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Gamertell Review: Beijing 2008 for Xbox 360
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With events already completed and the Beijing 2008 Olympics soon coming to an end, it’s very likely more than a few gamers will still have that Olympic itch, the desire to compete and a residual want of track and field sports.
Enter Beijing 2008, the official game of the 2008 Summer games to help scratch that itch. The good news is that this may be one of the best Olympic videogames ever made. The bad news is that isn’t saying much since they have all been pretty miserable.
On Your Mark
This edition of the Olympics in videogame form features many events including:
Some are further divided into Men’s and Women’s events and all are judged and ranked Olympic style, resulting in medals and player points that can be used in certain modes to improve team performance stats. (Sorry, no Equestrian events).
Pretty much any time your avatar’s feet are on the ground you either quickly wobble a mini thumbstick back and forth or alternate A and B buttons presses to build and/or maintain speed. For most Field events you use a combination of timed, context-sensitive buttons presses and thumbstick flicking, though some also use the alternating buttons/thumbsticks to build speed as well.
Almost all events involve a meter bar of some sort, either to indicate your speed, angle (for throwing games) or accuracy. The exceptions are Archery and Shooting which rely more on accurate aiming, compensating for wind or results of an initial accuracy minigame, to determine trajectory. Table Tennis’ meter indicates a power rating that will let you unleash a Slam. A few games, including Diving, some Gymnastics events and Weightlifting, require that both thumbsticks be simultaneously moved to keep a cursor within a limited area on a circular display.
Training mode allows you to practice events before competing in the Competition Mode against other gamers (online and offline) or the single-player Olympic Games Mode. You can also pick a country and create a custom team using very limited physical feature selections.
When buttons accuracy is required, the game sometimes goes into temporary Slow-Motion, which can also be extended by cashing in earned points.
Get Set?
All of the thumbstick flicking and buttons pressing makes this a rather painful and unenjoyable game. After only a few hours I suffered days of wrist pain and nearly unusable thumbs and had to wait a week before safely playing again (as well as let a few blisters heal). I guess the good thing that can be said about the flick-the-stick control scheme is that this makes you feel as if you’ve actually taken part in some tiresome, physically grueling event.
Unfortunately, on-screen cues are often lacking for crucial things like when to throw or jump. It requires an annoying level of timing that seems to have little if anything to do with your avatar’s actual foot placement. The in-game tutorials are zero help, with text that is too small to read and confusing instructions.
The easiest events to play are the Rapid Shooting, which seems to be a bit more forgiving than it should be, and diving, which really just takes a steady set of thumbs. Weightlifting, Skeet Shooting, Hammer and Discus proved to be some of the most difficult with mid-game speed buttons pressing, ill-timed accuracy and a complete lack of on-screen cues, respectively. The dumbest event by far was Table tennis, which was about as easy as playing Tennis for the Atari 2600 but not nearly as fun. Your player blocks most of the screen (you get a great view of his back) which makes timing your button press for top or bottom spin pretty much a crap shoot (and not one you can medal in).
The worst events, though, are clearly anything that involves distance. Wobbling thumbstick or alternating button presses is not only an outdated control scheme, it’s incredible painful and unnatural with modern controllers. The highly repetitive motion for more than a few minutes, which will be required for Track, Swimming and Cycling, will make you regret ever pressing “OK” for those events. And if your decide to try every game, you’ll end up powering down the system to restart the game (and for a psychological escape).
Making pretty much every event worse are lengthy athlete preparation cutscenes before making each attempt during an event. You’ll need to click through as many as six mini animated moments just to get to you next attempt at a jump or Pole Vault. They are kinda cute to watch once or twice since the character animations are rather impressive but hundreds of times is just an annoying waste of time.
Don’t Go
Whenever trying to play online, it’s pretty obviously that not many people will tolerate more than the Shooting or Archery games since those were the only events anyone else would play for several days, even if I hosted other events. All of the others are too imprecise and either bland or entirely unenjoyable.
Beijing maintains the long-standing tradition of lackluster Olympics games by trying to do too much and failing to do anything well except maybe graphics, a few interesting control ideas (eg. Diving) and a couple tolerable shooting events. Since there are so many diverse sports, it must certainly be a hard task for a game company to make every event easy to play or even enjoyable. One or two events may be acceptable but, as an entire release, this is still a pretty dismal game, even as a rental. I’ll at least give it some bonus points for offering a large range of events, the ability to compete online (even if no one is playing online) and the rather nice graphics.
For the sake of national pride, let’s hope this wasn’t in Team USA’s Olympic training facility.
If anything, rent this once for your kids to see how physically painful it can be to partake in any sporting event, even if in a videogame.
Site [Beijing Olympics 2008] Read [GeekSugar] Screen Shots [Gamertell]
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