Winter Challenge: World Class Competition (1988, Tynesoft)

[Tijn]

#3956

Because of how similar this game is named compared to some of the others, I thought I had already played this one. But I haven’t! It’s an Olympic-style game with mini-games for all the events in glorious CGA with PC speaker sound.

It’s sad this game seems to have some issues when it comes to the gameplay, because I found this title strangely appealing. The downhill event for example looks pretty intense, but with trees and rocks appearing out of nowhere it’s really quite impossible to get this right. The ski jump is also kind of wonky, although it seems more doable to get a decent run at that.

[Pix]

#3968

It may not be deserved but I associate Tynesoft with terrible games on the UK 8 bits (e.g. Supergran on the Spectrum). This was way better than my previous experiences with them so they clearly got better.

The downhill is just about completable at 4.77Mhz but still requires a good deal of luck. I got down in just over a minute the one time I completed it. It felt a whole lot like playing that hovercraft arcade bit from Space Quest where you have to avoid all the rocks, only with floaty controls to make life even harder.

The other events were far easier, possibly too easy even if I didn’t quite know what I was doing. Not bad anyway, and decent music from a PC beeper.

[TigerQuoll]

#4005

This is very similar to Epyx’s “Winter Games” from 2 years earlier. The biathlon in particular seems to be an almost direct clone.
The graphics in this one may be a couple of degrees better, but I think Epyx did a better job on gameplay.