Another in the series of Epyx Olympic sports games. Compete in many different sporting events like: Ski Jump, Hot Dog, Biathlon, Bobsled, Free Skating, Figure Skating and more.
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Maybe the worst game of the Nes. The controls are god awful and the music is dreadful. Not worth anything besides a laugh.
After seemingly centuries, Summer is finally long gone and Winter is right around the corner. At the very least in my neck of the woods, temperatures have finally consistently fallen to a very cold comforting condition. I can bundle myself up in trendy hoodies instead of wearing gaudy summer wear, and no longer do I need to be pestered by wasps constantly trying to nest in my porch's light. Drink some hot cocoa and enjoy yourself, bundle up and read a book, cause it's too damn cold out to do extraneous work outside. Fantastic excuses abound to sit around and just be comfy. My kind of season, I truly don't understand the hate. I'll be baking cookies in the meantime...get comfortable.
Winter Games is yet another Epyx sporting compilation that was released on every computer you could possibly imagine, even if you stumbled upon a wood-textured pile of crap in the Swiss Alps it could probably run a copy of this game. Of course, naturally they would want a taste of that sweet sweet delectable console money. Enter Atelier Double, a developer who knew exactly what they were doing when bringing this game to the NES/Famicom.
Upon starting this you'll find only four events to choose from; Hotdog Aerials, Speed Skating, Figure Skating, and Bobsled. This is bamboozling, because there can exist up to at least seven events depending on what computer your thrifty shopping mother could saddle your 80s family with. What happened to Luge, Biathlon and Slalom Skiing? I guess the community voted them off the circuit, clearly the audience just couldn't take the heartpounding thrill of the Biathlon. I mean, I sure couldn't, I'm literally falling asleep in my office chair as we speak.
Hot Dog Aerials:
The AVGN was famously left speechless by the term of "Hot Dog Aerials" instead of Freestyle Skiing. The term "hot dogging" means to show off and perform stunts, it's something I actually learned from watching Yogi's First Christmas back on Cartoon Network, and it's a term used repeatedly by the Irish podcasters I listen to on Old School Wrestling Review. It's peculiar to see nowadays, because like James Rolfe you'd probably just imagine a bunch of bunned frankfurters flying off a ski jump doing flips in the air. It'd be a lot more entertaining if that were the case, but instead it's a dude doing the ski jump with you stumbling on how to do more than just flips in the air before crashing face-first into the snow. Upon giving up on simple button presses, I started doing motions for spinning piledrivers on my dpad and there was where I found out that holding a diagonal direction will make your skier do more tricks. My fighting game mindset has finally paid off, at long last. Mystery solved gang.
Speed Skating:
rolls face on keyboard
Ten dollars please.
Actually, I'm not gonna leave it on that because once again the controls deserve to be explained at least the best that I can through text. In order to move in this race, you must press left and right on the d-pad constantly, but that isn't everything. You must rapidly press those directions to accelerate, then find the correct rhythm to maintain a high speed. I tried my best to find that rhythm, but it feels like if I'm off even a fraction of a nanosecond the CPU opponent suddenly charges ahead and leaves me to wallow in my shame. With only four games, I guess they really banked on the opponent in this game and the complexity of the incoming game to get any length of playtime out of this lousy port.
Figure Skating:
By far the most infamous of the events, because it is quite literally unplayable without access to the manual, the internet or divine intervention. It's known for being unresponsive, but it's not so much "unresponsive" as more that the controls are so unintuitive that no human civilization could possibly interpret them to any meaningful degree. You could bring every top scientist at NASA to my house and ask them to solve Figure Skating on my NES and all of them would bellow "IONNO!" before throwing the controller back at my face.
In addition to needing to know the full trick move list (diagonals are used again, yay.), you also need to know timings and "the flow" to the game in order to get the best score possible. If you fail to make a correct input for a trick, your girl falls and brings shame upon her country. Fail to hit the A button in time to stick a landing for a triple axel? Have a nice landing on your bum. How they even thought that this game would be suitable for the NES without using the second button is martian in itself, and in practice it's even more mysterious than the usage of Stonehenge. I was able to get off one or two spinning maneuvers and managed to score a 0.2, which I consider a victory since the shitty nutcracker music was killing my brain cells faster than any adventure with hard liquor could ever hope to achieve.
