Epyx's Winter Games series appeared on several platforms throughout the 1980s, with slight degrees of graphical variation. In Winter Games for the mobile platform, Epyx's signature gameplay, featuring timed button presses, has largely remained intact, although survivors of the original (more demanding) games will regale you with tales of their bloody thumbs, and perhaps even their ingenious use of spoons to operate the NES version pain-free. Your enjoyment of this mobile incarnation will be contingent on your level of nostalgia for the masochism of yesteryear. While the game has been slowed down a bit, thereby sparing your fingers (although not your eyes), it's still mind-numbingly tedious to play.
In Winter Games, you choose a name and a country and then compete in four Olympic events: speed skating, the notoriously strange biathalon, the death-defying ski jump, and the ever-popular downhill slalom. Fans of the original will notice the unfortunate omission of sports like bobsledding and figure skating. In Winter Games, you propel your athlete to victory in each of these events by pressing one of five buttons at the correct time. In the ski jump, for example, you must tell your pixelated future medalist when to jump, and then guide the jump with button presses and Dance Dance Revolution-style use of the arrow keys. In the speed-skating event, you simply alternate between two buttons in time with a meter. And so on and so forth. The ability to "play online," which actually entails simply submitting your best times to an online leaderboard, isn't enough of an incentive to endure this tired gameplay.
The mobile Winter Games is somewhere in between the NES and Amiga versions of the game, in terms of audiovisual quality. Its simplistic visuals aren't on par with other sports offerings for the Nokia 6600's Series 60 platform, but then again this is a retro title, designed to be imitative of its predecessors, even in the face of superior technology. Also appealing to your nostalgia is the game's audio, which consists mostly of ferociously loud monophonic ditties. These succeed in sounding hokey, but they won't necessarily cause you to pine for a bygone era of gaming. You will, however, hear the occasional vocal clip, such as when you fault during the speed-skating event.
Winter Games is a decent port, but it's a decent port of a mediocre game that hasn't aged especially well. Even within Epyx's large roster of competition-themed games, there are better options for a mobile conversion, such as California Games, usually regarded as the fan favorite. For everyone but Winter Games devotees, that means there are many superior alternatives to Mforma's latest offering.
