japan and Europe as World Soccer, and released again in Japan as Sports Pad Soccer, compatible with the Sega Sports Pad.

He shoots! He scores! He wants to play something else!

Nice colour scheme here

Great Volleyball
I really wish I hadn't chosen to try to play through these games. The best of the bunch probably was Great Ice Hockey, but that's only because I couldn't get it to work so didn't have to play it. Fortunately, we've reached the final game, Great Volleyball. Unfortunately, it's just as unplayable as the rest. Things sounds ok and look nice and cartoony, but it's hard to control what's happening. I'm never really sure what player I'm controlling, and he just seems to do what he wants, rather than what I want him to do. You have a team of six players, but sometime you are controlling three of them, sometimes one. And the rest of the team that you're not controlling doesn't appear to want to help out. It's confusing and, once again, not fun. The worst thing is that these games would have originally retailed for about £20 each. Maybe more. The complete set would have set you back £140. That depresses me.

Great Volleyball was the same game in all markets. It was crap everywhere.

Spot the ball

It's not great. It's super.

Anyone for Tennis?
This series of games seemed to represent a number of major sports, but Sega don't appear to have served up anything for tennis fans. Or did they? Well, yes, there was apparently a game called Great Tennis. However, this was only in Japan. Great Tennis did make it abroad though. It was released in countries elsewhere on the planet as Super Tennis. Just the same as how the Great games weren't great, sticking Super at the front of something doesn't make it Super. Except for Super Gran  Unsurprisingly, Super Tennis was a simplistic version of tennis. It's a bit fiddly to control, and the ball seems to be quite floaty, but it's not too bad.

You cannot be serious! We've got another 14 years to go until Virtua Tennis comes out?