At half a price, you might see it with a more positive look.
As I visited today my local games store, among the known and shinny mega-hits of 2009, I caught with the tip of my eye "Beijing 2008" being offered at a bargain price. My immediate thought was "Who cares... I'm not going to buy a game that has such a bad reputation in the gamers’ community. And suddenly a crazy idea crossed my mind. What if I actually bought it? Nobody will have to know it... I approached the shelf and hold its case in my shaking hands, knowing that at this very moment I'm holding something more deadly than a phosphorus grenade...the notorious "Beijing 2008". Many thoughts came to my mind: my parents, my friends, my childhood, my lost innocence, and the Resident Evil spiders. I took a deep breath and I said: "what the hell, I WILL DO IT!" I had some money to waste, so I decided to buy it, out of pure scientific curiosity. How bad could this be? After all, I have played "Alone In The Dark", and seriously I don't fear anything ever since. You should try this too. The best anti-lame game vaccine, 100% guaranteed results!
Now back to the game. Having read some "official" reviews about this game on the web, I was really prepared for the worst, and indeed after I had played it myself for a couple of hours, more or less, I made the same thoughts about the game. All that has been written for "Beijing 2008", on this site included, are accurate. I assure you that it is insanely hard, it's frustrating, the controls are awful, your controller’s integrity is in jeopardy too, and allow me to add that you also face a high risk of suffering a nervous break down, and at some extremely rare cases of over-intense "A,B,A,B,A,B,A,B,A,B,A,B,A,B,A,B,A,B,A,B,A,B" even an epileptic seizure.
I have only one objection though: it isn't some game, that without a second thought, you will throw it out of your window. There are some good moments in it. First of all, you will have a good laugh watching some animations of the athletes. It's not that there is something obviously wrong with it, but they are funny! The facial expressions the gestures they make, all copy real moments, probably being performed by real people, but at the same time, it’s the graphics quality such, that can’t fool you for a second, that you watch at some animated figures-merely puppets, and exactly that effort for realism makes the whole spectacle hilarious. I don't want to write any spoilers, but this, I can't help, but share it with you. There is this moment where after their victory, the winning athletes listen to the national anthem of their country, and every single time they look moved, they cry discreetly, and every five seconds, or so, there is an animation where they raise their left pointer finger up to the height of their left eye, and wipe the tears away from it. This is happening in every victory ceremony! All gold medalists (the "cheaters" included) experience exactly the same emotion: they shed one tear, and they wipe it away with mathematic precision every five seconds. It's unbelievably funny. I can't stop laughing now that I type. OMG! It's hysterical!!!
Also I had a really great time playing the female Gymnastics events. The animations in there weren’t bad at all, on the contrary, they were extremely accurate. But somehow I couldn’t really take the whole thing seriously. Unlike the frantic and thus hated track events, all you had to do here was to peacefully hit the buttons at a certain timed instance. You had to synchronize your button hit with the exact moment that the foot of the athlete would touch the floor. Not a millisecond earlier or later. This totally unneeded anxiety to push the button at the exact moment, watching at the same time this cute miniature puppet-athlete to execute her cute girlie program, all these seemed to me so funny that I couldn't play it anymore, because I was smiling, almost laughing again. I felt good actually.
Besides the laughter part, you can also see this game as the ultimate challenge. Beating perhaps a world record, or unlocking some achievements. They are as hard as actually winning a gold medal in the real Olympic Games, but some of you might just have the skill for it, who knows. There had been some unbelievable gaming records in the past, like the story of Billy Mitchell in 1999, who successfully cleared 225 levels of Pac-Man, succeeding the perfect score of 3.333.360 points! So why not happen again, here in "Beijing 2008", an equally prestigious record?
Perhaps I'm some kind of masochist, I don't know really, but I just can't feel bad for this game. Actually I feel sympathy for it.
