Bejing 2008 was supposed to be better than Athens 2004. Unfortunately the game copies alot the previous mistakes.
One of the main good qualities of the game is a nice and clearly built main menu. It was constructed based on classified markers. The navigation is very easy, which is very important considering you have over 35 sport disciplines to choose from. The main bookmarks are Training, Competition and Olympic Games. In the mean time its good to notice how the disciplines are divided, which again eases the navigation. You can choose the track, six types of running, stadium and things like that. Before each training there is a possibility to learn about the discipline. The game shows us there how to steer your player. You can choose two alternative forms of steering depending on the discipline you're playing. The basic are keys 'A' and 'B'. You can also block your speed. The perfect timing is the key here. Example? For the swimming competition you need to really kill your 'A' and 'B' keys. The faster you press one then the other the faster will the swimmers arms move. Speed blocking is neccesery when you do a recurrence, doing it in a right time might save you some priceless seconds. An additional hard part is the start. The player must control a special dial that symbolises the readyness of the sportsman. You just have to hit one button all the time but in a right tempo. If you overdose with the speed of pressing the button it will lead to a false start, which in many disiplines means disqualification. Ofcourse depending on the discipline you are playing the system is a little modified.
All of the mechanics of the game maybe look good on the paper but in reality it has some serious deal of weakness. Problematic is start system mentioned earlier. The player has to keep the arrow as near to the ''red place'' as possible, and even after a long time of training our opponents steered by the computer are faster and more accurate. Most of the time a late start is an impossible thing to come back from.
Another matter is banging your keyboard to death, which considers for example swimming and running. I doubt there will be someone who after passing a distance of 1500 metres would not be completely bored. Another example is judo - the player has not enough information about possible throws and techniques. Besides, pressing on the enemy takes most of the time and when you finally manage to take your opponent to the down floor you need to use a combination of keys. Great, but there is no information about any combos and the manual says to ''experiment on your own!''. Great, like I would not think of that myself.
Assuming that you have finished the training now and in some disciplines you got some good scores you can now try and play a Competition. There you can choose only one discipline from the whole pallet. In this mode you can play versus live enemies, making your own game or logging into a tourney made by someone else (LAN). You can also join to tourneys played on the internet after making an account and logging on in GameSpy. One thing I do not understand is why the camera does not have an option of spectating other players. You can only observe your own sportsman. Also the replays are very poor, you can watch them only from one point of view.
After a couple of tourneys it gets boring so the main thing is left - The Olympic Games. Here comes the first serious flaw. To take part in any competition at all you firstly need to pass the qualifications with a quite nice score. Its constructed so that the players has to start in four competitions at once. Every day of the Olympic Games is the next pack of disciplines. Example? 9th of July 2008, running 400m, swimming 50m, high jumps and archery. If you do not have all of the disciplines fairly mastered and u fail some of them - the game ends. A very annoying and useless solution. In general the system of the olympic games is based on points. After starting the game you get two thousand of them (2000) and you can add them to your stats (something like in role playing games) which are for example, precision, agility, strenght, speed etc. For every win you get awarded with some points which you can add to make your results in later competitions better. All in all its not a bad idea but considering that everything is anyways based on killing your keyboard (some of the competitions are literally unplayable) it just gets very frustrating. You can listen to some nice music in the menu, see some nice locations and great animations (winning gests, irritation, anger).
In short it looks good untill you dont bite into the details and start tripping because of bad solutions or fall asleep during boring competitions. Its probably better to leave the game and watch the original thing on television.