This year's Olympic Games are sure to be controversial due to host country China's dubious human rights record.  Sure, these days the U.S. isn't exactly the cleanest country when it comes to treating your fellow man with dignity and respect, but since the Olympics are brought to you by Coca-Cola and McDonalds, we'll torture as many people as we want.  Maybe if China came up with something as delicious as a Super Value Meal, we wouldn't mind that they won't free Tibet.  But even if China was clean as a lead-free whistle, they would still have the travesty of Sega's "Beijing 2008" for the Xbox 360 attached to their name. 

If the Olympics are about the glory of victory and the agony of defeat, then "Beijing 2008" got it at least half-right.  Nothing works in this game and that's especially sad when you consider that a lot of the competitions are just variations on each other.  You play the 400m dash the same as you play the 100m dash—by rapidly smashing on the "A" and "B" buttons and seeing all the other runners pass you by as you destroy a controller wondering why there's no indicator of your speed in running, but there is for swimming. 

Even the events that should be fair and simple to play like skeet shooting (gameplay that was mastered back in fucking DUCK HUNT) are a complete disaster.  You move the reticule over the flying red disc and pull the left trigger button.  If you timed it right, the clay pigeon explodes and you're a winner. 

You will never hit that clay pigeon.  You'll swear to Mao Tse Tong that you shot that motherfucker, but there it goes, sailing on by with the words "Miss!" staring you in the face.  Or how about archery?  The set-up is simple: hold back the right thumbstick and then try to steer the unsteady reticule with the left stick until it's over the bullseye.  If you played darts in "Grand Theft Auto IV", that's basically how it's set up and that's how it's supposed to work.  Instead, you'd be better off just closing your eyes and hoping for the best.  I was under the impression that when the bullseye on the reticule moves over the bullseye on the archery target and you release the arrow, you get a bullseye.  Maybe I just don't follow archery closely enough but apparently that gets you nowhere close to the bullseye.

Thankfully, you'll never have to play these events unless you attempt them in training or in competition with a friend that you secretly hate.  The Olympic Games Mode has you put points into your team's stats like "Power", "Stamina", and "Agility" but nowhere does it tell you how or in what events these extra points will help.  You can also add points to "Slow-Motion" where you can make everything go slow, brown, and blurry for a few seconds before you return to just losing horribly as usual.  But the kicker is that if you don't qualify for a certain amount of trials in random events, you get a game over.  No retries, no chance at other events, a game over.  When the "Game Over" screen came up, I had to check to make sure the year wasn't 1992 and I wasn't in a videogame arcade.  I wasn't and I was privy to even ever crueler discovery: if you've somehow managed to make any progress and made it to say, Day 3, if you get that game over, the game doesn't let you save on your own so a loss will send you all the way back to the beginning of the entire olympics. 

With such glaring flaws, it doesn't even seem fair to point out the smaller annoyances like useless tutorial videos on how to play the events, the ugly graphics, or the practically non-existent sound.  I will say this: whenever my shot-putter or sprinter fouled or made a false-start, I did feel like I had just shamed my country. 

But all shame here really belongs to Sega.  Yes, the product is a quick cash-in on the 2008 Summer Olympics, but since you have four years between these kind of games and you know what all the events are going to be, wouldn't it stand to reason that you could make a better game if you wanted to and not just a bunch of button mashing and broken hit-detection?  The only people who should buy this are the folks at Amnesty International.  They can use it as another example of the human rights violations brought on by China hosting the 2008 Olympic Games.  

(Rating: F)