Qualifying for the Olympics is no small feat. Athletes train rigorously over their entire careers for a chance to compete in this most glorious quad-annual event, to be hosted this year in Beijing, the clammy palm of communist China's Iron First. It is equipped with these two mindsets that you should approach Beijing 2008, the official game for the 2008 Olympics – that the Olympics is tough, and communists enjoy torture, and possibly cannibalism.

Developed by Eurocom, Beijing 2008 offers a fairly comprehensive and attractive package for the medallist-wannabes that prefer their buttocks planted on cushy couches rather than on sandpits or dirt tracks. The game features 38 events covering an impressive gamut of track and field, swimming, gymnastic, shooting, and more. You will be able to participate in these challenges across three game modes: Practice, Competition and Olympics.

The Practice mode is exactly that, and allows you to hone your skills in any of the game's plethora of events before moving on to the competitive modes. Competition lets you take on your friends locally or online, neither of which require a mandatory drug test. The third and most elaborate Olympics mode simulates the 2008 Games by having you compete in qualifying events over a number of days. Each day presents you with several events you have to try and qualify for, and a pass goal (such as qualifying for at least 3/5 events that day), failure of which will result in you being booted out of the Games entirely and promptly executed.

With all these game modes, participating nations, and more events than you can throw a hammer at, Beijing 2008 certainly won't go down in history for being feature-thrift. This doesn't mean that it can't be charged for other crimes against humanity though, as the core gameplay that all of these modes and events are structured around is guaranteed to reduce even the most hardened enemy combatant to a bundle of tears and nerves.

Despite a superlative veneer, Beijing 2008 is at its core a button-mashing game, a very punishing one. Instead of having your button presses matched by powerful attacks (I am patiently waiting for Outlaw Olympics to fill that niche), they dictate how fast you will run, how fast you can throw, and so on. These button mashing sequences wring out every button press combination conceivable on a controller to simulate the different motions required for each event. These range from alternating between A and B buttons to simulate running, to rotating your thumbstick to mimick a hammer-throw.

Most of the events string together 2 or more of these button-press routines in order to represent the different actions performed during an event. A simple example is the 100M Sprint, which first requires that you hold down the L or R trigger to slowly build up a power meter, and once the firing pistol sounds, switch to a frenzied bashing of the A and B buttons to gain speed. And as you approach the finishing line, you can hold down a trigger button to lunge forward or showboat. Unfortunately, on top of being repetitive to the degree of incurring physical pain, many of the sequences are unnecessarily difficult by requiring a finesse of timing that you need to work out all on your own with no onscreen help whatsoever.

Worse yet, neither the game's manual or tutorial go into any detail about the ‘nuances' in many of the events present in the game. Therefore if you think that following the simple tutorial will instantly make you a master of Judo, prepare to be Ippon'd (as near as I can tell, some kind of ultimate shaming move) by your AI opponent over and over, for failing to work out the ‘secret button combos' kindly glossed over in the manual. Not every event in the game is as frustrating, but then they are usually mind-numbingly simple and finger-numbingly repetitive.

The various issues with the gameplay are amplified further when you participate in the game's titular mode, the Olympics. Obviously intended to provide additional depth, the developers have implemented a points system, where you can spend points earned from qualifying events on improving your various stats from Power to Speed and even a Slow-motion ability. However, instead of making you feel super-human, you will quickly come to realise that you actually start the Games barely capable of qualifying for the Paralympic Games, and only by upgrading your abilities can you hope to one day become as proficient as your fellow athletes.

What this means in gameplay terms is that you need to perform at your absolute best and not make a single mistake just to match the proficiency of your opponents. If you do, you will risk disqualification, subsequently failing and having to replay the entire day over again. This reviewer has resorted to some unflattering means of manipulating the controller to regain an edge that the developers cruelly took away, such as jamming a thumbstick into my forearm to rotate it faster, or rubbing a pen (a PEN) over the A and B buttons repeatedly. So, depending on your predilections, you may be excited to know that before the game's done, you are likely to have gotten much more intimate with your controller than most sexual partners.

For a game with gameplay that has virtually been lifted from the 1980s, Beijing 2008 fortunately didn't inherit the fashion from that era. The game looks and sounds very impressive, with detailed characters and animation accompanied by appropriate crowd noises and a cheerful but utterly forgettable soundtrack that renders the Olympic Games better than any video game has done so before.

However, there is a very sterile feel to the entire affair that takes away the emotional impact that winning a race might have had otherwise, as the athletes never look overly exhausted, or sweat much by the end, and you are treated to a by-the-numbers replay, and ushered quickly to the next load screen. Also, the graphical prowess on display comes with extra seconds of load time, as each event can take about 15 seconds to load. Considering some events last all of a minute or 2, these load screens appear fairly frequently and don't help the already frustrating experience.