I first played Winter Games many moons ago on the Commodore 64 when my children were young. We had tried Summer Games and thought Winter Games would be worth a try. There are a number of different events represented and it is quite a good spread of events. One of our favorites was the ski-jump, and we played it a lot. The graphics were not too bad but we could never really master the technique for jumping consistently, and so the random element helped those of us who were not too good with a joystick.
The selection of the country you were to represent was always interesting and we had a lot of fun on the overall idea of tallying up your results in the various events. If you were good at some you usually did not do so well in all the others. So it was a good game for even young kids.
Another favorite was the downhill skiing with the various gates to try and get around without making too big a mess of it. This was quite simple from the graphics elements involved but the design of the event was very good and you had to concentrate intensely to maintain your path down the mountain and on to the finish. Again, like the ski-jump, not a long event
but definitely a gripping one.
The one that used to always irritate us was the biathlon, with the cross country skiing and rifle shooting at a number of locations. This had some funny joystick work involved to maintain a good pace in the cross country skiing but the tricky bit was the target shooting. Not an easy one to master and so my children were not so keen on it. If my memory serves me correctly there was an ice skating event as well, with some tricky jumps involved. Again this was one we enjoyed but never mastered consistently.
The sound in the game was as always with the Commodore quite respectable and added to the interest particularly the crowd cheering if you did well.
Overall the graphics was quite good - the Commodore games were always tightly written but Epyx was a leader at the time - what did happen to them. They had another good title called Oil Barons which even involved a map on thic cardboard and a lot of counters that you used in conjunction with what was on the computer. So Epyx were not afraid to be innovative.
