Review: Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games

I can't help it: there's something I really like about the Winter Olympic Games. Maybe it's the pride one feels in cheering for one's nation, maybe it's the inspiring spirit of competition that transcends international boundaries, or maybe it's just Curling. Yeah, nevermind, it's Curling. That's what I like about the Winter Olympics.

I caught the biathlon yesterday, which has always been favorite of mine ever since I first played it on the 1994 Winter Olympics Sega Genesis game. The sheer nostalgia involved in that moment was almost more than I could bear--I could feel the Sega Genesis controller in my hand. I could smell the RF Switch tied into the co-ax cable. As those biathletes shot the wimpiest and yet most complex .22 rifles I think I've ever seen, and the little black circles turned white, I knew what I had to do. I had to download the Vancouver 2010 Winter Games demo.

I was almost embarrassed to start it up. I'm not a huge sports video game fan, and I'm not a fan of blockbuster-movie-based video games, and frankly this felt like a little bit of both. I had to relive my childhood though; I had to try.

The demo is disappointingly sparse: there is one Olympic event (downhill skiing) and one "Challenge" event to play (ski jump). The downhill skiing course takes roughly 2 minutes to complete, assuming you make it through the course in a reasonable fashion. The ski jump Challenge is futile--they provide no tutorial on how to land once airborne, and I thoroughly refused to look it up online; it would have taken more time to do that than to play the demo start to finish. After three attempts at the ski jump, the demo shuts down and returns you to the XBox dashboard. Let me say this: it made for a bad demo. How does one make a judgment of the game if you can barely play it? I refuse to purchase this game for several reasons, but not least of all out of spite: it's insulting to be fed the slightest morsel of mediocre gameplay and have there be any expectation at all that you might want to purchase the game, and I think it shows a supreme arrogance on the part of the demo designers.

I'm not done. My resentment grows: the demo shows the player the entire list of playable Olympic games, and "grays out" all but the downhill skiing. You're made aware of the fact that there are way cooler events to be played, but they're not going to give them to you. Solid marketing is to show off your best stuff. Arrogance is to say, "you want something better? Pony up the dough, asshole."

The worst, however, is by far this: there is no biathlon in the Vancouver 2010. Not even a little bit. Are you fucking kidding me? The biathlon has to be the single easiest event to make appealing to a video game community. It has fucking guns in it. You discharge a firearm, which has to be the single largest pull for most gamers anywhere. Unacceptable. Without the biathlon, there's pretty much not a single chance that I might actually play the game if I ever were to buy it.

I have felt my resentment grow throughout this post, and no, I don't think I'm working myself up into a nauseating rage. I think I'm finally understanding what about the demo turned me off: it was literally crushing. It was a being of unimaginable and terrible malevolence, a dark and vicious specter cloaked in familiar and friendly garb, that chinked cracks into one's very soul and extended spindly tendrils of evil through that gap to suck out the very soul-marrow of the player.

My fond memories of the 1994 Winter Olympics video game have been sullied and tainted by the terrible experience; never before have I been closer to the sublime and abject truth that innocence is dying than I was during the Vancouver 2010 demo. I long for the opportunities of my youth, and I am denied.

I should have known it was a bad idea.