Producer: Atlantis
Retail Price: £1.99
Author: B Jones

Here's another sporting simulation designed to test your skills in five events, this time at a budget price. Weight lifting, canoeing, the 200 metre sprint, shooting and discus throwing all feature, and what's more you don't need any fancy equipment or months of pre-season training to compete.

At the start of the game three lives are supplied, and a life is lost each time the player fails to qualify in an event. After each event the scoreboard appears on screen, updating the points won and number of lives remaining, and at the end of a circuit round the five events, a high score table monitors performance and medals won.

This pentathlon commences with weight lifting, and a well timed press of the O key is needed to build up enough strength to heave the weights off the ground. A hand on the power clock at the top of the screen whizzes round and has to be stopped at the 'noon' position for maximum power. If a lift is successful, you keep going until the qualifying weight is reached. Failure costs a life and a smug helicopter flies past with a banner that reads "rubbish".

To get through the canoeing event the O and P keys are used to manoeuvre a kayak down a slalom of boulders which poke out from beneath the water. A meter at the bottom of screen shows how much of the course is left to get through, and contact with a boulder results in failure.

The 200 metre sprint has your runner scooting along a seemingly never-ending track. Speed and distance bars show how the race is going, and the power clock method is used again, this time to build up speed - misjudge the timing of the prod on the Q key and speed is lost, but get it right and the runner accelerates. At the end of a race the qualifying time and actual time taken are shown, and the rude helicopter pilot flies past if you fail...

Skeet shooting puts the player in control of a cross hair sight and the idea is to blast the qualifying number of skeets out of the air. Little meters at the bottom of the screen reveal how many skeets are yet to be released and the number of shots remaining. Skeets whizz into the air, launched alternately from a position behind trees on either side of the screen. As usual, the chopper pilot is waiting to the wings to mock....

The fifth event, the discus, involves two little power clocks one has to be stopped dead on 'noon' with the A key to determine the angle of the throw, and another stopped with the Q key to determine the power behind the throw. And yes, the pilot's waiting!

COMMENTS

Control keys: Q, A, O, P, SPACE: varies from event to event
Joystick: not applicable
Keyboard play: not always an accurate response
Use of colour lots of it; a bit garish
Graphics: nothing special
Sound: BEEPy spot effects
Skill levels: gets progressively harder
Screens: five one-screen events

This game is bad in every sense of the word. The graphics are awful, the colour is messy and unattractive, the scenario unoriginal, and the whole thing is just one big lump of unplayability and unaddictiveness. It's not a joystick-killer - but the clock stopping is rather inaccurate... Hint: prod the Q key when the needle is at the 10 o'clock position during the sprint for maximum power, rather than when it is at noon. Even for a couple of pounds this game is poor - you might want to persevere until you've seen all five screens, but I doubt you'd want to come back to it.

The graphics are some of the best ATLANTIS have ever produced - not such a hard feat - and consist of a good loading screen and some fairly large, smoothly animated characters. The sound is very basic, involving some sound loops up the musical scale, and then some down the scale - WOW! What variety... Olympiad 86 contains very little to keep the armchair sportsman interested further than seeing the loading screen. I expected more keyboard/joystick bashing, all I got was a consistent pressing of keys at long intervals. I didn't even feel panicked, never mind breaking into a sweat!

The trend for track and field games ended months ago and this latecomer doesn't add much to the genre, even at the low asking price. The gameplay is very slow and on two of the five screens you only have to use one key so it all gets very monotonous. There are no tunes, the spot effects are minimal and the gameplay is hardly exciting - a mix between unplayability and impossibility. I'd keep well clear of this one if I were you, as it is very primitive.

Atlantis
£1.99

Seeking stimulation from simulation? I'm afraid you night be struggling with this one! A little late for Los Angeles and somewhat soon for Seoul, Atlantis reckoned on hitting the market whilst there was no opposition. It reckoned without Mastertronic's Video Olympics, though that's not the hottest thing to hit your joystick, either.

Olympiad '86 is a Sports simulation of a cross section of Olympic events - canoeing, 2OO metres sprint, weight lifting, discus and the now compulsory skeet shooting. Why's everyone got it in for skeets, that's what I want to know? When was the last time a skeet got up your nose? Unfortunately, though, Olympiad is a simulation of other simulations - start at Daley's and work down.

