Torino 2006 [PS2]

Download and Buy Torino 2006 at Yahoo! Games on Demand.

As a peculiar sub-genre, Olympic games are a bi-annual failure. Though four years of development time lies between each iteration of summer and winter games, every game released to coincide with the competition seems to have been rushed into production and hustled out the door with little more than a kiss from the interlocked Olympic rings. In its own way then, Torino 2006 can be considered a champion, because it takes the bland art of Olympic video games to a whole new low.

Imagine a video game version of the Winter Olympics where you got to create the entire team for your favorite country. Where the interplay between personalities was important, and a win by one athlete could give another the morale boost necessary to triumph. Where training regimens play a part, and the differences between training ground and proving ground is subtle but of great importance.

If that sounds good, then keep imagining, because that game doesn't exist. In 2006, the year the HD Generation broke, all we've got is this lousy collection of events. Torino presents 15 competitions, though several are really the same thing. Hope you like speed skating, as there are three iterations, in 500m, 1000m and 1500m lengths. That could be cool, if the 500m introduced a basic mechanic which then had to be approached more skillfully to win the longer races. But there we go, imagining again.

No, Torino works on the supposition that stripping a complex physical activity down to a couple of button presses is all we need. So ski jumping uses a button press to launch, a bit of left stick balancing, a jump, and more balancing. Downhill skiing, luge, and bobsleigh (wasn't it "bobsled" before?) involve little more than steering. Ironically, the speed skating is the only event to demand anything at all from the player, as it relies on an initial frenzy of button mashing followed by a rhythmic tapping and holding pattern to keep the skater's speed up.

No matter, though -- it's all dreary. While the game looks fine, and downhill events actually capture a sense of speed, it all feels plastic and ineffective. The control set is so reduced that at times it feels as if there's no gameplay at all.

Furthermore, a sense of real competition never intrudes. Playing against the CPU, You might race another skater, win, and then see that four other anonymous athletes beat your time. Commentators always say that athletes are just doing their best and racing the clock, but we know that's crap. If a US skier has turned in a great performance, the Russian who follows knows it, and will push even harder to beat that time. There's nothing in this game to capture that sense of competition, indirect as it may be.

Neither is there any sense that these events are part of a gigantic global meet. All you'll see is a basic event introduction, the gameplay, and a horrendously slapdash medal presentation. Fans of the Olympics love the games for the stories and personalities of the individual athletes, but none of that is in evidence here.

And while we don't miss those athlete profiles that show how the Bolivian downhill slalom racer lost his dog two weeks before the games, Torino has gone too far in the opposite direction. There's no personality in the game at all. Play against the CPU, and you won't compete against Italy, Germany and France, but Computer 1, 2 and 3. How incredibly dull.

If the basic presentation is boring, then the commentary track actually steals your own personality every time it interrupts the otherwise quiet proceedings. You'll hear the same banal comments over and over again, and even the announcers sound as if their root canal appointment couldn't happen fast enough.

It's probably too much to ask that a single game capture all the nuances of a huge event like the Winter Olympics. But there isn't even the fun and spirit of gameplay that imbued the original Track and Field, and that was on the Atari-bloody-2600! When a modern game is getting lapped by an 8-bit wonder, something is really rotten in... well, Torino isn't in Denmark, but you get the point.