Ski or Die

The Good
The events in this game are really cool, and differ from the classic Olympic games. The sound is amazing, and the graphics are very nice, colorful and detailed. The snowball blast is my favourite, because its very intense when you need to watch every direction for those snowball throwing kids.

The Bad
Its a little hard to perform very good because the controls are quite difficult. Also, the game could have more events and more diversity in the moves and the tricks that you can do on the half-pipe and the big jump.

The Bottom Line
This game is a lot of fun. its looks good, its sound good and even though you probably won't play it for a long time, it's gonna be good hour or so you will spend with this game.

The Good
The game utilizes some nice EGA graphics for its time. Nothing spectacular, but the background and the sprites are pretty realistic, and it utilises the EGA's 16 color palette quite well.

The Bad

As a game it is horrible. It is NOTHING like the fun I had playing california games on my XT with a CGA monitor.

Ski or Die obviously borrows the basic concept from California Games by Epyx. It also borrows some more, like the snowboard halfpipe which is obviously based on CG's skateboard halfpipe.

The problem is that the games are not fun to play. I got tired of each game in 15 minutes, and the entire game in two day. The problem is not the premise, but the implementation of the ideas. The interface is pretty bad, the sound effects (on PC speaker) are truly horrible, and the gameplay is repetative. It all becomes very annoying real quick, and I simply quit the game.

I tried coming back to it a few times, to see if there's is something I missed, but there wasn't. The fun game just isn't there.

**The Bottom Line**
A really BAD game, not fun at all. If you want to see how it should be done - go play California Games or any other Epyx sports game.

The Good
This game features some of the best AdLib music I've ever heard, by that incredible music man Rob Hubbard (of C=64 fame). Too bad my SB 128 PCI can't play it like my SB 2.0 could... Anyway, the graphics are also great, colourful EGA, with well defined and animated characters.

The events are pretty nice, too, with a snowball fight, downhill skiing, snowboard half-pipe, and acro aerials...

The Bad
...but I never did quite get the hang of the stupid innertube trash event, and some of the events are way too fast on a new computer.

The Bottom Line
This game is like Summer/Winter Games meets Skate or Die. The actual gameplay is pretty much like WG, with the option of choosing between practicing or participating in one or more events and waggling the joystick to get speed and ranking lists and such. It runs great on a 286 and the sound is superb for its time (and pretty good even today, unless you want environmental audio or something silly like that). If you don't like ice-hockey or football (soccer) games, maybe you should give this a try, as it is great fun - with one or more friends! I wouldn't play this by myself if you paid me. (Is that a checkbook I see? All right, I lied, but I wouldn't enjoy it.)