Uploaded December 2021 | Updated September 2026, 1 day ago
Winter Olympiad '88 by Tynesoft
I do enjoy when novaload games actually use the novaload block counter! It's always nice to know what's going on! And petscii loading screens will always remain the way of the future! Also, I love that the game advertises buying other versions of itself on the loader scroller for some reason....
This is, of course, the untitlted epyx knockoff project, and so it is what it is. I've never playd this one before either. But you can't go past a rocking Wally Beben Soundtrack. So we go to play the game, and.... okay, clearly each game is a seperate executable. At least, unlike g-loc, they had the common decency to try and hide this (indeed, I thought the game had crashed originally!), but.... the way it uses novaload, this is obviously so. But unlike there, were it's frustrating, here it's actually kind of neat. Of course, the loading time is _brutal_, putting winter games (which I played yesterday) to shame with just how horrifying it is. It's a solid ten minutes before you hit any gameplay, which kind of makes sense given that, again, everything is entirely seperate executables, so there can be very little shared code between them.
That having been said, the presentation is great - THere is digi music everywhere, zooming logos, everything, which I suspect is why the loading is just so brutal. I said above the novaload was cute, adn honestly, when I wrote that, I was only 10 minutes in. I'm now 20 minutes in, and it's no longer cute. I appriciate some good presentation, I do, but the amouint of it here makes the game completly unbearable to actually live with. If I did not have the countdown timer, I probably would have given up by now, but at least I do know that it is loading....
It's no Run the Gauntlet, my current bar for bad mastering by people who should know better (goofy railway excepted), but honestly it's not that far off. The thing that I think I find offensive about both of these examples - and don't find, for example, as offensive about Skate or Die or Winter Games, is that this was developed for a mostly-tape market. In 1988, when this problem was well understood. It doesn't hurt that those are both really good games, also, and this one.... feels like the knockoff that it is. Biathlon is the worst in that regard, but honestly, none of the events feel like a patch on the equivalents in winter games - it really is a case of style over substance, which when you're loading all of that style over and over on tape, goes from kinda annoying to unforgivable.
As to the events: ski jump is passable once you work it out, although the perspective is stupid, downhill is entirely unplayable, biathalon is fine once you work out that the rhythm of your joystick should NOT match the screen, but rather just a gentle left-right-left-right every second or so, slalom is boring as hell but at least functional, and bobsled is another unplayable mess.
What a waste of 45 minutes. I will never get that time back.
Winter Olympiad '88 by Tynesoft
I do enjoy when novaload games actually use the novaload block counter! It's always nice to know what's going on! And petscii loading screens will always remain the way of the future! Also, I love that the game advertises buying other versions of itself on the loader scroller for some reason....
This is, of course, the untitlted epyx knockoff project, and so it is what it is. I've never playd this one before either. But you can't go past a rocking Wally Beben Soundtrack. So we go to play the game, and.... okay, clearly each game is a seperate executable. At least, unlike g-loc, they had the common decency to try and hide this (indeed, I thought the game had crashed originally!), but.... the way it uses novaload, this is obviously so. But unlike there, were it's frustrating, here it's actually kind of neat. Of course, the loading time is _brutal_, putting winter games (which I played yesterday) to shame with just how horrifying it is. It's a solid ten minutes before you hit any gameplay, which kind of makes sense given that, again, everything is entirely seperate executables, so there can be very little shared code between them.
That having been said, the presentation is great - THere is digi music everywhere, zooming logos, everything, which I suspect is why the loading is just so brutal. I said above the novaload was cute, adn honestly, when I wrote that, I was only 10 minutes in. I'm now 20 minutes in, and it's no longer cute. I appriciate some good presentation, I do, but the amouint of it here makes the game completly unbearable to actually live with. If I did not have the countdown timer, I probably would have given up by now, but at least I do know that it is loading....
It's no Run the Gauntlet, my current bar for bad mastering by people who should know better (goofy railway excepted), but honestly it's not that far off. The thing that I think I find offensive about both of these examples - and don't find, for example, as offensive about Skate or Die or Winter Games, is that this was developed for a mostly-tape market. In 1988, when this problem was well understood. It doesn't hurt that those are both really good games, also, and this one.... feels like the knockoff that it is. Biathlon is the worst in that regard, but honestly, none of the events feel like a patch on the equivalents in winter games - it really is a case of style over substance, which when you're loading all of that style over and over on tape, goes from kinda annoying to unforgivable.
As to the events: ski jump is passable once you work it out, although the perspective is stupid, downhill is entirely unplayable, biathalon is fine once you work out that the rhythm of your joystick should NOT match the screen, but rather just a gentle left-right-left-right every second or so, slalom is boring as hell but at least functional, and bobsled is another unplayable mess.
What a waste of 45 minutes. I will never get that time back.
