DoctorSpuds Reviews Things - Skiing (INTV)

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Since I mentioned it earlier in my Skiing review, I feel rather obligated to review it now. The Intellivision also has a skiing game called ‘Skiing’ and in my opinion, despite being on a far superior console is nowhere near as good as the 2600 version. Despite most of the game being identical to the 2600 version, the Intellivision’s Skiing has some flaws that completely kill the experience for me. Just a note before I dive into the review, actually this is something that kinda confuses some new collectors; there are two versions of the Mattel Intellivision games, colored labels and white labels. Games with colored labels came from the original Intellivision run when it was owned by Mattel, they came in gatefold boxes. White label games come from INTV, which was a company comprised of Intellivision programmers who bought the rights for the console after Mattel pulled out, the boxes INTV games came in were not gatefold and the manuals were in black and white on regular non-glossy paper, a bit budgeted. The game actually goes for 2600 games; there are the M-Network and INTV games, they shared the same style boxes (as far as I’m aware), but had the white labels on the INTV versions. There’s a little collecting information for you, usually the white labels are a smidge rarer so it’s worth picking them up just for the cool factor, but let’s get on to the review already.

This game looks better than Activision’s Skiing, the trees are far more hi-res, as is, well… Everything! When you start up the game you’ll see a very chunky mountain range where you can select your game in a menu, I’ll get to that later. The skier looks marginally better, though he looks a bit like one of the robots from Berzerk, and he’s skiing on two giant pretzel sticks. My main gripe comes into play when you actually start to move, the movement isn’t smooth like in Activision’s Skiing, everything moves rather choppily even at the max speed. At the very end of the course you are greeted by a small crowd of people huddled around a finish line, well they might be people, I’m not sure, they may all be grey frozen corpses for all I know. Game’s choppy let’s move along.

This is actually kind of hilarious; the manual actually details every sound in the game bar the menu sounds, which are stock Intellivision menu sounds as far as I can tell. There is a *BOING* noise whenever you hit a flag, there is a constant *WHOOSH* sound as you ski downhill (to me it sounds more like angry TV static, but whatever), there is a satisfying *THUMP* as you fall in the snow or trip over a mogul. There is also a *CRASH* when you hit a tree (also very satisfying), and once you get to the bottom of the hill the field of frozen corpses cheers and whistles for you, but that may just be the wind .

The controls are similar to those of the Activision version, but not quite as good, we can attribute this inferiority to the controller. The control disc as an absolute pain, mainly because of its sixteen way controls versus the Atari’s eight. With the Atari versions you only need to tap the joystick to control the skier with large movements reserved for the sharper turns. With the Intellivision version it feels like you have to seesaw you finger back and forth on the disc just to get the right angle, it feels like I just keep turning a bit too much or just not enough, it’s very strange to describe but when the two are played back to back it makes a bit more sense (or I just have bad controllers, that’s also a possibility). Also there’s no random hill selection, you can choose between ten different slopes at fifteen different speeds, that’s what the menu at the beginning was for, problem is you need the manual to make any sense of it, for the longest time I just pressed whatever number I wanted and the game either gave it to me or farted at me. My biggest problem though is how you only have skiing modes with gates, there is no pure downhill mode where you have to go a certain distance, you have to go through the stupid gates which usually just leads to me roughing it on the side of the screen that is away from the gates and getting an awful time for it.

This is not an expensive game; I got my copy at my local game shop for fifty cents boxed. On Ebay the shipping cost for the game is usually higher than the cost of the game itself; I’ll let that speak for itself. I can’t give this game to the Collector’s Zone though, it’s just too cheap and we all likely have it already. Skiing is not a terrible game, it’s just very flawed in a lot of areas but I think you can get some enjoyment out of it, as long as you didn’t pay too much for it.

http://atariage.com/forums/blog/729/entry-15089-skiing-intv/