Bruce Jenner's World Class Decathlon

The Good
The career mode is kind of interesting. As time passes, you get the chance to assign points to your weaker areas, until age starts to decrease your abilities, prompting for retirement. A big part of the game is finding a way to get the most of the daily stamina reserves, which opens gameplay possibilities a bit.

And that's pretty much it. No kidding.

The Bad
Graphics are pretty much passable. The whole game uses pre-rendered 3D graphics, but the result is nothing short of appalling, with the blocky characters and dull backgrounds. Ever wondered why the early DirectX versions (1 and 2) were frowned upon? Here's a good reason why.

Gameplay. "Click and hold, but pace your stamina, right click here and there to perform action". Hoo-ray. While, of course, this isn't much different from button mashing, there is very little to learn in each new tournament. Once you perfect each event (which is a matter of minutes on each one) and find a good plan for both days to get the most from the athlete, the game pretty much turns from a passable athletics simulator to a boring click-fest similar to Progress Quest.

The whole "listen to the star giving you advice" would be better spent if there was some analysis at the end of each decathlon advising the player to get some points or train on some key areas based on the current statistics, rather than having a bunch of videos, always ending up with "save your stamina".

The Bottom Line
One word is more than enough to describe the game - Pointless. While all games (at least that I know of) in the Olympiad genre of the Summer variant include (un)healthy amounts of mashing away the buttons or moving the joystick, this one doesn't. Which is exactly where the fun of these games come from. While I admit that the game is fun for the first times, particularly once you start getting some experience points and start to see the marks going up, it goes downhill very shortly after that.

Gamers expecting to become the new Daley Thompson or Roman Šebrle should get Athlete Kings for the Saturn, which, although based on an arcade game with quite unrealistic results (with scores in excess of 11000 points), at least is fun to play. While it's a cliché to say that most early to mid 1990's games nowdays pass as freeware, this one does full justice to it.