CBS Sportsline Track & Field 2004 Hands-On Impressions

CBS Sportsline Track and Field is the old PC classic Decathlon made mobile. With updated graphics and snappy, simple gameplay, this game tests your button-mashing skills to the extreme. The beta version we played was polished and pretty, but it thus far lacks the innovation to make it a standout title.

Basically, you thump the 4 and 6 keys repeatedly through seven events: 100m dash, long jump, shot put, high jump, 110m hurdles, discus, and javelin. Some events play intuitively (6 to run and 4 to jump hurdles, for instance), while others, like the shot put, take several tries to understand. Hopefully the instructions will improve for the launch version. The multiplayer aspects are limited to high-score posting, which misses a great opportunity for quasi head-to-head gameplay. Compared to the Playman titles, which are very similar in terms of genre but implemented in a much better fashion, CBS Sportsline Track and Field 2004 looks like a bronze medalist at best.