"Maybe if we make the Figure Skating game impenetrable to an impossible degree that'll give heaps of replayability to our four game compilation." ~ Moron at Atelier Double prior to searching for bugs in their co-worker's scalp
Bobsled:
This has to be one of the most humiliating attempts to utilize the power of the NES. Your bobsled is seen in this tiny little window with what looks to be mangled computer language floating in the top-half of it. This portion of the screen looks glitched, meanwhile half of it is taken up by the game map of the one course you can ride on. I used to think Super Mario Kart was wearing some serious clown shoes with it's ridiculous split-screen setup, but it looks like F-Zero in comparison to Bobsled on NES Winter Games. What makes this portion look even more comedic, is that the Atari 2600 version of Bobsledding straight up looks impressive and fast. It's cathartic isn't it? After years of abuse by gamers at large for being "too simple" or low-tech, the Atari finally gets to experience the taste of victory and bury another system's face in yellow snow. Congratulations friend, you earned it.
tl;dr NES Winter Games is a very smelly port and it deserves to be saddled along with the rest of the worst on the system for it's flying saucer logic controls, astounding lack of content compared to it's other versions, and failing to make the experience suitable for a console audience. I will say that I had a bit of fun in Hot Dog Aerials at least, which puts it above Ice Climber and Ikari Warriors for me.
Winter Games is yet another Epyx sporting compilation that was released on every computer you could possibly imagine, even if you stumbled upon a wood-textured pile of crap in the Swiss Alps it could probably run a copy of this game. Of course, naturally they would want a taste of that sweet sweet delectable console money. Enter Atelier Double, a developer who knew exactly what they were doing when bringing this game to the NES/Famicom.
Upon starting this you'll find only four events to choose from; Hotdog Aerials, Speed Skating, Figure Skating, and Bobsled. This is bamboozling, because there can exist up to at least seven events depending on what computer your thrifty shopping mother could saddle your 80s family with. What happened to Luge, Biathlon and Slalom Skiing? I guess the community voted them off the circuit, clearly the audience just couldn't take the heartpounding thrill of the Biathlon. I mean, I sure couldn't, I'm literally falling asleep in my office chair as we speak.
Hot Dog Aerials:
The AVGN was famously left speechless by the term of "Hot Dog Aerials" instead of Freestyle Skiing. The term "hot dogging" means to show off and perform stunts, it's something I actually learned from watching Yogi's First Christmas back on Cartoon Network, and it's a term used repeatedly by the Irish podcasters I listen to on Old School Wrestling Review. It's peculiar to see nowadays, because like James Rolfe you'd probably just imagine a bunch of bunned frankfurters flying off a ski jump doing flips in the air. It'd be a lot more entertaining if that were the case, but instead it's a dude doing the ski jump with you stumbling on how to do more than just flips in the air before crashing face-first into the snow. Upon giving up on simple button presses, I started doing motions for spinning piledrivers on my dpad and there was where I found out that holding a diagonal direction will make your skier do more tricks. My fighting game mindset has finally paid off, at long last. Mystery solved gang.
Speed Skating:
rolls face on keyboard
Ten dollars please.
Actually, I'm not gonna leave it on that because once again the controls deserve to be explained at least the best that I can through text. In order to move in this race, you must press left and right on the d-pad constantly, but that isn't everything. You must rapidly press those directions to accelerate, then find the correct rhythm to maintain a high speed. I tried my best to find that rhythm, but it feels like if I'm off even a fraction of a nanosecond the CPU opponent suddenly charges ahead and leaves me to wallow in my shame. With only four games, I guess they really banked on the opponent in this game and the complexity of the incoming game to get any length of playtime out of this lousy port.
Figure Skating:
By far the most infamous of the events, because it is quite literally unplayable without access to the manual, the internet or divine intervention. It's known for being unresponsive, but it's not so much "unresponsive" as more that the controls are so unintuitive that no human civilization could possibly interpret them to any meaningful degree. You could bring every top scientist at NASA to my house and ask them to solve Figure Skating on my NES and all of them would bellow "IONNO!" before throwing the controller back at my face.
In addition to needing to know the full trick move list (diagonals are used again, yay.), you also need to know timings and "the flow" to the game in order to get the best score possible. If you fail to make a correct input for a trick, your girl falls and brings shame upon her country. Fail to hit the A button in time to stick a landing for a triple axel? Have a nice landing on your bum. How they even thought that this game would be suitable for the NES without using the second button is martian in itself, and in practice it's even more mysterious than the usage of Stonehenge. I was able to get off one or two spinning maneuvers and managed to score a 0.2, which I consider a victory since the shitty nutcracker music was killing my brain cells faster than any adventure with hard liquor could ever hope to achieve.
