1500m

1500m is an athletic track event featured exclusively in the 3DS version of the Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games. The gameplay for this event comes with a control gimmick.

1500m is a real Olympic event where the athletes have to race triple laps on a 400m track. However, the name is a misnomer for this minigame as the game automatically skips to the final lap from the start at 2:40 minutes; as a result the player actually plays only 400m of the track.

This event can only be played by the Challengers group, which consists of Yoshi, Bowser Jr., Shadow and Silver the Hedgehog.

Gameplay
As mentioned earlier, the minigame of this event is skipped to the final lap, where each of the characters are visibly shown to be exhausted and can't run as fast. The aim of the game is to run and switch between the lanes to speed across the numerous dash panels scattered across the four lanes, to complete the final stretch ahead of the competitors.

The controls involve co-ordinating the control pad + ABXY buttons that the moving and running functions are mapped to, according to the input commands on the screen. At the start, the first set of controls for moving and dashing are shown, so use the buttons accordingly - keep pressing the dash button to keep running, and move left or right to a lane with a nearby dash panel.

However, the minigame comes with a gimmick to make things more tricky. Every few moments the controls for running and moving lanes change, so the player has to be on-guard and switch to the new buttons quickly; the dash button for example may change from X to B for example. This becomes more complicated in the final lap when the running + moving controls become inverted between the direction pad and ABXY buttons.