Olympic jam

Ever since the venerable Track & Field arcade game, developers have tried to capture the excitement and majesty of athletes pushing themselves to the limit to prove they're the best. It almost always ends up as a button-mashing fest, but even those can be all right if you're in the right mood and you have enough socked away for replacement controllers.

Athens 2004 requires you to jam on the buttons for most events, true, but there is more to it than that. By the time you get through everything, you will have experienced a wide variety of control schemes.

Of course, most of the track events require you to pound on X and Circle, but the 800- and 1200-meter races take mercy on your hands and actually require timing and strategy. Events like women's floor exercises and archery require no jamming at all, unless by "jamming" you mean hitting directions DDR-style.

But as much as the developers tried to vary the input scheme, there's not all that much room in which to maneuver, and this game does get old fast.

Before you jump in and go for the gold in earnest, you have the opportunity to practice and perfect your technique in all twenty-five events. There is even an option to watch a movie of each event, complete with on-screen graphics indicating which button should be pressed and when. Text instructions are available before each practice run, and also in the pause menu for those last-second refreshers.

Once in the real competition, you can try for medals in the individual events or take on the decathlon, heptathlon, or a custom group of events. Of course, the game logs your personal records, so if you shatter the World or Olympic record your name will go on the high score board.

There's a rather laid-back cut scene before each event. Since this is an Olympic simulation and not SSX, you'll find no trash-talking here, just some stretching and waving. After the competition, you get the obligatory and understated presentation of the medals.

That's pretty much it. No filler, no frills. The Olympic shop that was in the early builds is nowhere to be found, and there's no story mode following your team in its formative years.

Who's the official hand surgeon of the 2004 Olympics?

If you are good at rhythmically beating the hell out of two adjacent buttons, you'll have most of the events licked in no time, then you'll get bored and stop playing. If you are not good at the mashing, you will lose most events, then you'll get frustrated and stop playing. The events are so brief and scraping across the buttons at hand-blurring speeds is so painful, that I don't see many marathon sessions in most players' futures. You can achieve a respectable level of success rapidly alternating finger presses, but the friction pain is just replaced with cramping. (In a very nice throwback to the NES Power Pad, some of the four-player events can be played using Dance Dance Revolution pads.)

But that's why there's a mix. About a fourth of the events require no button mashing at all. Some require a combination of timing and positioning. In archery, you have to adjust your aim to compensate for the wind, but the longer you wait the smaller the target becomes. The rings competition starts with you steadying the athlete with both analog sticks, has you alternately tap the triggers to smooth out the moves, and ends with a series of button taps for the dismount. Weightlifting may seem like a straight-ahead masher, but breaking the lift into sections (the left trigger advances you into the next part) and letting you select the weight to use keeps you thinking a little.

It's not a bad rental, but the absence of a story mode, mini games - something - hurts Athens 2004 almost fatally. This is one Olympic contender that should have used some performance enhancers.

· · · Nick Vlamakis