Finally tired of rehashing olde arcade games, mobile developers have found another chapter of gaming history to plunder: the multi-event sports title. This popular eighties genre came about with Konami's Track & Field and Hyper Sports coin-ops, each featuring a range of sporting events that required the gamer to bash two buttons repeatedly to make their sprinter/long jumper/javelin thrower run faster. Later, 8bit home computer versions like Epyx's Summer Games and Ocean's Daley Thompson's Decathlon, added a bit more depth and variety to the gameplay basics and proved enormously popular - mostly because they offered compulsive turn-based multiplayer gaming at a time when such an option was rare.
And so, due to the technical constraints of the mobile format, this simple yet enjoyable genre is back. Over the summer there was a rash of decent Olympic cash-ins including THQ's Eurosport Games and Morpheme's Jeremiah Manford Athletics. And this week we've received details on another two new contenders.
Finnish mobile game developer Mr Goodliving not only has the best name in the industry - it also has some of the best Track & Field-style games. Having already released Summer Games, Shoot & Splash and Power Games, the company recently revealed that Winter Games is in development. As with its predecessors, the title will feature four sporting events, each requiring a mixture of timing and accuracy from the player. The full line-up hasn't been confirmed but we know that the biathlon and ski-jump are in there. Expect to see this one in November.
More offbeat, perhaps, is Big Brother: The Games, based on the infamous reality TV series. Developed by Overloaded, the mobile entertainment arm of media giant Endemol, this bizarre title features a series of events based around the concept of Big Brother tasks - you know, those things they get the inhabitants to do so they can earn more booze and thereby hopefully have sex with each other. I haven't been able to secure any gameplay specifics yet, but from the screenshots it looks like tasks will involve chasing chickens, throwing messages over the wall and jumping into the hot tub. Apparently, your aim is to build up enough points to escape from the Big Brother house, although perhaps there is a final subgame where you must sell the mundane details of your vacuous existence to Heat magazine. We just don't know. They're sending me the code later so I'll let you know.
