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The continuing slide in the quality of Wii titles that focus on mini-games virtually ensures that Winter Sports: The Ultimate Challenge will get a frosty reception.  Frosty. Get it?  But in this case, the game in question isn’t the train wreck we were expecting.

Go for the Gold

Winter Sports harkens back to an era when event-based sport games were all the rage.  Geriatric gamers will find that the game closely resembles the Epyx classic, Winter Games.   In that game as in this modern update, you and up to three of your friends pick a nationality and compete in a series of seasonal sporting events.  Do well and you’ll grab the gold, silver, or bronze.  Do poorly and, well… there’s always next time.

There are plenty of options and gameplay modes.  You can concentrate on single events, engage in a series of difficult challenges, and there’s even a career mode.  The career game is deepest part of Winter Sports.  It’s here where you’ll play through every event multiple times across four increasingly competitive leagues.  Playing well in career mode will also net your player experience points which can distribute however you wish.  Strangely there’s no indication of how exactly greater experience levels affect the gameplay.

The Gold

A game like Winter Sports is only as good as the controls for each event and as you might imagine it’s very hit or miss.  The absolute best of the lot are the downhill skiing events.  Players use both the Wii Remote and the Nunchuk to mimic how you’d naturally carve through the snow.  It’s by no means easy, but the controls are almost immediately intuitive and extremely responsive.

Also getting high marks is speed skating and cross country skiing.  These are events driven by a mix of rhythm and power.  Once again, players are given a unique and intuitive way of controlling both.

The sled racing events (bobsleigh, luge, and skeleton) all play so similarly that there’s no discernable difference.  Unfortunately, the touchy controls won’t leave you with a whole lot of love for any of them.

The Ugly Side of Sports

The two outright stinkers here are figure skating and curling, the two events I was personally most interested in trying out.  There are so many neat possibilities for controlling a figure skating game, especially with the Wii Remote.  Sadly, Winter Sports dropped the ball here.  Basically, this event plays like a poor-man’s rhythm game. Remember the dancing mini-game in Raving Rabbids?   That’s what you’ve got here.

Curling, despite being jokingly referred to as that sport where people sweep the ice with brooms seems like a natural fit for the Wii Remote.  In the case of Winter Sports, it’s certainly the most ambitions of the games from a control standpoint.   The act of lining up your shot, guiding, and releasing your stone doesn’t come close to the actual sport it’s trying to simulate.   What’s worse, the gesture you need to do in order to throw the stone is clumsy, imprecise, and way too hard to pull off successfully.

The visuals in Winter Sports are and adequate mix of good and bad.  The skiing is convincing as is the skating, so long as you don’t look at the faces of the characters.  The sledding events suffer from a poor sense of perspective with the edges of the track actually meeting on the horizon.

When Do I Get To Shoot the Polar Bear?

Wrapped around all this is a pretty uninspired sense of ceremony.   Before each event, there you will be treated to a fly-by of the area, shots of athletes getting backrubs, and some guy dressed up like a polar bear entertaining the crowd.  It just goes on and on, while two commentators engage in witty and repetitive banter.  Once the event is over, you attend a medal ceremony where abbreviated version of the top 3 athletes’ national anthems play.  It’s all a colossal waste of time and can fortunately be turned off from the options screen.

Despite the dull window dressing, Winter Sports does have lots of game modes.  There are more good events than bad ones.  The good ones actually show some pretty well thought out ways to use the Wii controls to good effect - a solid effort.

Review by: Greg Bemis