Summer Challenge: Athletics Tournament

Living as I do in Scotland can be, as the locals say, a driech experience. Not in terms of quality of life, rather in terms of the weather. A Scottish summer can amount to a bright, but ultimately overcast day, an ice lolly and your neighbours all saying “It’s the warmest day so far, eh?” So when offered the chance to play Summer Challenge: Athletics Tournament in the damp month of September, I couldn’t resist. What sun dripped joy I was to inherit, maybe this wasn’t a crap Scottish summer after all.

Summer Challenge is a fairly self explanatory title. The premise is that it’s time to hand out some medals to some top athletes, competing for the pride of their nation. Except, it’s not their nation, but a series of oddly coloured and campily realised teams. The exclusion of nations in favour of “Royals” “Buccaneers” “Wild Hogs”, etc. is curious, and I wondered if it was a legal thing. This is doubtful, as I’m sure Nintendo would be unhappy about the inclusion of team “Rocket” and “Galactic.” You can compete in any event on its own, take part in pre-set or custom cups, or embark on a career. To be fair, it’s hard to expect too much more from a game like this, but it did feel a little lacklustre. The game offers many disciplines, running, swimming, field events, fencing; the usual “Track and Field” fair. In fact, Summer Challenge shares a lot with its spiritual elder.

The first similarity you would notice is the control scheme. It’s similar enough that your hand might be cramping at the mere thought of it, but different enough to feel “next-gen”. Mashing buttons has been replaced by “Jiggling” the analogue stick. To say that my hand hurt after a 100mtr sprint would be underselling it, and to say it had damn near fallen off after 400mtrs isn’t that much of an exaggeration. Other disciplines offer familiar styles to any athletic or Olympic game has done in the past; set your speed, choose your angle, hope for the best. Actually, thinking about it now, the game doesn’t offer anything that hasn’t been covered before by Mario and Sonic, Beijing 2008 or any of the other, surprisingly numerous, athletics games. As a single-player game, Summer Challenge: Athletics Tournament is fairly mediocre. The bare-bones career mode provides an adequate feeling of progression, but is paper thin. It feels like a tacked on addition, as if having no “campaign” mode would have looked odd in this generation of gaming. The game’s main appeal, as is the case with most sports titles, is in its multiplayer. It is as you’d expect, allowing 2-4 players to compete in single events or cups to see who’s the pinnacle armchair athlete. Cleverly, the game allows both players to simultaneously participate in field events, cutting down on the waiting time between events. Summer Challenge: Athletics Tournament offers the most bare-bones online mode I’ve seen in my life, as it consists of a fairly uninformative leader-board system… and that’s it.

Visually, the game is quite pleasing to the eye. Arenas mix Roman architecture with modern twists, glowing with warm gold tones. The athletes all look like a designer was told to make standard models, then “up the zany factor.” They’re fairly silly, but they’re all distinct enough. Music is fairly average, and the sound in general does nothing fancy; it’s pure function. In fact that’s a fairly good description of the game in general, as it’s purely functional. It does nothing unique, it does nothing special, it’s existence is overall, well, odd. It’s not linked to any major real-life tournament, it’s not piggy-backing on the success of a similar game, it’s just there. It’s good for a fun evening with some friends, and as a budget title it’s definitely serviceable.