Torino 2006 - The Official Video Game of the XX Olympic Winter Games

It’s something you’ll play for a little while but you’ll soon realize that watching the real thing is far more exciting. It sounds better. It feels faster. And you’ll get to see the podium and hear the anthem of the victor’s nation.

It's not as if the Olympics, be it summer or winter, has had anything special to call its own when it comes to video game adaptations over the years, but Torino 2006 is especially egregious in that it pares down the number of included events to a fairly measly number, manages to make every single one of them completely uninteresting, and skimps entirely on the presentation.

An essential failure in almost every way. At best it's a collection of rather boring events. At worst, putting the Olympic symbol on the box is a mockery of the games' excellent now bi-yearly presentation.

The bottom line is that these events, while fairly dreary in reality, simply have no place in a game. For all its production values and official licence, ultimately you'd have a more interactive experience playing with a yoyo while watching the Winter Olympics on the telly.

Sucks and blows at the same time. What a shameful excuse for a video game. I take personal offence to this boring turd. [Mar 2006]

Your average cellphone game is more fun than any of these so-called "events."

A game more excruciating than an evening of ice-dancing preliminaries.

This official "game of the Games", however, makes it about as exciting as lying in an empty bath and pretending it's the luge, or sticking your head in the freezer and singing Advance Australia Fair.

The result in single-player mode is a messy, unresponsive mass of button-pushing and frantic joystick-twiddling that evolves from impossible to challenging to repetitive and dull in less than an hour.