Beijing 2008 Xbox 360 Review Los Angeles CA

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Even though I'm not a huge fan of the Olympics from a sporting point of view, I can appreciate the history, the passion, the competition and the message behind the event. When Sydney hosted the 2000 Olympics and Cathy Freeman took home the gold for Australia in the 100m sprint, it was definitely a defining moment for us here down under. It's just a shame the same can't be said for the various Olympics videogames we've seen over the years,which have been uninspiring at best. Like we see in the 'movie based video game' sector, the pressure to release in time overrides the pressure to release with quality, and with quite a few events to cover in videogame form, the end result has naturally been iffy at best. It's a surprise then to see the SEGA published and Eurocom developed Beijing 2008 turn out quite well relative to what we've seen in the past, although you'll still need to be an Olympics fan with sturdy agile fingers toget the most out of it.

The modes of play in offer in this game are basically as you would expect, covering training and competition play, to full blown Olympics mode. The training is a great place to start as you can acquaint yourself with the game's many events without any pressure to perform, and trust me you will need to do plenty of acquainting as the events often prove to be quite tricky to master. Once you feel confident enough with your skills you can take yourself over to the Competition mode and get a taste for, well, competitionI guess, although there is no doubting the main mode of play in this game is naturally the Olympics mode.

It is in this mode where you take a country of your choice and go for the gold medals. When choosing your country, you can opt for the inbuilt team of athletes or you can opt for the athletes you customized - an option accessible from the main menu - although customization is quite limited indeed, only allowing you to select from a range of preset athletes for each particular event. In any case, it doesn't matter a whole lot as there doesn't even seem to be per-country based strengths or weaknesses letalone attributes for each athletes. Rather, the Olympics mode focuses around a point system which you can allocate to certain attributes such as speed, power, agility and stamina for your athletes as a whole, and these points are rewarded after successful days, or more specifically, successful events each day.

One odd inclusion to the Olympics mode is the 'game over' screen. I can't remember the last time I played a sports game and saw 'game over' come up, but nonetheless this is a distinct possibility in Beijing 2008's Olympics mode if you don't perform well enough. If you fail to place well in enough events on any given day, you will be forced to go it again, and you will keep having to retry until you pass the grade. This is a slightly weird design decision because, as far as I know, countrieshave no performance obligations on day 3 of the real life Olympics to continue participating. I can understand this mechanism's worth from a video game point of view, but it doesn't seem to work too well, only really creating an annoyance.