Stumbling through The Games: Summer Edition

[davidn]

A shockingly long time ago, I talked about a game that I had on the PC called The Games: Winter Edition. I remember enjoying it when I first played it in school, but when I went back to it, it became a worrying indicator that I might be allowing nostalgia to cloud the simple fact that I was actually just amused by any old rubbish.

It wasn't the only backwards-titled sports game around - there was a counterpart to it called The Games: Summer Edition, and this is what rakarr suggested I play in the spirit of the upcoming Olympics in London. (I imagine that the game avoids all mention of the Games' actual title in order to avoid having to pay lots and lots of money for using their name and logo - though I accidentally mention the word throughout the video anyway.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35HBS-kyfOg

As a PC owner, I was always rather jealous of the superior graphics and sound that games always seemed to have on the Amiga - though I now realize how much they paid for that in disk-swapping and loading times. This game takes care of the 'sound' aspect by scoring the game with a series of what sounds like people banging chairs together, though I think that this might be at least half the fault of the emulator/recording setup. As to whether I think the superior graphics of this version make it a better game than the experimental joystick-waggling extravaganza that I owned in the 90s... you can make that judgement for yourself.

The game has eight events, none of which I'm much good at.

Comments

[davidn]

I love your mega-comments on these... they give me so much to reply to :) The comment about "proceed" was actually two different thoughts stuck together - I'd meant that it sounded like it was just me, personally, having to go around all these events and take part in them myself as the sole person in the entire UK Olympics team. (I suppose by their use of the word "attend", they were speaking to the... actual human player as a spectator going around all of these events instead... or something.)

I tried it on the Amiga mostly because that was the one that rakarr had memories of, and I wanted to try the exact same game without the porting differences. I just downloaded the PC version to compare, but I think that that might turn into an entire post by itself! In general, the graphics and sound are worse but the game runs a lot more smoothly. Interestingly, the PC version actually opens with "Officially licensed product of the US Olympic Committee" - so I'm not sure if that license only extended to the PC version and they used the generic name anyway across all formats or something...

I mentioned the strangely nice rendition of the national anthem, but it apparently the melody channel was recorded as much fainter than it actually plays in the game for some reason - I'm sure you'll recognize the real one. As for the flag issue, the most common sight is seeing the name "ENGLAND" below the Union Jack (how can someone write this without stopping to think that the clue might be in the name?). Semi-relatedly, I remember Actua Soccer managed to skew the flag of England so it looked like one of the Scandinavian countries' crosses (and I'm not sure how Gremlin - from Sheffield - managed that).

There are a lot of really nice background details in this game - the runners, the spectators in the stands or eating crisps off to the side, the completely unnecessary car park in the cycling... it makes it feel much more alive than it normally would :) As part of that, the game seemed to get gradually weirder as it went on, completely by coincidence in the order of events I'd picked... stranger and stranger things started happening to highlight my failures. Breaking the pole or just running blindly past it, falling off the bars or forgetting to do anything on the rings, flying away or hitting yourself on the head in the hammer-throw - and I've seen in a video that you can also break the camera by letting the hammer fly at the wrong time. (While I'm on the subject - I, too, noticed the competitor's unusually lovingly-rendered bottom.)

And the shark...! I've no idea what happened there, why it appeared or why it's in the game at all. You do control your own movement there, but it wasn't concern for my player that made me scream - the volume of the video is really too low for it to be noticeable, but it was the sudden disappearance of the background music and its replacement with the Jaws theme that really scared me to death there.

I... did not notice the cycling stamina meter, not even during my editing or watching of the final video, until you just mentioned it just now. I suppose its colours aren't very distinct to me against the grass, but even with that in mind... that's a very big thing to have missed! As invisible as the diving board is at first glance ;)

Other answers - the jingles in between the later events are mine as I put together a quick rendition of the Olympics theme and dragged different instruments on to it (and sort of fiddled with the intonation, for that diving one...) And I see exactly what you mean about the On the Ball music - it seemed to be a common feature of MOD files, as they were based on playing samples at different frequencies, to include a voice sample and then use it as a demented instrument...

[kjorteo]

I tried it on the Amiga mostly because that was the one that rakarr had memories of, and I wanted to try the exact same game without the porting differences. I just downloaded the PC version to compare, but I think that that might turn into an entire post by itself! In general, the graphics and sound are worse but the game runs a lot more smoothly. Interestingly, the PC version actually opens with "Officially licensed product of the US Olympic Committee" - so I'm not sure if that license only extended to the PC version and they used the generic name anyway across all formats or something...

And yet you still won't go near the ones I played, which came first, on the Commodore 64, and had significantly less mangled names (Summer Games and Winter Games, I guess The Games: ___ Edition came after they lost the license or something?) and freely used the Olympic theme and everything!

[davidn]

"Won't go near" - it's not as if I've been hanging back afraid of this game from the moment you brought it up, afraid that starting it up will result in being shot by snipers or opening a hole through time and being dragged in by unknown tentacles/flippers, I just never felt a particular drive to download or play through them. I could! Although as I note below, all sports games seem to be more or less the same thing - it was this game's strange additions (for disastrous failure) that made it stand out.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Oh, shoot -- I get the 'proceed' thing now XD Yes, one athlete running exhaustedly from event to event, briefly changing into drag for the uneven bars... :D

Ohhhh, Our Country Reeks Of Trees (http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x79zxf_ren-stimpy-the-royal-canadian-kilte_shortfilms)! Yes, I know it. :D Geez, how weird that it turned out that way... maybe it only recorded the left or right audio channel or something? (If MODs are anything to go by, I think amiga only had hard stereo...) Man, I wonder what else didn't sound the same :S
Anyway, yeah -- I can totally hear the rhythm in that counterpoint now :)

actually, do you still have the feed from the game in an uncompressed format? I might like to make a GIF of that shotputter XD;

[davidn]

Strange as it is for me to imagine that this might be the context in which this song is most familiar to someone... yes. It's especially odd because I didn't think the rest of the music was... actually, yes, I did think the rest of the music was that bad. But other pieces of music weren't noticeably affected by the phenomenon between game and recording, is what I mean.

I do have the feed from that section of the game! Though it's in a very uncompressed 300MB - would you like any bit in particular?