Vancouver 2010

How long have these kinds of sports games been running the same lane? It certainly seems like forever, and Vancouver 2010, with its insistence on boiling gameplay down to a combination of button mashing, timing and the odd stick movement, really hasn’t evolved in any perceivable way outside of its admittedly above average visuals since Track & Field back in 1983. An achievement in itself when you really think about it.

CPU USA. The infamous three-time Olympian

What you’re actually doing, be it skiing, snowboarding – which is identical to skiing but with one plank missing – Luge, or any of the other marginally varied winter pastime, is irrelevant. Here more than anywhere else of late, graphics and sound play second fiddle to action in that, for the greater part of the available events, you could take them away entirely, leaving you with only a timed fill bar, or some rhythmical quicktime prompts. The gameplay would be pretty unchanged.

Not only that, but the challenge as a single-player game leaves an awful lot to be desired. Each discipline has you competing against three CPU players – as opposed to the usual forty or fifty in your average men’s downhill ski event. Without the ability to watch their performances your only clue as to how inept yours is when compared to theirs is their time or score, stamped randomly on the action’s rear bookend. To all intents and purposes, this means that other CPU competitors are irrelevant. You’re competing against a number, so there was no need to dress it up. There are a few saving graces to this rule; the four events in which everyone competes at the same time being they.

If you want first place, in all but one or two of the 14 events, this means completing the event perfectly. There is no margin for error. Even the slightest of wobbly stick or nanosecond mis-time will see you tumble into second, third or fourth place. As soon as you understand this, the pain of each event increases tenfold, since you no longer want to continue playing from the exact moment you cock something up.

Get that camera out of my face, I'm gonna chuck.

In real life, the actual physical rules work quite well when zooming down a hill, a toboggan run, or around and around in the tight circles of an ice rink. Come off and you’ll go for a tumble or lose a few milliseconds. But Vancouver has a whole bunch of its own to inflict on you. For example, touch the edge of the ice track – you know, the bit with more ice rink on it – and you’ll come to a dead stop as if that ice were laminated in a clear coating of peanut butter and superglue.

Playing on your own is less fun than death, but we have to offer as a reprieve for Eurocom’s effort two very important caveats. Firstly, as briefly mentioned before, it’s easily the best looking Olympic tie-in ever made. Secondly, it’s an absolute blast to play with three mates in the same room and to a lesser extent online, since you’re all dealing with the game’s daft idiosyncrasies together. It is… a laugh riot.