"A fairly good Olympics game, and a great party game"

Athens 2004 is just what it claims to be: a video game about the 2004 Olympic games. It's a nice game, to be certain, although it does have a few small flaws.

Presentation
Athens does its job well here, to be sure. The official Olympics license and graphics is a given (although those creepy Greek-people mascots are, well, creepy), so that doesn't count. What's great is how when you actually get into play mode, it looks amazingly realistic.
The gameplay is simple, so it leaves a lot of open memory, and they take advantage of this with character models that look shockingly real, right down to facial expressions. During non-gaming scenes you can often see other runners on the track in the background.
Characters grip their javelin or wave to the crowd in a realistic way. It's very nice. Yes, animations do repeat, but there is a decent variety.
At the end of a competition, the top three athletes receive medals, of course, and their flags are raised on the flagpoles. Unfortunately, the national anthem of the winning country does not play. Oh, well.

Gameplay
The gameplay is very simple, to say the least, but what do you really expect? If you are playing the 100-meter, what better way is there to do it than to alternate mashing X and O? It works well. Some events are similar (i.e., all swimming events are the same, and all sprints are the same), but there is a decent amount of variety. A bunch of guys huddled around a TV can easily figure out how to play, and can easily compete with one another regardless of experience, and that means a lot.
Of course, it also means that if you're by yourself, there's not much to play. You will get bored after a while if you play by yourself after a while. I do not recommend even playing by yourself, since you'll only conquer the records too quickly, and there'll be nothing left to work for with your friends. Nothing if better about this game than when four guys play together and try to break each others' records. It's lots of fun.
It also allows the use of the DDR dance pad to play almost any event. I can only say that you should prepare yourself to become exhausted. It is lots of great fun, though.

Overall Experience
I gave this game a 7 for a reason, that being that it is solely a multiplayer party game. If you have three friends, you will have the time of your life.
I do wish there were a few more sports. I understand why things like basketball and baseball were left out (since they could never compete with titles dedicated to those sports), but it would have been nice to have other sports added in there. Obviously a marathon wouldn't work, but throwing in some relay races would be cool. Perhaps some more archery and shooting events would have worked. I could even see wrestling getting thrown in there with a timing system close to "Rock-Paper-Scissors". That lowered the score a bit, too.

All in all, it is a great game. It's fairly cheap already, too (I picked mine up for $40 on August 1, 2004). Buy it if you have some buddies. Don't if you live by yourself in a cave.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 08/09/04