Olympicon by Mitec. Good sport or Fosbury Flop?
OLYMPICON
(Mitec)
When it comes to Olympian athletic exploits, Los Angeles 1984 was the big one, don’t you think? I suppose it depends on your age and stuff, like whether you’re ancient Greek or maybe you reckon the best one was that one where Jesse Owens beat Hitler in a sprint, but when I think of the Olympics, L.A. is what springs to my mind. There were so many great moments weren’t there? Like… hang on, the internet can remember better than I can… ok, it seems Carl Lewis won everything, including the women’s 100m, Steve Redgrave won his first chocolate medal of many, and future evil Tory MP Seb Coe won the slow sprint to catch a leaving bus. Is that it? Alright, maybe not that exciting after all. I thought Zola Budd tripped up the entire American nation, and Ben Johnson got done for speeding using speed? Was that another one? Alright, well never mind.
I suppose there wasn’t that much on the telly in those days, so the whole sport thing seemed that much bigger a deal. Even the snooker seemed quite exciting. I literally couldn’t be bothered watching most sport these days – the Formula One is nearly always a foregone conclusion, and the football is a big corrupt swindle when it’s not just watching a load of millionaires under-perform and roll around pretending to be in agony. I know that’s nothing to do with the Olympics, but I just felt like being a moany old b***ard for this paragraph. At least it’s over now.
On the Spectrum scene, Olympimania had indeed well and truly taken over, if not the actual game Olympimania. The daddy of them all was Tom Daley’s Decathlon, the first Speccy take on Track And Field, and there were various attempts at cashing in on unfit people’s efforts to emulate those dashing Olympic folk. There was Run For Gold with its ludicrously huge runners – was that an early Don Priestley title I wonder now? And Micro Olympics by Database. And Video Olympics from Mastertronic via Dinamic. There were probably others too, but they were all very much in the shadow of our Daley, even though he had been whitewashed somewhat. Hypersports and DT’s Supertest came the following year, but for the purposes of this feature, they don’t exist, so pretend I never mentioned them.
One ZX Olympian exploit that springs to nobody’s mind whatsoever is Olympicon by Mitec. Literally the only press it received was a brief mention in Crash’s Sports Scene supplement from May 1985, the one with that crazy Oli robot on the front with a racing car for an arm. It was deemed “a fairly average offering which is not really very playable. Having few events severely limits the game’s addictive qualities. I wouldn’t worry over this one at all.” No screenshot either. Fair enough Crash, let’s not bother then. See you next time folks!
Ack, alright, this feature is meant to be about giving a measure of justice to previously unheralded titles, so I’m not going to be put off by Newsfield’s finest’s disapproval. At least they mentioned it, which is more than anyone else did, so props to them there, good old Crash. Who are these Mitec peeps anyway? Apparently they were an offshoot of Microtechnica, who sound Spanish but were apparently from Austria according to the little inlay flap, distributed in the UK by a certain C3-PO. Well really, R2! Their one and only other Spectral offering was the awesome-sounding Data Graph which dropped in ’87 (full review to follow). Not much to go on there then. It was written by a certain Ed Wyneblatt, not Ed Winchester, who doesn’t appear to have done anything else in the way of games. Ho hum. Despite all this, the cover looks quite professional, and that’s because it was drawn by Roger Pearce, who illustrated many a P.S.S. game in his time. Now you’re facted up on the whole subject, let’s move on.
Once you’ve negotiated the colourful, if unimpressive, loading screen, which owes something to the Manic Miner one methinks, it’s time to light the Olympic torch and “play ball!” We’re told there are five events to take part in, so half a decathlon then. Sounds easy when you put it that way. All the records are greedily held by Ed Moses, who truly was an all-rounder. Funny, when I saw him on TV all that time ago he just did the 400m hurdles. He did them really well, but I don’t recall him attempting the high jump or javelin, or any of the sprints. Clearly my memory must be at fault here, as a ZX Spectrum inlay would never lie to us surely? At least a real person is holding the records in this game, unlike “The Gay Dan” from Daley’s game – bet someone got quite annoyed at having their name up in lights in such a way back then…
So first up is the 100m sprint. Unusually the method of getting your guy from start to finish is to bash just the one key over and over, not two alternately as in most games of this type. Maybe that’ll make things a bit easier, no golf ball required. Okay, go – bash, bash, bash, bash… pause… ponder if this is really a good idea on a modern-day laptop… bash, bash, bash, oh I’m out of time. I only got halfway down the course, bit shameful. Try again, repeat the recipe, got up to 60m that time. And again, 60m again. At length I did manage to complete the course (oh well done) but I could only do it in 16.46 seconds, when to qualify I needed 15.97. And the Olympic record courtesy of Mr Moses’ long legs was a distant 10.89 seconds. This could be a short review.