"Maybe if we make the Figure Skating game impenetrable to an impossible degree that'll give heaps of replayability to our four game compilation." ~ Moron at Atelier Double prior to searching for bugs in their co-worker's scalp
Bobsled:
This has to be one of the most humiliating attempts to utilize the power of the NES. Your bobsled is seen in this tiny little window with what looks to be mangled computer language floating in the top-half of it. This portion of the screen looks glitched, meanwhile half of it is taken up by the game map of the one course you can ride on. I used to think Super Mario Kart was wearing some serious clown shoes with it's ridiculous split-screen setup, but it looks like F-Zero in comparison to Bobsled on NES Winter Games. What makes this portion look even more comedic, is that the Atari 2600 version of Bobsledding straight up looks impressive and fast. It's cathartic isn't it? After years of abuse by gamers at large for being "too simple" or low-tech, the Atari finally gets to experience the taste of victory and bury another system's face in yellow snow. Congratulations friend, you earned it.
tl;dr NES Winter Games is a very smelly port and it deserves to be saddled along with the rest of the worst on the system for it's flying saucer logic controls, astounding lack of content compared to it's other versions, and failing to make the experience suitable for a console audience. I will say that I had a bit of fun in Hot Dog Aerials at least, which puts it above Ice Climber and Ikari Warriors for me.
The success of Summer Games (1984) on computers had prompted Epyx to continue their series of sports games, adapting the 1988 Winter Olympics, held in Calgary, in advance. Like its summer counterpart, Winter Games was a great success, with a spriting that was rather elegant for its time. All the positive remarks that can be heard about this title are valid, but unfortunately cannot be applied to the NES port, which manages the feat of being, by far, the worst of all.
It is notable that a number of events have been removed in this version – for capacity reasons, not unlike the first ports of Hyper Olympics to the Famicom –, namely the biathlon and ski jumping. This is a decision that is difficult to understand, as these are arguably the most interesting and natural events to play on the NES. Instead, the title retains the figure events, which require the player to have the manual open with them, as the controls are so cryptic: one rather inexplicable choice is the refusal to use the B button for anything, resulting in weird button combinations that could have been avoided. In particular, the figure skating feels exceptionally heavy, and getting through an axel or lutz is not even satisfactory. In general, the port constantly betrays the fact that it is primarily a game for computers. The menu seems much more suited to the Commodore 64 or MSX, as does the bobsleigh interface, which puts the action in the top right corner of the screen, making it almost unreadable.
Critics were not wrong: Winter Games is a disastrous port, failing to emulate what makes a sports game interesting. Compared to the NES version of Track & Field (1985), it comes across as archaic and terribly complicated to understand. It's no wonder that the addition of Winter Games to the Wii Virtual Console catalogue favoured the Commodore 64 version over the NES version.
It is notable that a number of events have been removed in this version – for capacity reasons, not unlike the first ports of Hyper Olympics to the Famicom –, namely the biathlon and ski jumping. This is a decision that is difficult to understand, as these are arguably the most interesting and natural events to play on the NES. Instead, the title retains the figure events, which require the player to have the manual open with them, as the controls are so cryptic: one rather inexplicable choice is the refusal to use the B button for anything, resulting in weird button combinations that could have been avoided. In particular, the figure skating feels exceptionally heavy, and getting through an axel or lutz is not even satisfactory. In general, the port constantly betrays the fact that it is primarily a game for computers. The menu seems much more suited to the Commodore 64 or MSX, as does the bobsleigh interface, which puts the action in the top right corner of the screen, making it almost unreadable.
Critics were not wrong: Winter Games is a disastrous port, failing to emulate what makes a sports game interesting. Compared to the NES version of Track & Field (1985), it comes across as archaic and terribly complicated to understand. It's no wonder that the addition of Winter Games to the Wii Virtual Console catalogue favoured the Commodore 64 version over the NES version.
This is potentially an unfair review but I gotta give this one half a star because I played it at a friend's house for a bit and neither of us could ever figure out the controls. Then again, it comes from an era where that wasn't entirely uncommon, so perhaps it is a fair review.