Call me biased (don't be fooled by the Brit accent, I was born an Aussie) but it seems like Australia did one fine job hosting the Olympics this year. Just think of what a nightmare it must be to organise all those events, yet everything went by almost without a hitch, so much so that Australia is now helping get the Athens Olympics organised. With that in mind maybe Eidos should have had an Australian developer do the game of Sydney 2000 because whoever they got to make the title was either horribly inexperienced at games development or (much more likely) under an insane amount of pressure from Eidos to get the game out in an unfeasibly short period of time. Sharky Games reviewer Brett Todd described it as a “steaming kangaroo turd” and I couldn't agree more.

Key to a good athletics game is the control system, and Sydney 2000 got this wrong in a big way. The game's console roots showed through in the control method, right down to the fact that you had to use arrow keys to enter your name rather than just typing it. Controlling the races was similarly awkward. In the hurdles you had to bash the left and right arrow keys one after the other as fast as possible, Track and field style. Since these keys are relatively spread out, you had to use two hands to repeatedly press the buttons fast enough, and then I assume sprout a third appendage to then press the enter key to jump over each hurdle without dropping the pace of your arrow key bashing. This and other control methods in the game ended up being almost as tiring as the real life events themselves, and while real life competitions often find cold water welcome as something to drink after a race, you'll find cold water welcome as something to soak your aching hands in once you've competed in more than a few races. Of course, you'd have to be a few scotch eggs short of a picnic to want to go on after being subject to even one race in any of the events, or indeed the training section with the headache inducing coloured background. The most amusing bit of all came when Eidos released the demo for the Sydney 2000 computer game after the actual event had finished, thereby completely failing to capitalise on public interest in the Olympics. At least we can be thankful that it's another 4 years before we'll see another Olympics game which I have no doubt will be just as bad.