Nagano Winter Olympics '98

Nagano Winter Olympics '98

released on Dec 18, 1997

Nagano Winter Olympics '98

released on Dec 18, 1997

The Nagano Winter Olympic Games are here! Experience all of the thrills, spills and "chills" as you compete for glory against the rest of the world. It's time to find out what you're made of...Can you bring home a medal? 12 exciting Olympic events! 16 different countries! 1-4 player action. Set new world records and save them to your Controller Pak. Real-time motion captured athletes.


Also in series

Athens 2004
Athens 2004
Salt Lake 2002
Salt Lake 2002
Sydney 2000
Sydney 2000
Izzy's Quest for the Olympic Rings
Izzy's Quest for the Olympic Rings
Olympic Games: Atlanta 1996
Olympic Games: Atlanta 1996

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The first Olympic title on the N64 – and, curiously, the last one on a Nintendo platform until Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games. Olympic video games are usually collection of simple games based around Olympic Sports, often catering for multiplayer – and while Nagano does the first, it doesn’t really focus on multiplayer.

There are 10 sports – some with a few variations and are slow and tedious at best, and outright uninteresting at worst. The Skiing and snowboarding slaloms are best, but they’re both slow with some slight turns as you go through gates. The halfpipe is probably the worst, which has you copying input commands before you jump and your snowboarder doing a trick.

The AI is also insanely good at the game, so unless you manage to master the unclear and terrible controls, you’ll be happy if you make it to 15th place. The snowboard slalom is an odd exception, as I fell over a few dozen times and still won by a significant margin.

The massive let down in the multiplayer side is the complete lack of any simultaneous events. You all have to take turns setting records. Speed Skating is against an opponent, but in multiplayer you all race against a CPU player. Only curling, which is a turn-based sport, has any kind of interaction between players. On top of that, from what I can tell, each player still needs their own controller.

Nagano Winter Olympics is a shoddy sports minigame collection with poor controls and a terrible multiplayer mode.

I used to rent this game back in the old days and although I had no idea about winter sports curling was super fun.

Cruel. Ranges from bizarrely unintuitive to extremely button mashy, so much so that I could just about never keep up. I only got a feel for the ski jumping events, the rest rendered me a sitting duck. Fuck that, man.

I've always been much more fascinated with the winter olympics than the summer olympics. I do partially attribute this to Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games being one of the first games I really owned myself instead of sharing with the siblings, and having a blast with it on and off for years. But also, the winter olympics themselves are just much more of a spectacle to me. I wouldn't give this game to a kid who was into the winter olympics. A kid would want to play a sports game where they could feel like an athlete, moving with the same grace as the people they see on TV. The tedium and frustration present here does not feel rewarding even when pulled off. I'd be mad if I was a kid and a video game effectively told me "fuck you pal, being an athlete is Bullshit Insanely Hard. Go be an accountant or something lol"