641st played so far
Genre: Sports
Platform: Playstation
Year of Release: 1996
Developer: Konami
Publisher: Konami
I’ve played Track & Field some time ago – a minigame collection based on various athletics challenges, set up for arcade play and the inspiration for Olympics games, Mario and Sonic or otherwise, for a long time to come.
Returning to the formula, this game takes the minigames from Track & Field and its sequel Hyper Sports, which we have yet to cover, but with the upgrades that more than a decade would cover.
Our Thoughts
I had fun with a lot of the mini games in this game. A lot of it was near-controler breaking button smashing trying to run as fast as you can, as well as trying to get your button presses timed right. There were still plenty that was hard – I couldn’t get the hurdles right – but with unlimited continues and retires, it was quite easy to keep trying to win the events.
And then I got to the high jump. Tried and kept trying. And I just couldn’t get it right – I didn’t see where I was going wrong.ย Looking it up online, I wasn’t the only one – the game was really unclear what you were meant to do. To be honest, the instructions weren’t great on what to do – it was just easy enough to figure it out most of the time. Here, though, I couldn’t, and it was suddenly frustrating.
This is a minigame collection and a lot of it reflects that – the graphics are fine but not amazing, the gameplay is simple but with plenty of variation between them, and of course the difficulty gets mixed up a bit, although I’m sure different people would have found different activities difficult. On the whole, it still works and I suspect it would have worked ever better as a party game.