Olympic Decathlon

The Good
This was the first mutiplayer game I every played on my PC. It had pretty average CGA graphics, but the gameplay more than made up for it. Most of the events were easy to get into, but were very very difficult to get great high scores in. It took a long time to master an event, and to get a great overall score you had to play the perfect game.

I spent endless hours playing my brother and friends at this game - the multiplayer really made this game lots of fun. It was that "just one more go" type feeling that great games have, where you end up spending hours playing it over and over.

The high score board actually had some scores that real-life athletes got at Olympics in the decathlon. This was more motivation to keep playing, as the highest score was incredibly hard to beat, I never did, but my little brother (the shame of it!) managed to ONCE, in about 2 years of playing it. A great challenge.

The keyboard handling routines were very good, as they managed to pick up two 11 year old boys bashing the crap out of a handful of keys each at the same time, and translate it into the on-screen action flawlessly, without missing a beat. Very nice for a 4 Mhz XT!

The Bad
The keyboard bashing in events like the 100 metres ruined our keyboard - this was when it cost about NZ $130 to buy a new keyboard, so we had to put up with a broken keyboard for about 3 years until we got a new computer. The graphics and sound weren't too flash - but the gameplay and challenge made up for this.

The Bottom Line
A great game, with well thought out mechanics to each event, making them hard to truly master. The mutilplayer and high score challenges keep you coming back for "just one more go". Most people would look at this now and think that it looks terrible, but it (the playability) really does shine through when you're in the middle of a game and keeping up with the Olympic Record and you're friends are just behind you in points - the nerves, the tension, the excitement!