OLYMPIC GOLD
LET THE GAMES BEGIN
A Review of OLYMPIC GOLD
by Richard Roy
With the Summer Olympics near at hand, I guess it was inevitable for a multimedia product to be released to take advantage of the hype and free publicity generated by the world’s most celebrated festival. Fortunately, Olympic Gold is not a hastily, slapped-together, confused mish-mash of Olympic facts. Indeed, with the creative collaboration between Discovery Channel Multimedia and SEA Multimedia we are instead treated to a well planned, easy to use, comprehensive compendium celebrating the modern 100 year era of the Summer Olympic Games. Officially licensed by both the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the United States Olympic Committee (USOC), Olympic Gold bombards you with articles, photographs, voice narration, and video footage to bring the story of the Summer Olympics from Athens 1896 to Atlanta 1996.
Olympic Gold is without a doubt the definitive compendium of historical information about the Summer Games. Whatever question you may have, if it has to do with the Summer Olympics then you’re almost sure to find the answer here. From video tours of each Summer Olympiad to facts and figures of every nation to host or compete in the Summer Olympics, Olympic Gold presents us with a window back through time showing how far we have come and what the future may still bring.
Navigating Olympic Gold is extremely simple and intuitive. From the main menu you are offered five different perspectives on Olympic history: Athletes, Nations, Games, History, and Events. Athletes provides an in-depth look at all of the Olympic medal winners; Nations provides facts and figures about every country that ever participated in the Olympic Games; Games lets you learn about each of the Olympic Games of the past 100 years through articles and video clips; History allows you to read articles about the history of the Olympic movement, accompanied by narration, pictures, video, and sound; and Events contains the history and a description of each Olympic sport, including graphics, rules, and 3-D rulebooks.
In addition to these five menu options, Olympic Gold comes with a complete searchable database of more than 16,000 medal winners. With this search engine, you are able to ask questions dealing with such criteria as nation, olympiad, event, sub-event, gender, athlete, and medal standing in any combination whatsoever. For example, one could ask a question such as: What nation has had the most female silver medal winners in the Fencing competition? Incidently, the answer is Hungary with 6 silver medals. You may even look up individual athletes and view biographical information, photos, and view video clips of their performances.
When you think you have mastered all of the information contained within Olympic Gold, you can test the state of your Olympic knowledge by competing against the computer in Olympic trivia. The computer generates multiple choice questions with four possible answers and you have two guesses to get the correct answer for each question. The contest is portrayed on the screen as an Olympic hurdles race where with each correct answer you jump a hurdle and with each unsuccessful answer the computer completes a hurdle. First one to cross the finish line is declared the winner. If you’re good enough you may even make it to the championship round and have a chance to win a gold medal.
A small complaint that I have with Olympic Gold is that it doesn’t have enough full motion video clips of athletic performances. Often, the video shown (if any) is just freeze frame photos of different segments of an event. This does not carry the awe of any medal winning performance particularly well. A second CD holding more video would have been extremely welcome to help convey the atmosphere.
Also, while reading many of the articles or essays on different Olympiads and athletes, the scrolling of the text would bog down so much that my mouse clicks would get ahead of the scrolling on the screen and when I finally got to the portion of text I wanted to read I’d release the mouse button but the screen would continue to scroll on by. Mostly this was because the program would be loading pictures from the CD-ROM to accompany the text and slow down the loading of the text. Surely my quad speed CD-ROM should be more than capable of handling this task.
While Olympic Gold is not a flawless product, it quite obviously was designed with a great deal of enthusiasm and effort. It is simple to navigate, contains a huge database of Olympic information, and is enhanced with enough multimedia to appeal to both sports experts and Olympic novices alike. It will definitely enrich any Olympic viewer’s experience as they watch sports history unfold in Atlanta this Summer.
Multimedia Cafe Scorecard
| Product: | OLYMPIC GOLD |
| Company: | Discovery Channel Multimedia |
| Cost: | $39.95 |
System Requirements:
486DX33, 8 MB RAM, 2X CD-ROM, WIN 3.1 or WIN95, Mouse
Breakdown:
Entertainment Value 4
Educational Value 4
Concept 5
Depth 5
Interface 4
Overall Score:
(* 0 rating, 0 votes)
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