There are those who think sports are meant to be played either in the summer or indoors. These are the people who believe that the sole purpose of snow and ice is to screw up the daily commute; the kind of poor souls who don’t know what it’s like to rocket down slopes of fine powder at breakneck speeds and, well, quite possibly break their necks. Enter Winter Sports: The Ultimate Challenge, which isn’t the next great sports game for the Wii, but for fans of the type of games found at the Winter Olympics, it does provide an enjoyable, if superficial, diversion.
Make no mistake—the range of games available is impressive, with events such as: Cross-country Skiing, Alpine Skiing, Ski Jumping, Figure Skating, Speed Skating, Bobsleigh, Luge, Skeleton, and Curling (Yes. Curling). And just in case that’s not enough variety for you, many of these events have subcategories. For example, the alpine skiing event includes events for the downhill, super-G and slalom. Speed skating includes both 500 and 1,500 meter events. It’s fair to say that the scope of the winter games is well represented in Winter Sports.
There’s also a variety of modes in which you can play the game. You can play a variety of competition modes, including two set competitions of 7 and 15 events each, and a “virtual competition” in which you can choose the number of events (up to 18). In this mode you take your competitor -in either single or multiplayer- through each of the featured events in an attempt to rank up the most points (gained via winning medals). If multiplayer is your pastime of choice, the Competition mode represents pretty much the only way to play Winter Sports. In multiplayer you can have up to four competitors with up to two at a time competing in split-screen (depending on the event).
Then there’s the Campaign mode, which isn’t so much a campaign as it is a series of unlockable challenges ala the Tiger Challenge in the Tiger Woods PGA Golf games from EA Sports. You start off in the middle of a honeycomb and complete challenges, such as achieving a specific speed in the downhill. Depending on which cell in the comb you complete, new challenges open up. There’s some casual fun to be had in this mode, but it quickly loses its luster as you reach challenges that you have trouble passing (and you will).
Next we have the Career mode. This is, by far, the most involved of the games play modes. In Career mode you create -well, assign a name and country to- a competitor and try to rise through the ranks of four different leagues. Each league has a season, for lack of a better word, that consists of a 7-event competition and a 15-event competition. Winning a 15-event competition allows you to rise to the next level.
As career modes in sports games go, this one stretches the definition of a “career” to its breaking point. Still, it’s serviceable. Where it completely and utterly fails, however, is in the creativity department, which completely wrecks the immersion of the game. The only aspect of control you have over your competitor is the name, which doesn’t sound so bad until your figure skater, Todd, leaps out onto the ice in a skimpy rhinestone costume, sporting breasts to die for… that’s just creepy. Then there’s the experience point system. As you place (top 3) in events you acquire experience points that, ostensibly, increase your skill in specific events. What’s bizarre is that you can choose which event those points go into. So, when you win gold in slalom you can turn around and put the experience points into curling. What the connection is between those two things is, I have no idea.
The experience of actually playing Winter Sports is much like the rest of the game: very hit and miss. Most of the skiing events, for example, use the Wii controls to excellent effect, and while challenging, they’re also a lot of fun. In the super-G, for example, you tilt the Wiimote and Nunchuck up and down to control your speed, while twisting and turning the controllers left or right to turn. It takes some getting used to, but it’s a solid system that ups the immersion factor over conventional controllers. Unfortunately, pun not intended, it’s all downhill from there.
