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International Track & Field 2000 Review
Noel Brady
00/12/0000
To succeed in the world of athletics takes years of intense training, a supreme level of fitness and a technique honed through years of practice.
In this respect, International Track & Field 2 is an extremely accurate representation of the sport. The main difference being that your fingers are put to the test rather than your legs. Enudrance events such as the 1km time-trial cycling and even the 50m freestyle swimming will make you develop muscles in your digits you never even knew you had.
There are 12 events in all, and they offer a surpising amount of variety, even though the majority of them are controlled in exactly the same way. The easiest event is the 100m which requires you to do nothing but repeatedly hit the square and circle buttons. The other events are quite technical in comparison. For example, the horse vault demands lightning-fast fingers and makes the button sequences in Un Jammer Lammy look about as challenging as dialing the number for a pizza. With practice, and possibly the employment of some dubious button-hammering techniques you'll break every record in the Guinness World Records.
Unfortunately, once you've got them all, there's really no point in playing the game anymore, at least not on your own. International Track & Field 2 is a party game, plain and simple-- the more players you'll have, the more fun you'll have; and the more time you have between events to let your fingers recover. Stylish TV presentation has come a long way since the 8-bit NES days. With the flying camera angles, the personal close-ups, and the wide-angle action shots, the game looks like the sport being emulated. The graphics surely aren't breathtaking coming from the house of Metal Gear, but the style is perfect.
This latest Track & Field tries to mix up the competition, with varying degrees of success. The sprint events and tosses are still hysterical button-mashing events with a small degree of timing involved, but some more technical events are also added to fit the new sports. For instance, Clean and Jerk Weightlifting and Springboard Diving events involve sticking the move precisely during a lift or spin, while the Women's Horse Vault Gymnastics event is like Parappa the Rapper in that athletes must dial in moves in perfect timing to plant the move and stick the landing. They've also added lunges and leans for photo-finish victories.
Visually, International Track & Field 2 is very impressive with its swooping camera movements, action replays and photo finished adding a sense of style to the occasion. The athletes themselves look fantastic, their animation putting even the delectable Ms. Croft to shame. It's not gold medals all the way though because the 110m hurdles, the high jump, triple jump and shotput are all mysteriously missing from the list of events on offer. The cuts seem like Konami's deliberate attempt to distance this game from its predecessor. Certainly the brand-new canoeing, diving, vaulting and cycling events are among the best on offer this time around, but the loss of hurdles definitely detracts from the olympic feel of the game.
For instance, the canoeing event is boring and ugly like dirt, but it looks like a TV broadcast of a sport that's boring and ugly like dirt (there's even a replay to show all the glory of canoeing). On the other hand, the biking events (set in a dome) are incredible, and it's just fun to watch a belly-flop in the diving event. All of the character animation is good in motion, although the winning sequences are repetitive and dull. One other caveat on the graphics -- the pole vault event is set at an obtuse angle, making the timing on the event very different and very difficult compared to the original series.
This is the best anybody's done to capture athletic events outside of sports, but it's still a simplistic game despite the additions of strategy and timing. Even four-player bouts are typically weak. You find that out when you find him leading the field by 80 yards in an hundred-yard dash. Still, if this type of fast-action athleticism is to your liking, this is the best presentation and widest field of events for the series yet
