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

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

That was hilarious. :) Between Clive the electrically-tormented octopus drummer, the pole-vaulter that sprints straight past the bar, and the fact that "splat fall" is apparently now a recognised parallel bars move, I was in stitches. :P (Also, the depressed rings guy who gets a lift up there, realises "ohmygoshIjustcan'ttakeitanymore" and gives up and bursts into tears then and there deserves an honourable mention. :P)

I kind of wanted them to move the really generously-scoring judge on the left hand side in the diving competition next to the really hard-to-please guy in the middle, to see if a fight would break out between them. :P

Next up, James Pond; Aquatic Games? :P

D.F.

[davidn]

Wow - I had Robocod, but I had no idea that there was a 'sports' game with James Pond. That could turn out admirably mental...

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

I think I still have a copy in the garage somewhere; it's mostly repetitive button-bashing, á la press-A-and-B-alternately-to-run, so if you have an autofire joypad you pretty much ace the events. It was a pretty crappy game even when it came out, but it was quite popular for some reason. I like to think it was because of Mark the Shark, the unicyclist whose name I found endlessly amusing when I was younger, but somehow I doubt it.

Also, it had Pond himself looking the least fish-like out of his incarnations, in that the cover art gave him a giant round nose/snout/thing that looks really out of place on a fish. And yet it's still not as bad as Codsby... :P

D.F.

[davidn]

That fish will remain in my nightmares for many years to come. Actually, I never thought that James Pond looked particularly like a fish, apart from the way that his legs were actually the halves of his tail... he was more like a red-faced clown sort of psychopath thing (that could extend his body many metres at will in order to climb into your bedroom window).

The trouble with sports games like this, I think, is that it's very difficult to make them actually different from each other. The day after I uploaded this video, we bought and played the only game with a more lawyer-pleasingly generic title - "World Sports Competition" originally on the PC-Engine. It boasts 18 events, but at least ten of them are all exactly the same - bash two buttons to go faster and stop occasionally to recover stamina, with perhaps a third one for jumping or throwing or collapsing into a heap.

[davidn]

Oh, and while I'm on the subject, Robocod was also one of those things where I saw the parody before the real thing - so whenever I hear this it's inescapably an orchestral version of the James Pond 2 theme.

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

Ironically, the exact same thing happened to me; I remember thinking it was unusually well-written and catchy when I heard the video-game version, then I saw the film much later, and the penny finally dropped. :P

D.F.

[davidn]

Now you've got me watching a playthrough video of Robocod. I'd forgotten how properly mental that game was - having to bounce around Santa's toy factory p-p-picking up penguins, jumping on enemies like a wind-up man made out of cakes and a cock-eyed double decker bus that shoots grannies.

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

The third one was even worse (I got it as a gift; my parents thought they'd bought me Robocod, but someone at the shop had put #3 in #2's box - score!); it turns out the moon is actually made of cheese. And milk, and custard, and yoghurt, and ice-cream, and (apparently) fungus - presumably from the mould on the cheese - and you have to go and stop Dr. Maybe's cheese-mining operation before he corners the global markets. And there's something along the way about stink-bombs made of Stiltonium, and the final boss is a giant flying cow, and oh good grief it was mad. Fortunately it had, like, a hundred levels, most of which were impossible even when I was younger and my platforming skills weren't as atrophied as they are now, so I don't think anyone actually ever finished it. :P

D.F.