Another #1, another sports game. People in the UK kept playing them, which is a theme we’re going to get to think about a lot in the course of this project and one of one of the major places where standard historical narrative emphasis doesn’t quite match up. Even outside of that trend, Daley Thompson’s Decathlon was such a success that a sequel was just about inevitable. But what form to take? A Decathlon II could be a do-over and improve on some of its flaws, though simulating the same events again would not be the most exciting prospect. But doing anything else would lose the link to the event of the guy whose name was on the box.
Ocean opted for the second with a dash of the first – a lot of new events that Daley Thompson did not compete in, bulked out with a few returnees, packaged with a new title. His name was much more important than the event, they decided, which makes sense given that Decathlon wasn’t really about the decathlon as a competition anyway.
Following through from that good decision, Super Test is a sharp lesson in how transformational context can be. Not that it isn’t a constant feature of games, where the player is often doing the same basic actions but having a very different experience dependent on how those actions are being suggested and responded to. But with Super Test there’s a particularly direct comparison with Decathlon and its problem of feeling like it was a training run.
In Super Test’s first event, rowing, you hit alternate keys or waggle a joystick in alternate directions, left right left right left right left right, and travel at a speed dependent on how fast you can do that. No change at all there. You’re even, in reality, competing against the clock to preserve one of your three lives again. But just having a competitor on screen, in a display which throughout looks suspiciously similar to Hyper Sports’s swimming, makes it more involving. It’s that little bit easier to imagine you’re actually part of a competition, even if it’s a fleeting sensation.
Tug-of-war involves the same waggle input once more, but having to keep up the motion to drag someone past a line makes for a different experience again. Even getting to choose a named opponent at the start adds a bit extra. The wide assortment of events – there’s a football penalties round in there too – leaves very little sense of a coherent narrative, but it’s not like Decathlon managed to do that either. Sacrificing it for creativity and variety is barely even a sacrifice. And the slow building, beeptastic version of “Chariots of Fire” on the title screen is lit.
