With the Winter Games coming up now, I’m going to marathon all the Mario and Sonic Winter games (all 3 of them at least). This is honestly the game I probably have the strongest memories with out of the whole series. I became an Olympic fan when I was 10 during the Beijing 2008 Games. And obviously I got that game and loved it a lot. But I was actively anticipating the 2010 Vancouver games since I was already a fan, and as a result I got this game either at launch or really close to launch, to try to contain my 11 year old selfs excitement (Like I was REALLY bad with excitement, I was collecting soda cans and McDonalds barbecue sauce packets that had Olympic promos on them.). My memories with this game were I remember hooking our Wii up to the biggest TV in the house, loading into an event, and just letting the intro camera move around and show off the venues and just stare at them. One of the biggest things I love about the Mario and Sonic series is Sega’s commitment to accuracy when digitaly recreating the Olympic Venues. I think Vancouver 2010s is among the best in the series (certainly better than the terrible London 2012 ones), where it stuck a really good balance between realistic accuracy and cartoony visuals. I also VERY vividly remember the feature of linking the game to the weather channel and syncing the games weather and clock to real world Vancouver, which I thought was the coolest thing ever. I would just spend hours marveling at these stupid little digital recreations of places i had never been but really wanted to go, imagining I was there. I know thats not what most people play these games for, but that’s uniquely what I’ve always played the series for. So this was the first time I replayed this from way back then. Firstly, the opening cinematic is probably the best in the series. Fantastic music all around as usual. As for the events, I don’t know. Gameplay wise, alot of them blend together for me. Even 2008 had more distinct differences between events. As I said earlier though, the venues look top notch. The pictograms are accurate to the real world games. Festival mode is nice, but honestly I kind of preferred the circuit set up of Beijing 2008. The weather channel feature sadly doesn't work anymore, which just kind of sucks. Trivia returns luckily (before they axed it in London 2012). Overall, my memories aside, I’d say this lands right in the middle for the mainline series console games (besides Sochi 2014, haven't played yet). With Tokyo 2020 being on top, then Beijing 2008, Vancouver 2010, Rio 2016, and London 2012 on the very bottom. Just a solid follow up to the 2008 game.