The predictable thing to do right now would be to start this review moaning about the state of my wrist or my fingers, but to heck with all that – I’ve just seen Pyramid Head out-sprint Frogger in a 100-metre race. Yes, I’ve just seen a grotesque freak with a metal box on his head run quicker than a disturbingly happy amphibian. Hmm. In any case, I’ll openly admit that when I picked up Sumo Digital’s New International Track and Field to slot into my DS I wasn’t particularly looking forward to mashing both my console and my wrist and upper-arm by competing in the twenty plus athletic sports that have been piled into it, so it’s come as quite a nice surprise that I’ve actually become rather keen on it.

These kinds of game have been knocking about for ages, obviously, and on the face of it NITAF (now that’s what I call an acronym) doesn’t exactly do anything to break the mould and astonish us with some kind of unique take on things. Across a number of different disciplines you’ll compete as a number of ‘zany’ characters by frantically tapping and slashing away at the touch screen for most events (or using buttons for the events that allow you to do so) in a desperate attempt to rack up high scores and new records, and… well, that’s about nut shelled it. It literally is what it says on the box – a ‘new’ version of Track and Field, complete with DS-specific controls and colourful-yet-simplistic 3D visuals.

It’s still great fun, of course, although some events are rather more awkward to get the hang of than others. Your classic hyper-speed slash/tap events like sprinting and swimming are all easy enough and require you to slide the DS stylus left and right as rapidly as you can across a small bar at the bottom of the screen, and even with my cack-handed butterfingered stupidity I only managed to accidentally fling the DS on the floor once, and even then because I sneezed. It’s tasking, sure, and it will completely knacker you in the longer events (the swimming ones being particularly painful), but it’s good fun in short, concentrated sessions.

Where the wheels come ever so slightly off the go-kart is when you need to slash and tap your way through something, i.e. the hurdles. The smaller dimensions of the DS make slashing away and then lifting the stylus at the correct point really rather awkward if you are wanting to actually watch what’s happening on the top screen, and although the option to press either the D-pad or the X button relieves this slightly it still cramps the hands a little too much. It’s not something that brings your enjoyment to a huge juddering half, granted, but it’ll still frustrate a little. In general some of the events are also heckishly tricky – it took me a good dozen or so attempts at the rowing to even get a bronze medal.

Other events do add a slightly different tangent on the classic formula; the 400 metres has you having to follow a little metronomic pulse across the stylus bar for the first portion, with it getting quicker and hence harder to follow the further you go. Archery, meanwhile, has you scribbling frantically to pull back your bow string and then, via a twitching cursor overlaid on a target, brushing and scratching to aim the thing as near the centre as you can, taking into account the wind conditions. It takes a good deal of skill, and as a result those personal bests are all the more rewarding.

There’s obviously not too much variation in control schemes, of course, and this is actually why the game shines so much. Throwing in individual and confusing combinations for each of the twenty-four events (including sprinting, steeplechase, hammer throwing, long jump and high board diving) would have led to all sorts of massive brain jams at the worst possible times, and hence there are about four different main ‘themes’, be it frantic slashing, timed circling or rhythmic tapping, spread across the disciplines. It’s a case of something not needing to go too far out of its comfort zone; if you buy one of these games, you’re pretty much accepting that you’re going to half kill yourself doing them anyway.

Now, the main issue I always have with this kind of game is that the single player side of things always feel like slightly lonely practice sessions for when you get a mate round to have a proper multiplayer session. In an attempt to add a bit of longevity to proceedings, Sumo have plopped in a career mode and a plethora of unlockable characters, costumes and trophies for you to work your way toward. These include awesome bobble headed versions of Pyramid Head from Silent Hill and Solid Snake, and seeing the little guys gyrating wildly around a parallel bar setup is possibly the greatest gaming moment of all time. Seriously.

The career mode itself is actually just a series of four-event quadathlons (not a word, I don’t care) in which you compete to tot up the highest score possible against three AI opponents. You start off on easy with some simpler events and gradually work your way through each mini championship trying to win the overall gold, with the above-mentioned rewards as your incentive. In all honesty it’s not anything particularly enthralling and you’ll probably find yourself being able to see and do everything within about three or so hours if your body holds up, but it’s nice to have a little bit of meat on what previously has been a pretty bare bone. There’s also the option to work through each event singularly if you need practice and a challenge mode whereby you take one of the famous Konami back catalogue through a themed Olympic event such as Frogger’s swim up a river trying to gobble flies and avoid logs. Nifty.

Where NITAF really shines, though, is in the way that it all works pretty much seamlessly online, which for the DS is something of a novelty. You can set up online jousts with ease, take part in some really quite lovely leaderboard battles as well and also get little news feeds when records are broken, even when you are playing the single player form of the game. It somehow manages to make sense of the rather messy friends codes situation as well by having friends lists and rivals lists for people you’ve played but don’t know as well, which is a really neat little addition. In one swipe it adds tremendous value to the package, and it doesn’t hurt that it fully supports single-cart download local multiplayer too. In fact, it’s safe to say that as we stand right now, the game makes by far the best use of the DS’ online capabilities. Kudos, Sumo.

Hence, it’s not hard at all to recommend New International Track and Field to pretty much anyone with a DS knocking about. As a bit of a single player laugh it performs better than you’d expect thanks to the decent unlockables and sheer number of events to choose from, whilst the online aspect means you’re never far from a challenge should you wish for one. It’s a great case of a developer realising that sometimes you don’t need to make wholesale changes to a series; instead, by concentrating on the native hardware and adding plenty of events and online trickery they’ve made what could have been a pretty basic meal into a mini banquet. It was never going to be a nine or ten simply because the nature of the thing is relatively narrow scope of such a thing, but for what it sets out to do it succeeds very, very well indeed, no matter what your aching arm might think.