Reviews

This follow-up to the popular Summer Games, as the name suggests, took a look at several Winter sports. Despite something of a preoccupation with skating, which features in three different events all of which are rather dull, there's plenty of variety elsewhere with ski jumping, hot dogging, bob-sleigh and biathlon rounding out the line up.

Refreshingly the genre had moved on a little from sheer button bashing, but mostly they're very simple games where you've just got to hit the buttons with the right timing and/or in a regular pattern. Graphically, it's pretty good with some nice backgrounds, but inevitably it suffers next to the versions for some of the other 8-bits where there's more colour and less clash.

It's not a bad effort by any means, and some of the games were quite fun for their time. However, it's aged quite badly as there's little depth to the gameplay.

I kinda recommend this game . It brings fond memories to my mind. It is well programmed and quite original for its time. Not a timeless classic but a good game, whatsoever.

The events are challenging and quite charming .

If you like Daley Thompson's Decathlon you will also like Winter Games .

1986 US Gold (UK)
by Geoff Brown, Mark Alexander and F.D.Thorpe (loading screen)

No doubt the best winter sports game I've played and possibly the best sport game in the US Gold series.
Graphically it is a delight to watch, with beautifully designed landscapes and well drawn sprites and animations.
Gameplay is also at its best, from technique to strength events (finger strength!), all very well thought out and challenging.
At the time it was one of my most played game and it still holds well after all this years.

This was the only winter sports game from my collection so it remains dear to me. I got the Kixx re-release which was actually the 48K version so I missed out on the 128K version...bah!

From my experiences with this game side A, which had Ski Jump, Hot Dog and Speed Skating was fantastic, especially the Hot Dog. Side B, which had Figure Skating, Biathlon, Bobsleigh and Free Skating (pretty much the same as Figure) was not so good, the skating events were awkward and the Biathlon was never a friend of mine, I usually got so bored with it I wanted to quit, which is a shame because in actual fact they have done a fine job replicating these events, especially the gruelling nature of biathlon.

I always found that the Epyx sports games were overrated but Winter Games is by far and away the best of the series.

Remember playing this years ago and it was a bit boring for my taste, and playing it now only confirmed that theory. There's seven events in all, Hot Dog, Biathlon, Speed Skating, Figure Skating. Ski Jump, Free Skating and Bobsled. Hot Dog is great fun and easily the best event in the whole game, which was probably why it was the first event, Biathlon on the other hand is painfully long and loses its appeal very quickly. Speed Skating is confusing at first because it's rhythmic timing rather than a button masher, which is realistic, but at the start you're usually scrambling to figure out the right timing which can cost you precious seconds but once you're used to it it's relatively straightforward. Figure Skating is clumsy and frustrating as you're looking to do certain tricks but end up doing either the same one all the time or just fall over, then Ski Jump is a little awkward as you have to press fire before the jump and during the jump as he's about to take off, controlling the ski jumper in the air was a bit fiddly for my taste. Free Skating is identical to Figure except it's a different tune and it gives you an extra minute of pain to deal with and Bobsled was difficult at first but once I realised when I did wrong I was able to coast through it without any problems. So of the seven games here only three of them I got on with and only one of them I enjoyed outright. I do feel this is more playable than the Summer Games offerings but not by much.