Have You Played... Asterix at the Olympic Games?

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.

I didn't expect much from Asterix at the Olympic Games, and that's definitely part of why I like it as much as I do. I think it's a genuinely good PS2-era action-platformer though, and one with a delightful, meta story.

Based on the comic of the same name, you must steer Asterix and Obelix - alternating control between the two - towards entering and winning at the Olympic games. There's lots of block-pushing environment puzzles, beating up of Romans with entertaining combat and some tolerable olympic minigames.

It's also based on the 2008 French-language film of the same name, though, and part of the plot of the game deals with the merging of those three universes. The villain Brutus has opened portals between worlds, causing a 2D papyrus Getafix from the comics and real actors from the movie (depicted in filmed cutscenes) to cross over into the 3D world of the game. This is an amazing amount of commitment to the various versions of Asterix - one that I suspect didn't pay off in terms of sales, but does in terms of making the game more remarkable than it would have been otherwise.