Beijing 2008 for PS3 Review: Watch the Real Olympics

GeekSugar — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 07:30:43 PDT

I was really excited to get my copy of Beijing 2008: The Official Video Game of the Olympic Games, so that I could play along with my favorite athletes during the competition. Initially, I thought I was in for a good time, since the graphics and characters looked so darn good - they are fit I tell you - but unfortunately not all was well in Beijing.

In a nutshell? I haven't had "Mario Thumbs" since, well, Super Mario Bros. You know when you walk away from a game and your thumbs are sore and red? That's the idea, but I had only been playing Beijing 2008 for about 15 minutes. I love a button masher just like everyone else, but this was ridiculous! Almost all of the games require you to repeatedly push buttons to gain speed and power, while other events have you rotating your joysticks for far too long than it is pleasurable.

To read why you should watch the Olympics rather than play along, just

The overall concept of the game seems fine – you get to play along with the Olympians in 36 different events – but it's the frustrating controls that ruined it for me. Not only are you stuck figuring out what to do after you've gone through the lame tutorial, you will most likely be doing one of two things: frantic rapid fire button mashing, and rotating your joysticks. Swimming, track and field, martial arts, gymnastics, weightlifting, the list goes on, and not one of these events is really that fun.

And only to add to your stress, you arrive at the Olympic games totally unprepared, untrained, and are no competition to your competitors, so you find yourself struggling not to come in last in every event. Now, I'm not a sore loser in the least, but come on. Olympic athletes that are untrained, showing up at the qualifying events and you are expected to place? It's kinda irritating.

If you seriously want to spend any money on this game, at the most it's a bargain bin buy. But if you're up for some punishment, you can pick up Beijing 2008 online now for your PS3, XBox 360, and PC. Just remember to wrap your thumbs in some protective tape first!

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Gymnast Shawn Johnson Dreams of Making the Team

Susi May — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 15:35:22 PST

Shawn Johnson never officially retired from gymnastics. Although she toyed with the idea after the 2008 games, she's once again set her sights on the Olympics. But the decision to step back into competition wasn't simple. It took a a self-described "garage sale" wipeout on the ski slopes to end her indecision. Ironically, skiing, the only activity Shawn's long-time coach Liang Chow (they've worked together since she was 6) considered completely off-limits, brought her back into the game.

At a recent event at Nike headquarters, in Beaverton, OR, Shawn told me that after learning the results of her postaccident MRI, she drove straight to the gym and told Chow she wanted to come back even though she had torn two ligaments in her knee, torn her meniscus (the cushion of cartilage that sits between the thigh and the tibia, or shin bone), and ripped her hamstrings. "Instead of thinking, 'I'll never be able to come back now,' the first thing that came to me was, 'I have to go back.' It was kind of a motivation to me to get healthy again and to rehab myself . . . I really like to make things hard, and I don't like things that are easy."

Keep reading to learn more about Shawn's comeback.