The cream of the crop.
PLAYERS: 1-2 simultaneous/alternating
PUBLISHER: Konami
DEVELOPER: Konami
GENRE: Track-and-field
RELEASE DATE: April 1987
If you’re feeling Olympic, look no further than Track & Field, the game that shows you just how out of shape you really are. Konami gives you eight athletic events repeated ad infinitum: the 100-Meter Dash, Long Jump, 110-Meter Hurdles, Javelin Throw, Skeet Shooting, Triple Jump, Archery, and the High Jump. You can select any event at the start of the game to get a feel for it, but should you qualify, you’ll have to keep playing through all the events in the menu order. They start off easy. 100-Meter Dash is a button mash, a real knee-knockin’ smash. Literally, all you do is hit ‘A’ with whichever finger you wish to fall off. The Long Jump, the 110-Meter Hurdles, and the Javelin Throw continue the mash-a-thon, while hitting ‘Up’ and ‘Right’ on the D-pad enable you to jump and throw respectively. These four events ably combine precise timing with blunt force. Triple Jump and the High Jump utilize similar controls, while asking the player to account for the angle of the jumps; tougher to master, but still enjoyable. Archery is an excellent change of pace. Hold back ‘Left’ on the D-pad – far, but not too far – then let go as the target sails past. Skeet Shooting is the only real stinker, due to its bizarre mechanics. As skeets are launched, two boxes “automatically” target them. All you, in theory, have to do is shoot them, but your timing has to be dead-on. Unlike the other events, Skeet feels more luck-based than skill based. As a whole, Track & Field is fun to play for five minutes or an hour, depending on how deep you want to go. It’s one of the purest mini-game collections on the NES.
B+
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6 replies on “#681 – Track & Field”
I had bought the nes max just for the two games in this series.
Yeah, this game is was more enjoyable with a turbo button!
The skeet shooting is annoying. Sometimes you can get a good rhythm going, but then you miss one and everything goes to hell quickly.
I love the fact that there was even an easter egg in the javelin throw.
It's true, you can't progress very far in the rounds without a turbo controller.
My favorite event was Skeet Shooting. I own that event. I recently got a perfect round after playing it for the first time in years. Archery on the other hand, completely sucks.
I enjoyed the Skeet Shooting more than the Archery, the latter almost always being too difficult for me 🙁 If I remember, the buttons A and B were for the right box and the direction keys for the left box. After shooting a few (eggs? skeets?), the boxes used to increase in size, and that really helped. Thanks to turbo controllers, I could get through the button-mashing stages quite easily. I never figured out the technique of scoring anything other than 2.26m in High Jump though 🙁
Great two player game. Back in the day, before anyone we knew had turbo controllers, my friends and I would take a spoon and placing our index and middle finger in the depression rapidly move it back and forth between the a and b buttons.