Even though I'm not a huge fan of the Olympics from a sporting point of view, I can appreciate the history, the passion, the competition and the message behind the event. When Sydney hosted the 2000 Olympics and Cathy Freeman took home the gold for Australia in the 100m sprint, it was definitely a defining moment for us here down under. It's just a shame the same can't be said for the various Olympics videogames we've seen over the years, which have been uninspiring at best. Like we see in the 'movie based video game' sector, the pressure to release in time overrides the pressure to release with quality, and with quite a few events to cover in videogame form, the end result has naturally been iffy at best. It's a surprise then to see the SEGA published and Eurocom developed Beijing 2008 turn out quite well relative to what we've seen in the past, although you'll still need to be an Olympics fan with sturdy agile fingers to get the most out of it.

The modes of play in offer in this game are basically as you would expect, covering training and competition play, to full blown Olympics mode. The training is a great place to start as you can acquaint yourself with the game's many events without any pressure to perform, and trust me you will need to do plenty of acquainting as the events often prove to be quite tricky to master. Once you feel confident enough with your skills you can take yourself over to the Competition mode and get a taste for, well, competition I guess, although there is no doubting the main mode of play in this game is naturally the Olympics mode.

It is in this mode where you take a country of your choice and go for the gold medals. When choosing your country, you can opt for the inbuilt team of athletes or you can opt for the athletes you customized - an option accessible from the main menu - although customization is quite limited indeed, only allowing you to select from a range of preset athletes for each particular event. In any case, it doesn't matter a whole lot as there doesn't even seem to be per-country based strengths or weaknesses let alone attributes for each athletes. Rather, the Olympics mode focuses around a point system which you can allocate to certain attributes such as speed, power, agility and stamina for your athletes as a whole, and these points are rewarded after successful days, or more specifically, successful events each day.

One odd inclusion to the Olympics mode is the 'game over' screen. I can't remember the last time I played a sports game and saw 'game over' come up, but nonetheless this is a distinct possibility in Beijing 2008's Olympics mode if you don't perform well enough. If you fail to place well in enough events on any given day, you will be forced to go it again, and you will keep having to retry until you pass the grade. This is a slightly weird design decision because, as far as I know, countries have no performance obligations on day 3 of the real life Olympics to continue participating. I can understand this mechanism's worth from a video game point of view, but it doesn't seem to work too well, only really creating an annoyance.

Perhaps the biggest reason why it is such an annoyance is because the events in this game can really be very, very hard, and repeating them isn't always a lot of fun. All up you have 38 events in Beijing 2008, spanning 10 sports. The range on offer basically covers sports and events you don't typically see in the standard sports video gaming market, so stuff like running, high jump, swimming, hammer throw, archery, gymnastics etc are covered whilst sports like basketball, soccer, boxing etc are not. The reason some of the events are hard is because of how the gameplay is designed. Each event is somewhat like a 'minigame', usually requiring some form of joystick prowess to succeed. Sometimes these 'minigames' can be quite addictive, but other times they can be very difficult, not to mention quite taxing on the ol' fingers. Take the sprinting and hurdling events for instance. In these you have to mash "A" and "B" alternately as quickly as possible (or "waggle" the analog sticks, although I still haven't really figured out what that means), and this can really wear you down very quickly. Even after taking a break and then coming back fresh to give it my all, I could never finish better than last in events like the 100m sprint. My fingers just can't sustain the required tapping.

As mentioned though, some of the events can be challenging and addictive while still being fun. The events which require accuracy or timing over raw controller thumping are such examples, which include events like the hammer throw, shot put, gymnastics, judo, archery, shooting, and various others. The good thing about these type of events is, despite sharing similar concept, they are all just varied enough in how you play them to be unique and different, so there is a decent amount of variation on offer in Beijing 2008 as a whole. However, as already mentioned, they basically all have a very 'minigame' feel to them, and in general, the game is definitely much more about joystick skills than your typical sports game. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but to call this a traditional sports game would be a bit of a stretch. There really isn't a whole heap of strategic or anticipative thinking going on so, if anything, Beijing 2008 is more of a sports theme puzzle game.

The visuals certainly live up to the expectations in the sports gaming genre though, with very detailed athletes and nice environments, although the vast majority of the time the game is focused on the athlete(s) so you don't always get to see a whole heap of the environments. From what you can see though, Beijing 2008  is a pleasant game visually, and this definitely adds to the experience. When it comes to online capabilities, the game does feature full leaderboards to compare your results with gamers worldwide, and you can have multiplayer competitions, although the latter doesn't seem to be very fleshed out, only allowing you to invite gamers already on your friends list into an event. Obviously, it would have been much better to see a proper lobby or game finder system built in.

Beijing 2008 is not a fantastic game on its own, but it is far from a terrible game. If this was just a general track and field style game and not based on Beijing it would surely suffer from a gameplay point of view, but while it definitely rides on the interest being generated as we approach the real event, it's not a poorly thrown together game just looking to cash in; effort has gone into making this quite in-depth, detailed and mostly playable. At the same time though, gamers with little interest for the event will not find a whole lot of value here, and even if you're a big Olympics fan, you will need to tolerate the 'mini-game' joystick-jockey skills focused gameplay that rewards raw controller ability over any real knowledge for the sports and events being portrayed. With that said, Beijing 2008 is definitely a worthy rental for most, and a decent purchase for those who can't wait for Beijing to start.