A repost from videogame_tales.

Having had the Winter Olympics on over the last week, I was reminded of a game that was given to us by my uncle Brian many years ago - it was released to tie in with the ones held in Calgary 22 years ago. The awkwardly-titled "The Games: Winter Edition" was released in 1988 by Epyx on various formats, though we had the Kixx re-release on the PC, and I remembered playing it a lot but being slightly mystified as to how most of it worked. At first I was doubtful that I could find any trace of it on the Internet, but I looked on Abandonia and there it was, so I downloaded it to see if I could be any more successful at it now that I'm a distressing number of years older.

Welcome to the 4-colour Saddledome

Even getting into the game is a problem in itself, because you're provided with no fewer than seventeen EXE files and running all but one of them will just crash DOSBox, even the ones that look like they should work, and GAMES.EXE was the only one that did anything (the promising EGAMODE.EXE and MCGAMODE.EXE giving me no success). It was apparent, then, that the only way I was going to be able to continue this experiment was in four-colour CGA. Who cares - it's the winter olympics. Everything's white anyway.

The extremely plain main menu gives you four options roughly equivalent to "Play", and options to set the configuration - configuration! That sounds promising. Yes, it looks like you're meant to set the graphics mode there rather than actually using the separate executables for each one - that's honestly quite ahead of its time. Right, that looks marginally better. You can also see the world records (high scores) and view the barely-animated opening and closing ceremonies that you get at the start and end of the game. These both show a thirty-second view of the lighting/extinguishing of the torch while an attempt at the Canadian national anthem wibbles out of the PC speaker, then it suddenly cuts off in the middle of the second verse and leaves you to get on with it. If the TV coverage of the games was anything like that here they'd have about two days' more empty space to fill.

You can sense a game's age when it has West Germany and the USSR in it.

On starting the full competition, you give the names of the players and the country you want each to compete for (a couple of which no longer exist) - seeing as everyone else in the world gets it wrong I found myself actually impressed that the game knew the correct country that corresponds to the pictured flag, so points for that. After this, the game is really a collection of seven mini-games, each representing (to a greater or lesser extent) an event at that year's Olympics. Like most computer representations of competitive sports, the lifetime training of the professional athletes in the real thing is boiled down here to some sort of sequence of joystick waggles, but I really can't tell you much more than that because the most you usually get by way of instruction in-game is along the lines of "PRESS THE BUTTON". Which one, you infernal string of hastily-organized binary - I've got 102 of the bastards here. But without the benefit of a manual even after hunting around for one, I decided that as Space and the arrow keys seemed to work in most cases, I would draw on my vague memories of these games that I played nearly twenty years ago and just muddle through from there.

Cross Country

Not pictured: Approximately four miles between me and the last trace of the computer's ski tracks

The ancient art of strapping planks to your feet and trying to stumble over some inclines. You're given a choice of distance when this event begins - I went for 1km so as not to prolong the agony too much, and after that it goes pretty much as you would expect. Your objective is to batter the left and right arrow keys to propel yourself clumsily forwards while the computer player sails easily on to the finish line, until you get stuck on an upward hill and have a FAULT declared. After some memory-dredging I found that holding down the space bar on upward hills seemed to help a bit, and managed to stumble on to another downward slope where Space made the skiier actually ski rather than twitch his legs rapidly back and forward.

So things were off to a promising start as I managed to actually finish this event - a feat which wasn't to be repeated very often. I also consider it a great success that I wasn't shot by snipers at any point during my attempts.

Original success rating: 50%
Current success rating: 50%

Luge

Wheeeee.

Again you're presented with a choice of courses here, on a screen that looks like it had to be redesigned several times to jam them all on. You have to push off from the starting gate using some sort of procedure that I remember being explained painstakingly in the manual, but nothing seems to actually make any difference apart from pressing Down to start yourself off. As you can see at the bottom of the screen, there are some sliders, and pressing Left and Right seems to move the "Steer" one in those directions. Ultimately, however, this makes absolutely no difference whatsoever and you'll always eventually arrive at the finish line battered, bruised and with an arbitrary finishing time.

Original success rating: Not applicable%
Current success rating: Who cares%

Slalom Downhill Skiing

Aaaaargh!

There's an unusual setup screen on this event where you're invited to "set your cameras" with a view of a ski slope - you can place four markers anywhere along the route. I couldn't recall if these gave me any advantage (and still don't, really) but I seemed to remember putting them at the sharper corners, so I went with my instincts.

After pushing yourself off in a sideways view with Space, you're treated to a version of that "steer the car between the barriers" game that's usually people's first QuickBASIC project, rendered in 3D Commodore 64-o-vision. At red gates (presumably corresponding to the camera positions that you set earlier) you get a view of your skiier sailing past followed by a sudden jump back to the steering game, where more often than not you'll slip past a gate on the wrong side and instead be treated to another view of your skiier sliding to a halt and then falling over. It is, however, just about possible if you hold Down to limit your speed.

Original success rating: 70%
Current success rating: 50%

Speed Skating

The usual view for this game

It should be mentioned now that I'm doing these writeups while the PC speaker tweets an apparently randomly selected string of notes at me as the introduction for each event, which doesn't really help my mood or boost my opinion of the game. The setup for this one amounts to how far you're going in laps, and feeling inexplicably confident this time I went for one of the medium options - five thousand metres, or two and a half laps.

