Olympic Gold

Olympic Gold, full title Olympic Gold: Barcelona 92, is the officially licensed game of the 1992 Summer Olympics. The Mega Drive version was built by the British studio Tiertex, a house that at the time made its living converting licences onto anything with a joystick. It is a classic olympic compilation: seven events, eight nations, and a medal table to fill.

The programme covers the 100 metres, the 110 metre hurdles, the hammer throw, the pole vault, archery, the 200 metre freestyle and springboard diving from three metres. Button mashing is the main mechanic, exactly as the genre demands, but the game at least took the trouble to build in exceptions. Archery is about a steady hand and reading the wind, diving is about timing your rotations, and those two events split the sporting half into genuinely different skills. Swimming is slower and rewards rhythm rather than raw hammering.

The eight selectable countries include Spain, Japan, the United States and the Unified Team, each with its own anthem and its own profile of strong and weak disciplines. The computer athletes follow those profiles, so no single nation walks away with everything. You can practise, assemble a short meeting out of chosen events, or run the full games, across three difficulty settings.

The trouble is the one every game of this kind has: mashing gets old within a quarter of an hour, and playing alone is a fairly bleak affair. The graphics are decent and the stadiums look good on the Mega Drive, but there is a lot of waiting between attempts and the track events repeat themselves. With two or more people around one pad it works exactly as intended.

Treat it as a party game rather than a sports simulation. On oldgame.cz it runs straight in the browser, with nothing to install.