Winter Challenge - World Class Competition

When you loudly tell your friends in the eighties that you've got a program where you can take on the world in winter sports, you don't expect it to look like a set of colored squares on a black background. Winter Challenge, however, quickly toughens you up.

It's a simulation of five winter disciplines — downhill, slalom, ski jumping, speed skating, and biathlon. Each has its own simple menu where you dial in the difficulty and then dive into the action. The graphics are at the level of the brand you remember from old floppy disk wallpapers. It's not about beauty, it's about function. Sounds? More like acoustic signals that something happened.

The controls are befitting the era — vertical and horizontal movement, maybe a few extra buttons for acceleration. Playing it depends on which discipline you pick: in downhill you navigate around obstacles, in slalom you weave between poles, in speed skating you hit the key at the right time. It's nowhere near as fun as you'd imagine. Physics often lets you down, the graphical representation of these sports is laughably oversimplified. After fifty seconds of playing you feel like the game has exhausted its content. There's no dynamism, no tension, nothing to keep you going.

Winter Challenge belongs in the category of games that exist mainly because they exist. Among dozens of sports simulations that flooded shops in the eighties, it blended into the crowd. It wasn't a hit, and I don't know if it ever got anyone's interest beyond the average player who bought anything just to have something to play. Today it mainly interests nostalgia seekers and compilation collectors.

If you want to experience the freedom of slow gameplay with an archaic sports game on a notoriously outdated PC without any expectations, there's something waiting for you here. But put some Walkman tune in another window, because the game's sound won't entertain you by itself. The game works, does what it promises, but that's not the same as being fun.