Beijing 2008 has a nice visual, but is so hard to play some games that you'll give it up to play something else!
The game-play is strange and based only on Microsoft-Xbox button patterns on the joy-pad. So you'll have to match buttons in the right time on every competition. If it's just supposed to be fun, I think it would be better to combine sequences, but easily. In Beijing 2008 you have to rotate the analogics following arrows and little balls in insane and crazy movements. Equilibrating the athletes using the same idea with the analogics again! And everything is just so hard, cause you can't set the analogics sensibility, there's no option of different difficulties and the CPUs results are every-time near the World Record. Other problem is that if you miss some sequences, the athlete does the same movement that he would do if you do it right. The athlete rarely falls and it makes your experience really confuse between your awful mistakes and the nice movements that your athlete executes. Actually i've discovered in this game that Kenya and Ethiopia are the strongest olympic-potences in the world!!! There are so many problems in the game-play that I could spend more than 5 pages writing about it. But I'll just say to avoid the Judo!
There's good sides in Beijing 2008: the graphics are nice, almost the same of Virtual Tennis 3 from SEGA. You can customize your athletes on every competition and you have 38 different kinds of competitions making it a potential game and something that could be explored in the future.
Overall, the SEGA's Beijing 2008 has a nice visual, lots of options for competitions ans customization. But the most important thing on a game: its game-play, is so hard that lacks fun and compromises all the experience.