I have just had some quite remarkable news. It seems that these French lads have come up with a 10-event sports simulation. Errrrrrr... Well done! Given that the bandwagon left town over five years ago, there could only be one reason for bringing out this sort of sports sim now, and that would be to bring it up to date. You know; bigger, better graphics than ever before, amazing sound and a cunning new interface that leaves you gasping at its awesome simplicity. Unfortunately, Super Sport Challenge has none of these.

Eventful, hardly
The game offers you the chance to compete in 10 events, from the athletics field to the swimming pool: 100m, 110m hurdles, pole vault, long jump, shot putt, high jump, triple jump, 100m freestyle, 4 X 100m freestyle relay and the javelin. It does not take a genius to realise however, that the 4 X 100m freestyle relay is the 100m freestyle repeated four times.

Up to four people can compete at a time, each representing a country of their choice, although joystick port limitations means that in race events only two actually compete against each other at any one time.

The controls for each event vary, from the simple to the unusable. In the first category is the 100m where you start running by pressing fire, and push the joystick to the right when you want to run faster. Now this many be less expensive on joysticks than Track and Field-style button bashing, but it is difficult to feel like you are actually involved in helping your athlete win.

In contrast the pole vault requires you to push fire to start running, move the joystick left to increase your run up speed, push fire to plant your pole, pull back on the joystick to bend your pole, press fire to lift yourself up the pole and then move the joystick left to clear the bar. Which is as difficult as it sounds.

The real gameplay comes in the control of your energy level. At the bottom of the screen is a bar display showing the amount of energy you have. This is never enough for maximum effort all the way through an event, and the trick lies in using your energy sparingly. In the jumping events there is little point in arriving at the board at 100mph if you are too tuckered to lift yourself into the air.

Similarly, in the race events there is no point to racing away from the field and leading for the first half if they all catch you up when you are doing a dying fish impersonation down the home straight.

One of the worst points of Super Sport Challenge is that during most events you are forced to listen to the most annoying sample ever heard on a computer game. It sounds like a crowd of 100,000 people chanting 'boring' into a flanger; it only lasts two seconds, but it never stops repeating. Aaaargh! Turn off the sound.

Super Sport Challenge lacks consistency, you get the feeling that different people worked on the different events and nobody co-ordinated them properly. On top of this there is a serious lack of imagination. It does not make any difference which country you select, you will always be the same athlete; there are no female athletes or shots of you on the podium if you win a medal; there is no celebration when you set a new world record and there is unnecessary disk swapping because the individual events are stored in the wrong order.

Player bonding
It is a shame Microids have let these sort of problems spoil what might have been an exciting game. In places the graphics are good and there is an above average soundtrack, which could have been performed by a close friend of Jean Michel Jarre. The four player option encourages even the most pale and wan gameplayer to have some kind of interaction with real people.

Even thoughSuper Sport Challenge does show a lot of promise for the future of Microids, it is let down by poor execution. You can have some fun with it, but it will wear off soon, leaving you bored.

Go on. Admit it. As soon as you turned to this page, read the name of the game and glanced at the grabs you thought, "Uh oh, waggle-frenzy". I know I did when I was given it to review. Sports sims and waggling are inextricably linked in the minds of a generation.

Like buying a second-hand Mini and having to push strart it on rainy wintry mornings. Like watching a US sitcom and cringing at the moralistic bit. Like going to the cinema and finding yourself reciting, "Next door's budgie... The Dog And Duck dahn the 'igh street.." along with THAT ad. Sports sims and waggling are two things that we've come to accept go together.

But get this - there is no waggling in Super Sports Challenge. I would say it again to make it blatantly clear but the beauty of the written word is that you can read it as many times as you like. So go on, then.

Read the first sentence in this paragraph as many times as you like until you're fully convinced that you have come to terms with the concept. Believe me, there's not even the slightest hint of a twitch or mere suggestion of a rhythmical swaying of the joystick from side-to-side.

Yep, Super Sports Challenge has come up with a new system. The quesiton is, does it work? I mean, waggling has been constantly derided over the past decade (and has been the subject of more smutty innuendos than you'd find in a BBC2 repeat season of the entire Carry One series) but the reason it has lasted is because the physicality of it somehow suits the subject - sport.

The system used in Super Sports Challenge's 10 events uses an energy bar which goes down as the athletes do their thang. By pulling the joystick either left or right (depending on which way they're running, swimming or jumping) you can make them gradually build up speed. And pressing the Fire button gives them a short, concentrated burst of energy.

The object is to work out when and how to use each of these techniques to make your athlete perform at the peak of his abilities. For example, in the long jump, the best combination is to start with a slow build-up of speed, then put on a burst just before the jump, but leave enough energy for the jump itself.

So is Super Sports Challenge going to cause a revolution in sports sims? Somehow, I doubt it. The control system works reasonably enough, but it's static and a bit too calculated.

Once you've learnt the best way to get your man to do his stuff, it's fairly easy to repeat the formula. Sure, there are loads of other game formats you could level that criticism at, but in, say, an platformer at least there's loads going on to keep you busy. Here there are basically only 10 different things to perfect, so it robs the game of a lot of its excitement.

To be fair, the system does work better with some events than with others. The Javelin event, for example, is one of the best of its type I've played in terms of control. But with most of the events, especially the races, the control system works against them, with the result that they're about as exciting as a live Radio 4 broadcast from the House of Lords.

FOR THE HIGH JUMP
Even worse - rant coming up here - how did the programmers think they could get away with the Triple Jump? It's exactly the same as the Long Jump - your athlete does his skip and jump bits automatically if you hit the Fire button at the correct time to make him do the hop. Very lazy gameplay that makes for a totally redundant event.

The control system might have had more chance to make an impact if the presentation of the game had been a bit more thrilling. Instead, we get pretty standard fare for a sports sim. The 10 events have all been used hundreds of times before (just for example, say, why do we never get to try our luck at the discus, the speed-walk or the steeplechase?) and the competition mode, which allows up to four people to take part, is the usual format.

It's a shame, though, that the shirt colours of the players' athletes are dictated by the player number and not by the team you choose to play as.

The graphics are variable. The swimming events look impressive, and some of the athletes are well animated, but the majority of the graphics are at best uninspired while perspectives in the High Jump make it look like a Picasso had a substantial hand in the design. The score tables are also vile - I reckon they're supposed to look like they're supposed to look like they're set in marble, but they look more like that really cheap lino you get in DHSS waiting rooms instead.

It's also incredibly slow. In competition mode you're swapping disks like a DJ who's only got one working turntable and the game seems to access the disk every time an athlete transfers his weight onto a different foot - ultra yawnsome.

SSC isn't so much bad as dreary. There are one or two bits that work fairly well, but despite the new control system, it ends up more like being forced to watch your little brother take part in the school country finals in midwinter than a top class international sporting occasion.