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.