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We've all played Summer Games, Winter Games, California Games and every other sports menagere game in between. EA decided to take the whole idea in a slightly different direction by adding in a little humour, a little off-the-wall thinking, and about thirty pounds of boredom. In other words, they made Caveman Ugh-lympics, what sports were like before the invention of the wheel.
Rather than represent a country, there's six different cavemen you can pick from to be your competitor across all the events. Each one has their own strengths, or in some cases weaknesses, as well as their own backstories. Then, it's on to the events.
Not necessarily in order, here's the events - the mate toss, a.k.a. the hammer throw. Yeah, you have to swing your girl (or in Crudla's case, guy) around and around, building up as much speed as you can before you chuck them. Don't swing them for too long, because once your guy starts to change colour, he loses power rapidly.
There's firemaking, which is self-explanatory. Rub the sticks together and blow on the sparks. Just don't blow too much too quickly, or you'll get dizzy. And watch out for the other guy, because he'll smack you over the head if you're not looking.
Then there's the dino race, where you race dinosaurs equestrian-like to the finish line. Very simple here. You can give your dino a turbo boost by hitting him over the head with your club, but the more times you do it, the more confused he'll get. Confused isn't a good thing.
There's the clubbing event, which gets down to the most primal of instincts - smacking people over the head with big clubs. You don't get a great variety of attacks here, just high and low love taps and a big double-handed whallop, and there's also no defense. You win by either knocking your opponent out, or by knocking him off the ledge. You can push the button to do the "look at the birdie" trick, which hardly ever works. If you push the button when you see the shooting star in the lower corner of the screen, you do the scream attack, which throws your opponent back about half a screen length. Normally, it's enough to win.
And then, the saber-toothed tiger race. You don't race the tiger, you race each other to get away from it. The finish line is the tree at the end you need to climb up to escape. If the tiger catches you, you lose. There's obstacles along the way to jump, and the guy in the rear can grab the guy in the front and throw him back, hopefully into the waiting maw of the tiger.
And finally, there's the dino vault. It's just like any other pole vault. This one's just as tough as the tiger race, because you not only have to clear the dino, but you have to clear it by quite a bit. There's no "just barely's" when you're trying to jump over a hungry T-Rex.
Short, simple, straight-forward. A break from the regular stuff.
Downloads: Music, Advert
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| GRAPHICS - 9/10 |
The colour palette is very bland, and it makes it very hard on the eyes sometimes. But the designs are good and the animations are smooth, making the palette the only knock on graphics.
| | SOUND - 7/10 |
They did their best to make it sound like a pre=historic environment.
| | PLAYABILITY - 5/10 |
It's a lot of repetitive motion, moving the joystick back-and-forth and in circles quickly enough to do well on most events. On the old C-64 joysticks, you could go through a lot of them playing this game, and it tires your arm out very quickly. Also, this game really is more of a two-player game than a one-player game, because the AI isn't very good. You can take the worst guy and give the computer the best guy, and still win most of the time. It's when you're playing against someone that the game is more fun.
| | OVERALL - 6/10 |
EA did a good job making this game, but there's a couple of things they could've done to make this a lot better. More events would've been nice, and having controls that weren't so tiring would be just as good. But hey, take what you can get, and give it a try.
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