G4TV

We Ski, which incidentally is how Arnold Schwarzenegger pronounces "whiskey," is an alpine skiing title featuring whimsical graphics, bouncy music, and Mii support. It’s also the first third-party title to make use of the Wii balance board. Yet the peripheral is entirely optional, designed to enhance the experience rather than define it.

Pole Dancing

The biggest surprise is how well the standard controls are used to simulate actual skiing motions. While the cartoon-like visuals may be oversimplified for some tastes, the same cannot be said of the controls: the game uses nearly every button on the remote and nunchuk. Both controllers are used together like ski poles, and the motions for the most part are intuitive. You hold both upright to start, push down on both simultaneously to push off, and hold them horizontally (twisting them inversely) while bending your knees to crouch. 

That's just the basics. Tilting the controllers sideways while holding various button modifiers let you perform snowplow turns, parallel turns, and wedeIns. Tricks such as grabs, kosaks, spread eagles, flips, corkscrews, and spins are possible after getting airborne from jumps. There are even individual motions for sidestepping and recoveries after wiping out. While it takes a few runs to remember which buttons do what, We Ski's motion-sensitive controls bring you closer to the slopes than in any previous skiing title. If only the rest of the game measured up…

Mii Ski

We Ski gives you the option of creating a character or borrowing one of your Miis. Hello, Beavis. Hello, Butt-head. The drawback to the latter is you can't wear hats or goggles.  If you forgo the Miis for in-game characters, you'll have four choices: children, teens, adults, and the elderly. All are of the "cutesy" persuasion, with the differences primarily involving moustaches, "attitude," and/or wrinkles. While there are no stats to manage for your character, you can acquire new equipment and accessories by earning star points in the game's freestyle mode.

Mountain Climbing

The freestyle mode lets you freely explore a ski resort bustling with activity. Rather than provide players with a structured career, the developers opted instead for a freeform adventure. You'll talk with certain characters on the slopes to receive missions, which offer a total of 160 star points. Instead of solely focusing on races against rivals, the game has you accomplishing such offbeat tasks as looking for specific items or helping fallen skiers. The action-oriented events, such as performing certain air tricks, stopping at a specific location, and mimicking various turns, are shockingly easy.

What many will find charming about the freestyle mode will be an annoyance for others. Rather than offer a checklist of objectives to accomplish on each of the game's 14 courses, you have to search for the events by skiing toward people with bubbles over their heads. It's not always easy to pick them out in a crowd, either. All the other skiers suffer from the same ailment plaguing the characters from Hot Shots Golf series: they use musical note "thought bubbles" to express happiness. The result is needless clutter on the slopes, since there are a lot of happy people visiting "Happy Ski Resort."

Snow Fun?

The rest of the modes are more filler than fun. A photo album sounds like a great idea, suggesting you can take pictures while on the slopes. Yet all it consists of is the ability to choose a different pose on various backgrounds to save in your collection. Boring? You bet. There's also a ski school, a collection of tutorials on each move or individual stunt, and a ski race mode, which features 20 individual events in one of three areas: race, slalom, and moguls. Once you complete a single run, the game kicks you back to the menu screen so you can choose another event. There's no progression or goals in these short events other than to win.

There is also no score or medal system designed for tricks, which could have provided a secondary objective on each course as in titles in the SSX series. There are no rewards for completing courses under specific time limits, no experience points to build your custom skier's attributes, or tournaments to compete for cash and prizes. The computer opponents are extremely easy to defeat, which takes a large portion of fun out of the title. We Ski does support four players on the same system, but given the sweeping motions involved with the controls, it would have made more sense if it were online. Fewer bruised elbows that way. 

We Ski doesn't feel like it's quite ready for prime time, which may be due to the publisher's need to schedule the game to coincide with Wii Fit. Still, the title's lower price point and excellent controls are worth experiencing with or without the balance board, which is primarily used for turning. As crazy as it sounds, the freestyle mode, despite its annoyances with the hide-and-seek mission system, is oddly relaxing. We Ski is a low key game for people who want to experience skiing on their own terms. Veteran racers expecting a more traditional format or trick-based game should treat this title like a first-time skier on the slopes and give it a wide berth.

Review by: Scott Alan Marriott