Arcade Archives Alpine Ski

Genre: Sports (Skiing)

Players: 1-2 Alternating (Local), Online Leaderboards

.

Review:

(Note: This game is included in Taito Milestones, along with Chack’n Pop, Elevator Action, Front Line, Halley’s Comet, Qix, Space Seeker, The FairyLand Story, The Ninja Warriors, and Wild Western)

Alpine Ski is a Skiing game released in 1981 in arcades. This modern release sees the game coming to PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch in 2019.

The basic idea of this game is fairly similar to the classic Windows game Ski Free, where players try to reach the bottom of a mountain as quickly as possible without running into obstacles. Alpine Ski has players moving upwards on the screen instead of down, though, and it places a 2-minute limit on their play time that can only be extended with point bonuses. Players can opt to stretch this out to 2:30 in the options, but in either case it’s not a lot of time, especially since there’s a 10-second time penalty every time you strike an object. What’s more, you cannot extend this time further using continues – once you’re out of time, you need to start over from the beginning.

Furthermore, the controls here are just terrible. It takes a while for the game to actually get you moving after you change your direction on the D-Pad, and the game oddly assigns both “speed up” and “jump” to one button, which made it so I couldn’t quite figure out how to jump. In any case though, the terrible controls made this a pretty miserable experience for me.

This release of the game includes a new “Hi-Score Mode” that challenges players to score as much as they can in one run before seeing a game over screen. There is also a new “Caravan Mode” that does much the same, but with the limit being five minutes (assuming you can even manage to extend out your time that much). In addition, this release of the game includes various display options, sound options, challenge modifiers, button mapping, and online leaderboards.

Overall, I think Alpine Ski has aged absolutely terribly, all thanks to terrible controls and the game’s fairly strict time limit. The only people I can see finding this game worthwhile are those who have nostalgia for it, and even then I think the game’s $8 price tag may be too much to pay for something this clunky and lacking in any sort of fun.

tl;dr – Alpine Ski is a game where players try to race through a ski course while avoiding obstacles. This game has a strict time limit and terrible controls, which adds up to a game that is simply not fun to play.

Grade: D

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Jamie and His Cats, Ben, Ilya Zverev, Andy Miller, Homer Simpin, Johannes, Francis Obst, Gabriel Coronado-Medina, Jared Wark, Kristoffer Wulff, and Seth Christenfeld. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}