Uploaded December 2021 | Updated September 2026, 1 day ago
Winter Games by Epyx/US Gold, played from tape
So, first up - I actually ended up running out of disk space during the last event, so you guys miss the message to rewind the tape to the start and load the game again to re-play. But, since this contains all events (bobsleigh is the last event on tape), I decided to just leave it there - the only thing missing is the final presentation screen, which is nothing but a screen of text with rankings.
I'll admit, after Skate or Die, I was expecting the worst here - in particular, I was expecting to magically have to know which event was where on the tape. But actually they re-did the game to be vaugely linear. Yeah, the multiload is still hell, but it's not Skate or Die level of hell. It is Turbo Outrun level of hell, though, so... still not great. You know, I didn't really need to see that intro sequence and such again, and I sure as hell don't need a seperate load to show me the results - i'm sure it's paging the music in/out of memory or something like that, but it really does seem unnessesary.
That having been said, I chose to compete in single player, which is def the worst option, as these things go go, than most others, as you can see by the tiny amount of play time I got on between loads (It's loading the second event as I'm typing this), but I could see this being actually pretty cool if you select practice instead.
In a couple of these events, I _really_ wish I had practiced. Mostly the ski jump. But yeah, if this was the
I actually hadn't played this for a couple of decades - I had the atari 2600 version around 1989, and I had the PC CGA version in 1992 or so, but never the c64 version (the only C64 game in this series I've played before is California Games). It's really good - definetly worth the loading, as aggressive as such loading is (obviously, like most USA games, this was primarily intended as a disk game, and hacked onto tape for the PAL market later)
The thing that most surprised me, playing this, is in my head the epyx games series were just another violent joystick waggler, but actually this isn't true - the events rely on timing rather than raw speed, and do not put your joystick in danger of death. I suspect this was mostly my kid self not really understanding nuance, but.... well, as sports games go, it's pretty good in that regard!
That said, after all of these years, it turns out I still don't really understand how figure skating works. Go figure. Also, the bobsleigh event is kind of dumb, but the rest are gems. So, you know, for a 1985 game particularly, this is punching well, well above its weight - and definetly better than any other version of the game that I've played. But, yeah, maybe I should invest in a 1541 if I want to play this further....
Winter Games by Epyx/US Gold, played from tape
So, first up - I actually ended up running out of disk space during the last event, so you guys miss the message to rewind the tape to the start and load the game again to re-play. But, since this contains all events (bobsleigh is the last event on tape), I decided to just leave it there - the only thing missing is the final presentation screen, which is nothing but a screen of text with rankings.
I'll admit, after Skate or Die, I was expecting the worst here - in particular, I was expecting to magically have to know which event was where on the tape. But actually they re-did the game to be vaugely linear. Yeah, the multiload is still hell, but it's not Skate or Die level of hell. It is Turbo Outrun level of hell, though, so... still not great. You know, I didn't really need to see that intro sequence and such again, and I sure as hell don't need a seperate load to show me the results - i'm sure it's paging the music in/out of memory or something like that, but it really does seem unnessesary.
That having been said, I chose to compete in single player, which is def the worst option, as these things go go, than most others, as you can see by the tiny amount of play time I got on between loads (It's loading the second event as I'm typing this), but I could see this being actually pretty cool if you select practice instead.
In a couple of these events, I _really_ wish I had practiced. Mostly the ski jump. But yeah, if this was the
I actually hadn't played this for a couple of decades - I had the atari 2600 version around 1989, and I had the PC CGA version in 1992 or so, but never the c64 version (the only C64 game in this series I've played before is California Games). It's really good - definetly worth the loading, as aggressive as such loading is (obviously, like most USA games, this was primarily intended as a disk game, and hacked onto tape for the PAL market later)
The thing that most surprised me, playing this, is in my head the epyx games series were just another violent joystick waggler, but actually this isn't true - the events rely on timing rather than raw speed, and do not put your joystick in danger of death. I suspect this was mostly my kid self not really understanding nuance, but.... well, as sports games go, it's pretty good in that regard!
That said, after all of these years, it turns out I still don't really understand how figure skating works. Go figure. Also, the bobsleigh event is kind of dumb, but the rest are gems. So, you know, for a 1985 game particularly, this is punching well, well above its weight - and definetly better than any other version of the game that I've played. But, yeah, maybe I should invest in a 1541 if I want to play this further....
