In a few minutes the 2018 Winter Olympics are starting (officially). Time to celebrate this with a picture of the only real Winter Games:
Any winter sport fans here? Are there some winter (sport) related adventure games out there?
6 Likes
I don´t ski, which is extremly frowned at where I live. A big part of my paternal family branch does. And I don´t watch it on tv either.
However, Ice Hockey is really big where I come from, more so where I was actually born. And i enjoy watching that if I have the chance and I´d actually love to see a game in a stadium again.
I´m still looking for the name for a (french-canadian?) cartoon show from the early 90s which was all about adventures related to skiing. I remember it for two reasons one because they had a “funny” animal mascot sidekick called “floppy” and two because all scenes that involved skiing by the protagonist where in a first person 3D rendered view, which was really special at the time.
Anyone remember that and have an idea what that was called? I searched to no avail.
1 Like
Same here: We have some slopes around the corner, but I can’t ski. 
(But I used to do ice skating - even if I haven’t done it in the last few years…)
Sounds interesting and somewhat familiar, but I can’t help, I’m afraid. Do you remember the TV channel and what kind of animal “Floppy” was?
It might have been Pro 7 (the short period where they had their original non red logo) and Floppy was a grey sort of rodent always wearing a red or blue ski hat himself.
/edit: For all non-german speakers: It’s a french cartoon show from 1992 called “Pierre & Isa”.
1 Like
Hah, yeah! Oddly enough the article doesn´t mention the CGI which was a real novelty at the time. You can see some of that on youtube (turns out I was also right about the station and it´s old logo!) like in the show´s intro.
1 Like
I can relate. It’s the eighth winter where I must explain that no, I can’t ski, I never tried, I’d even like to, but no.
Nobody seems to understand that it’s difficult to ski when you’ve been living for 25 years at sea level and the nearest ski resort is some 600km away and you need to take a plane or a ship to get there.
2 Likes
I loved Winter Games, as much as Summer Games!
Biathlon and Bob were my favourite events!
4 Likes
What’s the reason? Lack of time (like in my case)?
I hope only your joysticks broke and not your arms…? 
Especially Biathlon was a “joystick-killer”…
2 Likes
YES! and oh dear joysticks didn’t last a session 
1 Like
The Competition Pro with analogue contacts (which you could bend & tweak) was the most solid home computer joystick I can remember (and it was silent too).
@milan&some
As for watching skiing.
Winter Games was a beautiful game (on the Amiga) but apart from Biathlon it wasn’t such a great sports game.
Blasphemy! Without doubt the C64 version is the best version!
At that time it was the best. And even with the hardware limitations I consider it one of the best sports games. And Winter Games was a very good multiplayer game. I still remember sitting with the whole family around the computer.
Amiga: higher res, nicer colors, smoother sound.
I think Decathlon was the best sports game for the C64.
Those were my favourites, but even they didn’t last forever. Though it was mostly the buttons that had issues. The stick itself was pretty much unbreakable
That’s also the only game of the series I had. It didn’t make for a good single player experience, but it was great with friends or my cousins. But I think, in order to celebrate the occasion, it might be time to fire up the emulator …
… an hour later: hm, for some reason that one did not quite match the memories I had. I could recognize the different competitions, but I could have sworn the graphics had been … different. Worse, actually. Were there different versions? Or badly made clones? Now I wish I had made images of all my floppies back then. Or of my brain …
Yes and yes.
Which version have you played?
The first one listed on http://thegamearchives.net . It also had some graphical glitches, but at least it ran. The others I tried just ended up in a Guru Meditation.
Okay, I think I figured it out: configuring the emulator with 512k chip mem and the 1.3 ROM gets rid of some glitches and the graphics look notably worse. Who would have thought that the game would render differently with 1MB?
I assume you used the Amiga version. Have you played “The Games: Winter Edition” or “Winter Games”? They are both from Epyx:
Winter Games is the first one, published in 1985. The Amiga version is a “conversion” of the C64 version.
The Games: Winter Edition was published in 1988. It’s not that good as Winter Games and the Amiga graphics were -hm- worse.
My screenshot in the first post above is from the C64 version of “Winter Games”.
I never had a C64, so back then I played the Amiga version. And it’s been Winter Games, pretty sure. By now I suspect my initial emulator configuration had some kind of anti-aliasing enabled. That would explain why everything looked “off”. Has nothing to do with the amount of RAM or Kickstart version used, at least.
1 Like
@joy
That’s true. Thankfully I never had problems with the buttons of my joysticks. I used a few of them with various setups for different games.