Ten ways to break your keyboard
Summer 1984, Daley Thompson once again shows he is master of the decathlon and becomes a double Olympic gold winning hero, it’s a magnificent achievement. Over two days and ten events he has taken on, and then beaten, the best athletes in the world.
There was some controversy, sure, perhaps the homophobic slur in the form of a T-Shirt wasn’t the most mature thing anyone has ever done at a major sporting event, but now everyone would see how great this man was and the plaudits would come pouring in!
Well, no.
Yeah, he had won the ‘BBC Sports personality of the year’ award in 1982, but that’s something awarded by a “public vote”, the sort of public vote that gave the 1988 award to ‘Steve Davis’, a clever snooker-playing automaton that only barely resembled a real human being. He also got an MBE in 1983, but that’s the Chivalric equivalent of your significant other telling you they’re giving you something really special, and then finding out later on that it was gonorrhea.
What he did get was a licensed appearance in a computer game!
During this period, while our Daley was winning gold and computer game contracts, I was a largely unremarkable if slightly underweight twelve-year-old with an all consuming love of tennis and some major confidence issues. I really did not like P.E. Not because of the sport, though, as I said I literally lived for tennis and had a fair turn of speed on the track (only weighing as much as that dried hairball the cat threw up three days ago helped there).
No.
The reason I hated school sports was sharing a changing room with fifteen other twelve-to-thirteen year old boys, all of whom were further along their journey through puberty than I was, and who were happy to demonstrate their new found testosterone by pointing out a lack of it in others.
Now I had a way to enjoy some hot track and field action without having to strip naked and get laughed at afterwards.
The setup
As the worlds best athlete you have to prove yourself over ten gruelling events, showing great endurance and skill again and again, finally emerging victorious.
The execution
The game is set out over two days just like the real thing! Unfortunately you have to load the days separately so it actually takes two flipping days to play. Once you’re in though, select your control method and then it’s name picking time..
..and then off to your first event.
Day 1
100 metres
Oh the good old days of whipping out your joystick and furiously tugging it left and right! After a short while you’d ‘cross the line’ and finish. Usually took about 10 seconds in my case! In all seriousness though you’d always want to use a joystick rather than the keyboard as the Spectrum wasn’t all that robust and you always risked the machine resetting during play if you hit it too hard.
Anyway, once you qualified (or even if you didn’t) it was off to the..
Long Jump
..where you continued rapidly manipulating your rigid shaft, thumbing the button firmly to get yourself off..
..the ground. That’s was pretty much it for the gameplay mechanics, you mash buttons or waggle joysticks to build up momentum and then press and hold a button at the right time, for the right length of time to set the takeoff angle. All but one event work this way.
Shot Putt
Looks like the high jump. Plays like the high jump. Only difference is that instead of sailing gracefully through the air yourself you’re throwing balls that largely defy the laws of physics and are the exact colour of your characters flesh. Make of that what you will.
High Jump
Oooooh! You get to push the button twice. Once to set takeoff angle, and then again to set your path over the bar, or, inevitably, into the bar.
400 Metres
It’s the 100 metres again, only now you’re all desensitised so it takes four times as long to ‘finish’. Finally Day 1 is over and you can flip the tape over, reset the computer and load in some more events!
Day 2
110 Hurdles
Day 2 is completely different! Only kidding, mash or waggle to build up your speed, push the button to time your hurdling, profit!
Pole Vault
Think ‘High jump’ while holding a long stiff pole. It’s not about how big it is though, it really is much more about technique. You have to jam it in tight and then grip the shaft firmly and so on and so forth.
Discus
Mash / hit button / release button / watch flying saucer thingy fly off into the distance. It’s not going to change much from here.
Javelin
I quite enjoyed the stick throwing game at school, you could imagine what it would be like to skewer someone with the pointy end and then laugh at their twitching corpse as it’s very life blood soaks into the ground around your feet. Or something else, yeah, probably that.
1500 Metres
They saved the best for last here. You’d be forgiven for expecting this to be the 400 Metres but seemingly endless, it isn’t!
They changed the mechanic for the last event, presumably because by now even the programmers were bored with button mashing or cramp inducing joystick manoeuvring. This time it’s all about the fine balancing act between speed and stamina, you build speed the usual way but instead of slowing down when you stop your speed remains constant.
The catch is, that if you are going too fast it consumes your energy!
If you slow back down by holding a button or something, your energy can be re-generated, but not very quickly. So kinda stay mid-speed for the bulk of the race and then sprint home with all that lovely energy you saved by being a wuss earlier on.
Buyers remorse
Goodness, where to begin.
Believe it or not, the graphics were actually quite good for the time, and even though it wasn’t multiplayer you and your friends could still take turns. If you had no friends, the game was easy enough to play that the cat could make a decent go of it, which added to the fun. Really, the only blemish would be the god-awful sound effects and maybe there’s not a huge amount of replay value once you’ve gone round once and found out that every event is essentially the same..
Now watch as I destroy the field (of one, that one being myself), breaking record after record!
So?
Can I recommend going to the trouble of setting up an emulator to play this? No. To be honest watching a video of someone else playing is exactly as much fun as doing it yourself, and apparently it’s not often you can say that with a straight face.
| Game | Publisher | Released | Price | Graphics | Sound | Fun | Final thoughts |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Daley Thompson’s Decathlon | Ocean | 1984 | £7.99 | 😐 | 💀 | 😑 | Don’t befoul sandpits, it’s not nice. |