Daley Thompson's Olympic Challenge

Cor! I've played some joystick waggling games in my time but this beats them all. Every single event requires you to move your joystick left/right non-stop for what seems like hours. But never mind all the aching arms and cramp, there's a good game underneath it all with some splendid graphics. On the sound front there's the usual running effects and a reasonable tune on the 128K. In addition there's a free music tape (hardly making the NR Disco Sounds charts) and a giant poster, but the game's the most important thing and it makes the real Decathlon seem easy.

It really is jolly clever and exciting - a pretty big leap forward actually (ho ho), and guaranteed to have you waggling until your joystick curls up and dies.

The graphics are very good throughout, especially the training section which has a couple of clever touches. It's a real simulation because all that continuous waggling from left to right is as exhausting as the real thing!

Daley Thompson's Olympic Challenge is, on the whole, an excellent game. But I do think that it's a shame really that a megabucks company like Ocean can't come up with new ideas instead of lugging old horses around while flogging them and making them drink while stopping them from gathering moss.

The graphics are impeccable. Right from the start Daley really looks like Daley, and really moves like Daley. The animation and other characters are faultless. But the gameplay is so monotonous. All you do is waggle. And if you can't waggle very well (oough!) then you soon become dispirited and annoyed with the game when you can't get any further. In the original, timing and finding the correct angle was involved but in this version all you do is waggle, waggle and then waggle some more.

All pretty standard jock stuff. The graphics and animation are decent, the scoring system straightforward and the sound passable. If you're a complete trainer-head you might as well add this to your sports collection, but even at £2.99 this isn't going to hold your attention much longer that it takes to say "the British lad done great, there he is coming in twelfth behind the cheating Germans...."