This was one of the games that I was sure that I had been reasonably good at when I first played the game - as you might expect, the idea is once again to hit Left and Right in strict rotation to speed gracefully around the course, and I thought I could just about manage that. What I got instead was a prolonged display of my skater repeatedly collapsing on to his face (the Button also got a lot of use here, having the function of "get up") and lagging woefully behind the computer player, even when I worked out that it seemed to work a little better when I tried to time my keypresses so that they went with the rhythm of the skating animation. Eventually, with my skater's nose probably squashed as flat as a pancake, I completed the course in just over four and a half minutes, setting a new record for the slowest speed ever recorded by man.

Original success rating: Possibly 80%
Current success rating: 0%

Figure Skating

The preparation...

I knew that this was going to be a problem from the very start, because I had no idea how to do it even when I had a manual to consult. I think the idea was that you set a routine for yourself in the first stage and then tried to play it back in the second.

What actually happens is this. You select a piece of music, represented by completely random instruments (flute for "Slow Rock", piano for "Fast Rock"), and then the PC speaker - as if it hadn't caused enough trouble in the incidental music already - becomes a primary part of the experience as it warbles its random notes at you while you stab at some buttons to make the on-screen figure spin around a bit. You can only have about 14 moves in the two-minute routine, though - if you go over that limit you'll just have to skate around until the end, which wouldn't exactly lower your chances of winning at all.

...the result

Then you move on to the competition stage, apparently being scored on how accurately you keep to the routine that you did earlier. Naturally this is completely impossible - you have some icons down at the bottom left that might be the ones you recorded, but there's no timing information so you have to remember which of the PC speaker patterns sound familiar. When you dare to guess that you're just about at the right place, you press Up, which is the "fall on your arse" button - your skater spins around a bit then topples over, and there's apparently nothing that you can do about it. When you feel like being released from the pain, you can hit Space a few times and your skater will just stop dead and spread her arms in a finishing pose, to be awarded straight zeroes by all the judges.

I have never successfully completed a single move in this game or have scored more than zero points.

Original success rating: -999%
Current success rating: -9999%

Slalom

When you crash the computer stops and looks over, in as withering a manner an EGA sprite can.

I know I've mentioned a couple of times before that the musical quality of this game is not high, but the title music for this one really does break the record for sounding like something that someone just bashed into ZZT's play command at random. Apparently, the event that I previously thought was the slalom before wasn't, but no matter - this time you have another choice of distance, and having learned my lesson from the speed skating event, I went for the shortest, simplest-looking one this time.

This one is perhaps one of the less inspired ones (and much like the comment on the music above, that's really saying something). It takes place in a sort of split-screen isometric arrangement with the computer pacer, where you have to clip flags with your shoulders repeatedly on the way to the bottom of the hill. One mistake means you tumble over and roll into a snowball like in Tom and Jerry, as amply demonstrated here. Even when you get it right, this is the slowest event ever - all you have to do is press Up or Down every couple of seconds for what seems like a week.

Original success rating: 50%
Current success rating: 50%

Ski Jump

Yes, that looks about right.

This was another event that I knew was going to be difficult, having memories of exactly how it used to play out whenever I was at the controls (see illustrative screenshot). I remembered vaguely that I could at least jump off the ramp when I played this before even if I always completely failed to land, but after a couple of spectacular failures where I didn't even get that far, I resorted to hunting for the manual yet again to see if it could possibly help.

And this time I found it, in the form of a plain text file that someone had put up on a Commodore 64 fansite - I love the Internet. It told me, about as vaguely as the game, that I had to press the button to start off, press the button at the bottom of the ramp to jump, then get into the landing position (with the fabled button) at a forty-five degree angle to complete the jump.

What I eventually worked out was this. You press the button to start off down the ramp - that's fair enough. You're then given a brief first-person shot that looks much like the Downhill Skiing event, where you can steer to the left and to the right if you like for no reason at all. But importantly, you have to press the button here before the view switches back to third-person - in fact, almost exactly at the moment it changes (and getting the timing on that right isn't easy). If you've done that right, your skiier will zoom off to the right instead of tumbling off the ramp pathetically, and I was so shocked the first time this happened that I almost considered it enough of a success.

Honestly, balls to this.

While airborne, you can use Up and Down to flap your arms in a futile attempt to fly or something, while Left and Right rotate you through a limited series of stances. Here, the manual once again proves right in a very cryptic sort of way - just before you hit the ground, you have to be facing roughly up and right, and if you hit the button at that angle at the correct pico-second, then instead of collapsing in a splintered heap, the skiier will change his animation subtly, land the right way up and scoot to a halt triumphantly among the stands. I did this once, was given a distance of 53 metres, then I quit the game and it's destined to languish in my Retro folder, never to be played again.

Original success rating: 0%
Current success rating: 1%

videogame_tales is usually about games for which we can recall fond memories. Is this one of them? I can safely say "no" - it's rubbish. But looking back on it and playing it today does serve to point out just how much entertainment I could get out of games like this at that age, no matter how good they actually were. Brian, if you have an Internet connection from wherever you are (and are reading this with a severe lack of celestial things to do), thanks for giving us countless minutes of entertainment with this - but I really hope you didn't pay more than about £5 for it.