Thankfully the good people of Mitec have incorporated a saving grace. You can practise any of the 5 events to your heart’s content if you’re too crapulous to qualify on the first one. Phew. So next comes the long jump, hopefully that will suit me more. Bash that one key, then when you reach the line, keep your finger on another key (wow, 2 keys) until your guy reaches an angle of 45 degrees, which is apparently the optimum contortion for such things. This is more like it – after a bit of trial and error, mostly error, I managed to attain the required qualifying standard. The point is a bit moot since I couldn’t do so in the first event, but never mind, it’s a morale boost anyway for the team and might save me from getting kicked out of the Olympic Village too early in the proceedings.
Right, bring on the next one then. Oh crap, more running. 100m hurdles this time (they must have dispensed with the last 10m to make things slightly easier). Yeah, this one is just about as b***ard hard as the first, only you’ve got to somehow get over all the annoying fences into the bargain. Clearly I wasn’t about to achieve anything this time round, and I got more angry looks from my Team GB colleagues. Gulp, moving on…
Yes, javelin! I couldn’t do this in school for love nor money, but in most games throughout time, the javelin has proved to be eminently doable, whether on the Spectrum, Nintendo Wii or ZX81 (on which your blocky man would throw a blocky javelin the length of the screen and cause it to crash. The Commodore 64 version is much the same. Ha, cheap C64 burn!). What does the inlay say? “Any of the A-L keys will control the throwing-up angle (arf!). The ‘zero point’ for distance measuring is the second bar after the sandbank of the long-jump pit”. What the flip is it talking about? No matter, I qualified quite comfortably after a few attempts, so I must have been doing something right.
Finally there’s the high jump, “the most difficult part of the game”. It’s not kidding either. You have to do the run-up, sort your angle for the take-off, then “control your flight path by soft touches”. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, and proves as hard as trying to do the Fosbury Flop in school. I much preferred scissor jumping in primary school, which I was quite good at, being a lanky sort. Apathy had set in by this point in the game so I wasn’t too bothered by my repeated failures.
Enough of athl-etics, let’s talk about aesth-etics for a bit. I’m far too pleased with that one. You’ll probably have spotted that the graphics are not particularly amazing. But in fairness, they have thrown an awful lot of UDGs at the screen, so it certainly isn’t sparse at all. Movement is pretty jerky but your little Olympian responds reasonably well to you stabbing that key over and over. It’s just it’s doubtful whether you can physically do it fast enough to get him to the end of the 100m, unless it’s just my lack of stabbing proficiency. Colour is great – loads of it, too much, splashed all over the place until your eyes bleed. Sound is minimal, but at least there’s no Chariots Of Fire theme, thank Christ.
So five sub-games then, but do five of them make up one halfway decent game overall? Well not really, but at least there has been an effort at making something to a semi-tolerable standard. I didn’t mind the events which combined an element of speed (i.e. the run-up) with a degree of trying to get the angle of approach right (sounds dodgy) but the sprint events were a bit of a bust. I suppose it was only 1984, so it would be wrong to expect too much in the way of technical brilliance, but I don’t think Mr. Thompson would have had any cause to lose sleep over this particular rival in his (track and) field. Hardly an Olympi-con though, it has its amusing moments.
FINAL MEDALS COUNT
46%
THE GAMES THAT TIME FORGOT: 1984 EDITION
4th out of 5
Flippin' eck it's quite tough... Micro Olympics is the worst though, I think I might have even heard Chuck Norris complain about the 1500m in that game...
Imo nothing can beat daley Thompson’s decathlon.