Grrr! What!? No? Man? No. I hate this. I do. I hate it. You know what's like? It's like winning the lottery to discover two-hundred thousand other people won it too. It's like waiting for your favourite meal all day. You book the restaurant, you sit there with anticipation, the waiter takes your order, your mouth slobbering all over the place, the meal arrives and what? There is a big old house-fly, dead and resting in the middle of the plate.
Bugs!
Decathlon was released last year by Older Games, who sadly are no longer with us, but they are dumping all their stuff on eBay right now, so if you are quick - who knows?
Decathlon looks great. It was made by 3DO Studio in their prime, which was around 1995/6 but because Decathlon is a pre-release beta it has more than just one big fat dead house-fly sat in it.
It crashes. It crashes a lot. You've been warned.
The other annoyance is that there are no instructions. Trying to figure out what a buggy game is expecting in the way of input during a virtual shot-put tournament can easily shred ones nerves.
Other things like the contestants names are beta so it's Rex and Neil from Japan and Jim from Italy.
You have to be a thick skinned 3DO fan to enjoy because of all the bugs, but if you do stick with it there are a few things that stand out.
The graphics are amazing. The 3D stadium isn't anything to write home about but the character animations are extremely good, characters arms and legs are shaded to give the impression of depth and they do look really very good indeed while doing the events, which are:
100M, 110M hurdles, Long Jump, High Jump, 400M sprint, Discus, Shot Put, Javelin, 1500M Run and Pole Vault.
It's all obviously been motion captured, and watching the athletes run, kick the dirt or throw a javelin, or jump about in jubilation is very impressive. Each athlete has a shadow and the camera zooms in and out very smoothly. Squint during one of the running races with upto eight other contestants on the screen and you can almost see a real race. That's not bad for the old 3DO.
The sounds rich, the samples aren't terribly refined but the tunes are high quality.
Eight players could have played together, but I imagine due to the preponderance of bugs it would be somewhat irritating, which again is a great shame.
There are only 50 copies in existence due to licensing restrictions, and since Older Games has gone game-over it's not going to re-emerge any-day soon.
3DO Kid.
this is a perfect review of this crap of a game
after 3 hours of playing and a crash every 5 min i havent put it back in the 3do
and i have #3 of 50