The game gives you your money's worth in terms of numbers of screens, but as to their quality and just how much is used on game play - well, I've seen more wit, action and invention on the TV test card. It's not joystick compatible and only has single player facility. You have three lives and you lose one each time you fail to reach a qualifying standard. Lose all three before completing the canoeing and you have no chance of being in the medals. There's a (marginal) points system, though, which allows competition with your opponents even if you don't reach the gong show.

Arsenal fans alone might spy some excitement in this farce. I certainly didn't.

Label: Atlantis
Author: in house
Price: £1.99
Memory: 48K
Reviewer: John Gilbert

Olympiad '86 is a kind of budget Decathlon. And you get what you pay for.

There are five 'events' in Olympiad, all of which can be completed with your little finger.

Three of the events use a speed/strength clock. A second hand glides round the dial and when it gets to the arrow at the top of the clock you press the Q key to acquire speed and strength. This decides how good your lift is in the weight-lifting competition, for example. Hit the Q too soon, or too late and your lift is judged as bad and a bi-plane flies a 'Rubbish' message over the stadium.

The 200m sprint - which is more of a crawl - uses a similar clock technique. There are two horizontal indicators on the screen. The first shows the distance you need to cover while the second indicates your speed. To increase speed you keep hitting the Q key when the clock hand reaches the 12 o'clock arrow.

You use two clocks for scoring in discus. The first clock determines the power of your throw, a second judges the angle.

Canoeing is fun. Your canoe drifts down from the top of the screen and you use the O and P keys to steer it away from the blobish white rocks in the middle of the river's rapids.

Shooting consists of two dead trees, a cross-hair sight and skeets which look like fat javelins. The only tip I can give is to find a point on the screen through which both left and right skeets always fly and position your sight there.

Okay, so Olympiad '86 is a budget game, but that's no longer a good enough excuse for putting out this standard of programming.

MACHINE: Spectrum
SUPPLIER: Atlantis
PRICE: £1.99

Olympiad '86 is a brave attempt at a budget Decathlon-style game which doesn't quite come off.

It nicely presented with a good scorechart and instructions for each of the five events on screen before the event begins - but the controls for the events leave a lot to be desired.

For example on the sprint and weight lifting events you have to wait until the whizzing "hand" on a clock-like powermeter lines up with an arrow at the top of the clock before hitting the "action" keys.

Quite why the programmers didn't simply use the tried and trusted two keys being hammered at once method to get things going I don't know.

This spoils what otherwise could have been a good budget offering. As it stands Olympiad '86 lacks a lot in the playability stakes and misses out on a medal in any event.

Atlantis Software
£1.99

I'm at a loss as to how I can review this game constructively, other than to say that it simply isn't very good.

Olympiad is an attempt to produce a budget sports game along the lines of Daley Thompson's Super Test and includes five 'events' - Weight lifting, Canoeing, 200m Sprint, Skeet Shooting and Discus. For some of the events all that is involved is pressing a single button when the powermeter is at its height. The powermeter is a small clockface in the top left corner of the screen, around which a dial rotates constantly and when it reaches the 12 o'clock position (the highest energy level) you just stab the Q button. This is how you play the weight lifting and sprint sections and it doesn't give any of the excitement that the joystick/keyboard pounding style of Super Test provides.

The Canoeing section simply involves moving the canoe left/right across the screen in order to avoid the rocks that scroll upwards from the bottom of the screen. I completed this section without making a single mistake on my first attempt, so it can't really be described as much of a challenge.

The skeet shooting is the only part of the game that has any complexity to it - you actually get to use five controls for left/right/up/down and fire when positioning your guns sights.

The graphics aren't too bad, but they aren't good enough to make up for the lack of involvement in the games themselves. The program doesn't seem to accept joystick control and, when someone suggested that it might be simple Basic or compiled Basic, I tried to break the program just by using the BREAK key at which point a message flashed up saying "Show Off!'' and then the program crashed. No points for user friendliness.'

I'm afraid the only thing that Olympiad has got going for it is the budget price, but even then it's not as good as some of the budget software from many other companies.