Crossbow Reviews

7800 Rank: 51st Genre Rank: (Sports) 9th Awards: 5th Worst Interpretation, 5th Worst Value News at Eleven: Stickman Dives at Olympics... Floats Pros: Nice Backgrounds Cons: Tedious Gameplay/ Boring Events Carrie Scrug Forever!

Overview: Back in the day, Epyx was the originator and most popular pusher of mini-game style titles. Most were based on Olympic style competition, while others strayed into other types of multi-player combat like California yuppie style games. The 7800 Summer Games was a harder title to find as opposed to its cousin, Winter Games. This is probably a good thing, because Summer Games misses out on medalling in every event it tries to get us excited about.

Graphics: The strengths of Winter Games and Summer Games are the excellent background and arena graphics. They both feature the identical opening ceremonies, as well as the very impressive country select screen that features several countries' flags, each rendered well. Unfortunately, it also features the lame yellow on baby blue game menus as Winter Games. The visual problems really heat up when the athletes appear. The divers/ swimmers look like match stick men, and the runners' animations tend to look very choppy and blob like. The grandstands during the running events event feature the crowd flipping cards that spell out USA...even if the participants are from Russia and West Germany (Remember those days?). The graphics during the gymnastics portion of the game are actually pretty good: it looks like an actual human being is participating in an event....not some kind of short circuiting robot.

Sound: The opening ceremonies feature the Olympic Theme, which is the highlight of the sound department in Summer Games. This game could have really benefited from ballistic crowd noise. Somewhere during the 4X400 swim relay, I begin to drool from immense boredom. A crazed and encouraging crowd would have helped me finish the event with mild interest. Since most of these games featured are "low action", the sound effects are appropriate. But of course, they didn't exactly put themselves out by rendering "splash", "thump", and "splash once again".

Gameplay: There are "6" events included in Summer Games (wink wink). Honestly, there are actually only four, with the 2 most boring events (running and swimming) featuring less-exciting and more mind-numbing longer 4 man relay events. Four times the drool. Four times the cramps. Get used to deception while playing this game though. The box actually features a man aiming a shotgun. This is either to mislead us into thinking skeet shooting is included, or this is a kind man putting the people who bought this one out of their misery. In terms of joystick action, most of these events are similar to what you have to do while playing the easier games in the Mario Party series. Nothing is particularly hard, but some events require very repetitive and annoying motions. While the required motions of the joystick and buttons simple to do, each event is confusing and difficult to figure out without the instructions. This kind of bleeds into the other main problem of the game: none of these events are fun. The running and swimming events are joystick jiggling/ button smashing fiascos, while diving and gymnastics are joystick wrestling matches. But honestly, even with perfect game mechanics, how fun could those events be anyway?

Interpretation: The amazing fact of all of this is that the 2600 version of this game simply blows this version away. Sure, the graphics are better here, but the events are much more fun in that title. The greatest facet of the 2600 version was the medal standings list at the end of all events, which determined the overall winner and settled small side bets. Not included here! This game is not nearly as fun as Winter Games, and in my opinion, both titles get completely crushed by the Atari 2600 version of California Games...which features actual summer games that are fun to play: mountain biking, skateboarding, surfing, and a hacky sack game that is actually intriguing.

Value: Because the game requires others to enjoy the actual "competition" aspect of this title, chances are absolutely "zero" people will be excited about sitting down with you on your sofa to spend a Saturday afternoon watching a matchstick man swim a 4X100 relay. If you do get 8 people to play this with ya, ask yourself this question: "How many of us have girlfriends?" I also think the abuse your controllers endure during these events is ridiculous, especially since replacing Proline joysticks will be annoying and expensive.

Overall: Besides the Unabomber in Atlanta, this is the worst thing to happen to the Olympics in the last 20 years. Wow....was that harsh?



Other Reviews:
Video Game Critic: B+
The Atari Times: 4 out of 10
CV's Panoramic Froo-Froo: 2.0 out of 5.0 (Bad)


Additional Info: I would like to take this time to thank Mitch Orman, owner of The Atari 7800 Page for allowing the use of his screenshots for this review.

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