Game Review: Olympic Skier (Atari, Americana)

There were only a couple of sports games released as part of the Americana range, and of those only one – Olympic Skier – made it across to the 8-bit Atari family. The winter events based game, converted from the Commodore 64 original features three separate events all – as you can guess from the title – centred around skiing. But are any of them worthy of olympic gold?

Getting Started

There are no options available to you at the outset and pressing fire from the title screen dumps you straight into the game. From here, you play each of the three events in turn and the aim is to score as many points as possible to get onto the high score table. There are no player rankings, no multiplayer options or any other frills – just a basic one player linear experience. There’s no option to play a single event, but as each is relatively short this isn’t really an issue.

Giant Slalom

First up in Olympic Skier is one of the two downhill events, and this is a straightforward slalom. Simply make your way from the top of the course to the bottom, passing through as many of the gates as you can. Gates can appear in several places on the screen at the same time but as long as you go through one of them in a horizontal line that’s fine so you have some control over the path you take down the snow-covered mountain.

You’re allowed to miss a maximum of three gates along the way before you’re immediately disqualified, but if you collide with anything on your run then everything comes to a halt, a helicopter comes along to remove you from the course and it’s on to the next event.

Ski Jump

Time to grab some air with the next event as Olympic Skier moves on to the Ski Jump. Again, you only get one try at this and starting at the top of the ramp you have to wiggle the joystick as fast as possible to build up speed before getting to the bottom of the slope, push up to take off, then push down to land safely. Obviously, the further you jump, the higher your score.

The hardest part in the Ski Jump is the take off. The instructions mentions both the joystick waggling and rapidly pressing the fire button as ways to accelerate down the ski ramp but I found that only the joystick movement seemed to work and having to do that and then push the joystick in another direction to take off did make things a little tricky to start off with but after a little practice you soon get the hang of it. Timing your landings however… now that’s another thing altogether!

Downhill

The final stage is the Downhill race and this is a basic top-to-bottom course. Simply steer your skier using left and right and try to get down to the bottom of the run. There are two basic things you need to deal with here – obstacles in your way that resemble fallen trees that you can jump over by pressing fire, and areas of the course that are blocked off.

This is probably the most frustrating aspect of this part of the game. Because your view of the course ahead is limited you can’t tell which areas of the course are closed off until it’s too late and no matter how well you’re doing, your run will come to an end as you crash head first into the oncoming trees. As with the other stages you only have on attempt and that collision means the arrival of that familiar chopper to take you off to the end score summary…

Playabilty

While I found that Olympic Skier was fun in short bursts, truthfully that’s all the game really offered. The two downhill sections – depending on your ability – had the potential to last the longest – but each play of the Ski Jump was over before you knew it and a complete playthrough of the whole game only took a few minutes. And with no random elements to the courses for either the Slalom or Downhill it meant that one you memorised the layout for each course it didn’t really offer anything new.

At least most other downhill skiing games on the market used a random element to give them some form of long term appeal and replayability, but without that boredom quickly sets in.

Graphics and Sound

While the backgrounds and sprites are nothing special, the most important parts here are how well it scrolls and how accurate is the collision detection and I had no complaints with either. The scrolling for the downhill sections were perfectly smooth, as was the horizontal Ski Jump section, the skier itself was well animated and everything was clear and easy to distinguish from the background even if it was simplistic at times.

Sound effects – as you’d expect from a game like this – are quite limited, with the most notable being the helicopter as it arrives to rescue the prone athlete. There is a short piece of music on the title screen but nothing to write home about.

Overall

I really wanted to like Olympic Skier, but all along it just felt like one wasted opportunity after another. Adding the option to play against other people would have given the game a more competitive feel to it, and minor tweaks to the gameplay – such as allowing multiple attempts at the Ski Jump or extra lives on the Downhill – would have made a huge difference. Probably the game’s biggest let-down for me is the fixed nature of the two downhill courses and the inability to play any of the games individually.

What had potential to be a great winter sporting game (although understandably it was never going to be up to the standards set by Epyx), falls flat and leaves you feeling nothing but disappointment.

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