#oneaday Day 945: A sporting chance

I like Olympics games. Always have done. I wrote about the first one I ever played over on Retrounite this week — go check it out here.

I'm not sure why I've always liked this type of game, because I've never been a particularly sporty person, nor have I ever really taken much of an interest in sports on the television.

That said, I do remember developing an interest in the Olympics as a child — I have reasonably vivid memories of visiting my grandparents' house and watching the Olympics coverage on their old CRT TV that was in the corner of their dining room. I believe that would have been the 1992 Barcelona Olympics because I remember the Queen song; at that point I would have been about 11 years old and still playing games on both the Atari 8-bit and Atari ST — including the original Summer Games.

I think one of the things that appeals to me about Olympics games is that — certainly back in the day, anyway — they were graphical showcases. Epyx's games in particular were always beautifully presented, with excellent animation that really showed what the host platforms were capable of.

These days, that's perhaps less true — the most recent Olympics game from Sega opts for a more stylised, cartoony look than going for realism — but it's still an opportunity for developers to show off things happening in a variety of different environments, and characters doing all manner of different things.

Because that's the other appealing thing — the variety of the things you get up to. In titles like Summer Games, some of those events only last for a couple of seconds, but the feeling of satisfaction when you nail them is immense. Okay, these days the load times between events might put more than a few people off spending too much time practicing, but back in the day, jumping from pole vault to diving to running to gymnastics to swimming was the sort of varied experience you just didn't get in a lot of other games.

While the Olympics are on, over at Retrounite I'm going to cover a few more past generation Olympics and Olympic-inspired games — already planning to look at Beijing 2008 and London 2012 on Xbox 360, but if you have any others you think are especially worth exploring, be sure to let me know! The more the merrier!