Athletes train for years to achieve the peak physical condition needed to compete in the Olympic games. For many, all those months of running around in high altitude or hitting the slopes 13 hours a day go for naught, but that’s why the rest of us love playing Olympic games at home. They give us the chance to try our hands at a number of different disciplines; most important, they give us the chance to wipe the carpet with those snooty Austrian skiers, all without having to get out of our La-Z-Boys. Torino 2006 follows the path blazed by California Games and the two Track and Fields. But unlike those relics, this game is not a whole lot of fun to play. True, the Winter Games have fewer events than the Summer Edition, and unlike California Games, you can’t just make up events. Take away hockey — already über-represented in the home-video-game market — and you’re left with skiing, skating, and sledding. Torino 2006 offers those three sports plus that odd duck the Biathlon and gives you the choice of competing in eight different disciplines over 15 events. To me, this whole Sport-Discipline-Event classification is as confusing as the taxonomy lessons we learned in Biology class, but it wasn’t hard to dope out the overall lack of effort put into this game.
The character animations and the background graphics are decent enough; that and the $20 price tag are what Torino 2006 has going for it. Then again, any game coming out now for Xbox or Playstation 2 better have decent graphics. Between the commentators’ rote dialogue — I never thought I’d be yearning to hear the inane babble of the Madden games — and the lack of real-life Olympians to choose from, there’s a distinctly haphazard feel to the whole thing. What’s the point of offering more than 20 competing nations if no effort is made to identify individual competitors? This makes for some pretty unsatisfying victories. The multi-player option allows you to beat up to three of your friends, but pitting Switzerland versus Norway loses its thrill when the only thing that distinguishes the competitors is the color of their unitard.
The controls are pretty standard, and though there’s no training option, on-screen prompts during every event direct you how to play. You can also practice individual events before going for the gold. This is recommended for both the terribly-mapped Cross Country Ski controls — with its circular energy level it’s akin to the kicking meter in Madden — and the Speed Skating event, where timing bars prompt you to hit A and B as quick as you can. This should be a button masher’s delight, but the decision to shorten the timing bars to represent the increased frequency of the skaters’ strides — thus injecting some “reality” into the near-debacle — makes a boring event even worse.
And that’s the biggest problem with Torino 2006: it’s boring. I’m not saying I would have preferred Curling or Skeleton (great name) to what’s offered here, but three Cross-Country events are about two too many. Where’s the Snowboard Half-Pipe or the Freestyle Skiing? Oh, that’s right, they’re in fun games like SSX, not this pretty-looking snoozefest.
