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Retro Video Game Reviews: Winter Games (NES)
Overall Rating: 1/5 Stars
Acclaim is an interesting company, when it comes to publishing video games. In some cases, they have had a hand in putting classic titles like Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam on the market.
On the other hand, they sometimes let developers like Pony Canyon, the chop shop responsible for NES debacles like Super Pitfall and Tiger-Heli, help them release regrettable cartridges like the terrible Winter Games game in 1987.
Gameplay
Winter Games is one of those multi-game, Olympics-style titles in the tradition of such classics and sentimental favorites as Track and Field, World Games, and Caveman Games.
Winter Games is most similar to World Games, in its options to allow the player to select a country, input their name, have an overall international flavor, and even play the respective anthems of the countries, to an extent.
There are four events in Winter Games: Hot Dog Aerials, in which the player tries to pull off a trick or flip or two before hitting the ground off a ski jump; Speed Skating, in which the player desperately tries to find the correct rhythm of rhythmically hitting left and right in order to overtake the superhuman computer opponent;
Figure Skating, in which the player presses A to move and then the directional pad to perform tricks in the air only to land on the skater's butt; and The Bobsled, where over half the screen is taken over by the map, and less than a fourth of the screen shows the harrowing (sarcasm alert on that one) bobsled action as the player uses left and right to counter the force of the high-speed turns.
Points are awarded or time is measured, but ultimately, all the events are boring, broken, and bad. This is a game that feels very powerfully underdeveloped, and is notorious for simply not being fun.
Even in 1987, NES games had far surpassed Winter Games in their graphical technology, depth of gameplay, production values, sound quality (by far), and other elements. Let us not mince words:
This is a terrible video game. This is a cartridge rife with poor design choices, from the subtle (naming an event "The Bobsled" instead of just calling it "Bobsled Race" or something similar) to the enormous (impossible to put into words how uniquely this game makes its mechanics both unintuitive and redundant).
Graphics
This game looks bad. The visuals are not pleasing to the eyes. The fiasco of The Bobsled has already been mentioned, with the actual "action" taking place on a very small portion of the screen, but the other events hardly fare better.
In fact, pay attention and the player will notice that none of the events scroll. Bobsled and ski jump ("Hot Dog Aerials" is a stupid, stupid name, even considering the hip winter-x-games lexicon context) obviously take place on a static single screen, and the other two events, speed skating and figure skating, only grant the possible illusion of movement, despite the player-character never changing on-screen location.
The animation is stilted and slow, the "opening ceremonies" is a joke, and the highlight is perfect the static background and athlete figures.
Sound
Wow. The music in this game is among the worst NES soundtracks of all time; that statement is not hyperbole, exaggeration, or deception.
The background tracks are right up there with the seemingly intentionally obnoxious Tagin' Dragon title screen and the warpedly disturbing tones of Rad Gravity.
At certain portions of the game, the background "music" consists of a single rapid-fire buzzy note that is, occasionally, interrupted by an ear-punching squeak, or series of said squeaks.
While the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) home video game console was certainly difficult to program music for, the absolute minimum effort seems to have been given here.
To add insult to injury, the national anthem for Great Britain, for some mind-boggling reason, is My Country 'Tis Of Thee. Incredible.
Originality
Every once in a while, throughout the course of reviewing video games, there arrives a title for which it is truly difficult to convey how badly made, unfun, and regrettable it is.
This is one of those occasions. Without playing the game yourself and experiencing the horror first-hand, no further words are really going to be any additionally convincing.
The verdict: One star out of five for an atrocious NES game.
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