I thought the Olympics required skill...

Well, like the title states, I thought the Olympics took some skill, but apparently all you need is mad button pushing skills. In this case the ability to push 2 buttons one after the other as fast as you can on a Dreamcast controller. Which by the way, isn't that easy to do. I'm not going to cover all the events one by one, like Alkaiser did. I'm going to give more of an over of the game with the events as examples.

A lot of the events in Sydney 2000 are a lot like Track and Field on the old NES. You just have the mash the buttons pretty fast, but the trick now is to mash them in sequence, first red then the blue button! Very technical. Come on folks, how many years has it been since Track and Field? Don't you think by now we can think of something better than this?! Apparently not because you need it all over the place with Sydney 2K!! The DC controller really isn't the best controller to do this with to. It doesn't exactly sit right for you to do coordinated button mashing, so you have to figure out some way to brace the controller, a second person holding it down works great! Sheesh. This works in the 100M dash, swimming, javelin, hammer throw, you name it if you need "power" then you will have to do the mash!

Sydney 2K's graphics are pretty sub-par. For being on a Dreamcast they really do not stand out at all. It doesn't seem like the development team took any time out to customize the DC version at all because I think the graphics definitely look low res. Most events are quite short lived and there aren't any detailed textures on any of the athlete models. Compare this to something like Virtua Fighter 3 and you realize there's a lot of power not being utilized.

Sound isn't that great either. It plays some tracks then the track ends and their's quite a long silence before it will start up again, but since it's always the same track you're not missing out on much.

There are basically 2 modes to playing the game "Arcade" and "Olympic." The main difference is you have to "train" in Olympic mode. You have stats like Upper body strength, lower body strength or flexibility and there are stupid exercises you can do to improve your stats before you actually try competing. On top of that there are 3 rounds of competition so you can "PUMP YOU UP" (Hanz and Franz accent) 3 times as well. This might be interesting, that is if it wasn't pointless. "Training" seemed to make absolutely no difference in my performance as long as I could button mash effectively most of the time. Well...whatever.

The one bright spot that I can mention about Sydney 2K is not actually about the game itself, but rather a pair of maracas. That's right you heard me maracas. These maracas are from the game Samba De Amigo, actually they aren't the authentic maracas they're from a third party. Anyway, Samba De Amigo is a maraca playing game and guess what? You can use them in a lot of other games too, including Sydney 2K. Remember that I said the DC controller really isn't built to do button mashing? Well, instead of button mashing you can shake the maracas as fast as you can and guess what? It's WAY more effective! I can easily max out the "power" bar in all the events with it! Amazing. I almost broke the world record for the 100 meter dash the first time I used them! I was WAY out in front, it wasn't even funny. The main drawback to the maracas are they don't have an "action" button. Sometimes you need to push the green button to do something, like jump hurdles, in between button mashing and the maracas don't have that button on them. If it weren't for that they may have been the perfect Sydney 2K controller. Weird, huh?

Overall, I can't even say anything decent about the Sydney 2K other than it reminded me of Track and Field, and that was a game from the 80's. Not only could the developers not think of a new user interface, they couldn't even present us with good graphics. Geez, I've seem better models and textures on Playstation games, not that the Playstation is bad hardware, but how much newer tech is in the DC? Ex-squeeze me. They didn't even include very interesting events either. I remember Atlanta '96 on the Playstation being a better game than this, and I didn't like that game much either. Anyway, like most other multi-sports games Sydney 2K turns out to be another dud. If you've got the money go out and rent it, it will surely provide a solid 10 minutes worth of entertainment. If you happen to have those maracas, then you've got at least another 10 minutes.