Item - Space Olympics

Space Olympics was the first of the Interplanetary Spy books I ever read. It was immediately welcoming, as I still had childish dreams of being an Olympic athlete. But even as a kid, I saw a potential problem with this, which was that you, as a Spy, would be exposed as a non-elite athlete pretty quickly.

Fortunately, that's dealt with by having a lot of technological events, where you control a robot acrobat or something. They make for some neat puzzles (gears moving to raise or lower a space parasail) beyond the usual maze-tracing or object and pattern finding. And one of the endings that follows multiple bad choices is an Olympic official saying "Sorry, you messed up, try again next time." Another is being captured by a garbage scow spaceship in one of the many instances where you steer a craft into the stratosphere by mistake.

You're not just there to gain trophies and medals for Spy Center. Your object in this mission is to defend Andromeda, an athlete from the planet Nez, from the insidious Gresh ("evil master spy from the planet Sharn"), whose greenness just oozes off the page, what with the small warty tentacles on his head. He also has an army of clones dressed slightly differently from him, who if they make a certain hands yesterday, vanish. This plays a part in a puzzle and it's rather neat, because it gives Gresh the feeling of a villain who's everywhere.

SO also has some neat mulligans where the cool graphics rival the deaths. It makes sense that Olympic slip-ups don't result in fatalities, or the games themselves would not be very safe. But the stakes still feel high. You are still open to Gresh's sabotage or attacks, which include indirect stuff like a statue crashing around and burying you in rubble, or you getting squashed into a shrinking glass box. One ending from multiple paths I found particularly scary, even more than a planet blowing up, had one of Gresh's clones shooting a warp gun at you: "You are doomed to repeat this forever -- until THE END of time."

SO holds up well for me because it adds to the variety of settings. It's not just about finding the bad guy. There are worries, for different reasons, that Andromeda or Gresh may figure out your true purpose. What if you perform so badly you can't catch up? Even with the binary choices, I still felt a bit of imposter syndrome. Fortunately, at the end, the Galactic Police appear and haul Gresh away. It's satisfying.

More reviews by andrewschultz

My first ever Interplanetary Spy book!

I remember thinking the idea was fascinating at the time, although the device based on your eye colour was a bit suspect.

Generally a lot of fun, and Gresh was a suitably horrible super-villain.

More reviews by Aussiesmurf

In this mission your job is to pose as an athlete in the Space Olympics while protecting another athlete named Andromeda from kidnapping by space terrorists. The villain Gresh is intimidating, as is his cohort of clone agents. This is the first book in the series by Ron Martinez, and he brings a more mature writing style to the series, and the artwork is more refined and less cartoony than in the previous volumes. I give it 3 out of 5 stars.

More reviews by auximenes

This is the first book in the series not written by Seth McEvoy. It's slightly more wordy than McEvoy's work (which is not to say it has much text; none of these books do) and consequently has fewer puzzles. What puzzles are present are fairly simple. The most unusual thing in the book is a device which functions differently depending on the eye color of the reader.

More reviews by Demian