Ah, the Winter Olympics. A lot less dramatic than its Summer counterpart, but people still tune in from all over the world to see if their country’s athletes has what it takes to go for the gold. Just like any other major sporting event, it has certain licenses and rights it hands out. Unfortunately for Konami, it didn’t have the Olympics license, and ESPN didn’t get the television rights, so anything remotely related to the Olympics had to be dumped for this game, leaving in only ten events.

But that’s okay, as Konami pretty much picked the more popular ones to be included. The ten events in the game are the Downhill and Slalom, K90 and K120 Ski Jumping, Moguls and Snowboarding Halfpipe, 500m Speed Skating, the 4-man Bobsleigh, Figure Skating... and of course, Curling. It’s a pretty good representation of the Games, but it would have been nice to see some Cross-Country Skiing or more Skating disciplines and distances.

When you boot up the game, you get a standard flashy intro, and then hit the menu. After the Japanese-flavored music and abundance of jingle-bell sounds sink in, you have the option of 3 basic modes: Trial, Competition, and Championship. The Trial mode is where you can both practice and compete at all ten of the game’s events, earning medals in the process. In Competition mode, you and a friend can compete head-to-head in events (sometimes simultaneously, but usually one at a time) to see who’s better at a given event.

Then, there’s the game’s Championship mode, where the meat of the game lies. After you think you’re good enough in all the individual events, you can come here and compete in all the events in a row (seven for the women, eight for the men), earning medals and points in each. After all the events, the most points wins. While this is standard enough by itself, Konami went the extra mile and threw in a password-driven internet rankings mode. It gives you the incentive to compete against people from all over the world, instead of just trying to top your own best. Gives it lots of replay value, for sure.

Graphically, the game looks pretty average. There’s nothing really outstanding about the game (although some of the replays look really nice), but there’s nothing really bad about them, either. Snow looks like snow, ice looks like ice, and the player characters look just fine.

But, if you’ll pardon the pun, it starts to go downhill from here. While some of the event’s control schemes work great and make perfect sense, like using the analog L and R to maintain your balance in the air during the K90 ski jump, some don’t. In the K120, your job is to mash A and B alternating, hit L to jump, keep A-B-ing to maintain balance and achieve distance, then time L to land. You’d think both of the ski jumping events would have the same (or similar) control layouts, but they don’t. In the skiing events too, even though the actual control scheme is the same, you have absolutely no control over the start... a good 7 seconds usually passes before you get to control your character in any way after a start, which is frustrating.

There are some really unbalanced areas, too. In the Bobsleigh, for example, there are two phases. The first, you need to rapidly hit A and B back and forth for each of your 4 riders, hitting L for one, building up a power meter, then hitting L, etc. Works well, for sure. Then, as you slide down the track, you need to steer. This is where the problem lies. You can usually be up 6 or 7 seconds if you slide down the first half of the track perfectly, but if you do the second half of the track perfectly, you’ll lose 8 seconds, and will usually come in a few seconds off the pace, even if you had a perfect run. Makes no sense at all.

The sound isn’t all that great either. You can tell the game was made by a Japanese developer, because the music is distinctively Japanese. The sound effects are bland, the background music gets really boring, really quick, and the announcer’s main goal is to put you down in as many ways possible (check that; three ways), only to congratulate you for doing your best at the end. You’re much better off turning down all the sound, or just muting the game altogether and listening to something else.

This is a game whose flaws catch up with its good points, inherently canceling each other out, yielding an average game. It’s definitely not worth buying, considering what’s coming up on the gaming horizon, but you might consider renting it if you find that you’ve got nothing to play (or you just want to see what Curling is all about). There’s fun in this game, if you can ignore all the annoyances.