SEGA unveils their inevitable spin-off of the upcoming Olympic Games...

Yesterday the inevitable was confirmed...SEGA are making a game for the Olympics.

In an enthusiastic press release, SEGA proudly announced that London 2012 will feature over 30 of the events, including synchronised diving, hammer toss, and something called the "25m rapid fire pistol". The game will also feature Kinect and Move support for some of the events, and as SEGA puts it:  "Budding sports heroes will have an enhanced and realistic way of competing"

You will have to forgive my complete lack of enthusiasm about this game, but there are reasons for it; if history has taught us anything, it is that any "Official" game following the Olympics is always terrible. They are quickly made, poorly developed cash-ins, where not enough time is spent on any of the events, and the whole package feels cheap and uninteresting.

The last time we had to sit through this sort of game was for the 2010 winter games, and guess what? The game was bad. Really bad. Scoring only 56/100 on Metacritic, it was met with widespread criticism for being too hard and not having any sort of career mode or progression through the game. Bejing 2008 was worse, barely scraping a score of 50. Before that there was Torino 2006, which was even worse than Bejing 2008, only managing to score 36 out of the possible 100, and receiving no positive reviews whatsoever.

I could go further back, but just believe me, the trend continues. The only Olympic video games that have been worth playing have been the Mario & Sonic titles, which were passable games in their own right, but weren't actually associated with the real event.

Now, I don't know why these games are always bad, because they all seem to have their own unique failures, but I think it boils down to the varied and disconnected nature of the events. If you are trying to accurately represent 30 different sports in one game, the quality just isn't going to be great, and people are going to notice. If you get lucky and actually enjoy playing some of the events, there are still going to be about 20 that you don't like playing, and those 20 other modes are just going to sit there, reminding you that you paid £45 for a bad representation of about five games that you don't really like anyway.

But despite all this, the games always sell well, and they keep getting made, so what do I know? Maybe 2012 is the year for an Olympic tie-in. Maybe, but I doubt it...

London 2012 is set for release in June, on all major platforms. If you would like to see more, and start making your own mind up about buying the game, check out the official trailer below:

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