Dear Readers, welcome to our live coverage of Winter Games! The organisers could not have chosen a better day for the event: Look at that Čerenkov blue sky, ever so slightly marred by small cloudy squares of brilliant white! The sight is even clear enough to catch a glimpse of the far away Purple Peaks.
Just now a runner enters the stadium with the Olympic torch and climbs the steps up to light the fire. But what‘s that? His skin is blue with cold! Has nobody told that poor man that a sleeveless shirt might be a little bit too much on the cool side? Now the Epyx-fire blazes up and the white doves are set free. Endless swarms of them fly over the crowds in this grandest of opening ceremonies.
Virtual sports should be physical exercise, too! No, this is not a review of a modern-day Wii title – the idea goes back to much earlier time. The first game to famously follow this premise was Activision's Decathlon.
Granted, the kind of physical exercise is largely one-dimensional. Instead of the wholesome, healthy training of the human body which participation in an actual decathlon would represent, legendary designer David Crane boiled all the challenges down to hand and wrist strain. Not exactly healthy, neither for the joints, nor for the controllers of the console, both of which notoriously needed replacement after too much time playing Decathlon.
The idea of clowns shooting each other up with seesaws and trampolines is not new. The theme has appeared in arcades since the 70s and has also been transferred to various home consoles. In the 8-bit realm, Comic Circus is by far the best version I know of. However, the console called Super Cassette Vision, which is almost only known in Japan, also came to a tiny degree of fame in Europe through a temporary export collaboration with France. Despite the name Super Cassette Vision, by the way, modules were used as the carrier medium.
