Sliding at breakneck speeds down treacherous snowy slopes with your feet lashed onto two spindly lengths of plastic might not be everyone’s idea of fun. So much safer then to squat comfortably behind your keyboard and watch your digital avatar flounder to an agonising death.
Ski Racing 2005 lets you play all the original slopes from the 2004/2005 skiing world championship. The four core World Cup disciplines are slalom, giant slalom, super-g, and downhill. Winning the championship requires competence, if not mastery, of your skiing skills in these areas. Let’s get this straight; SR is not easy. In fact, your first ten tries are all likely to meet their end on the wrong side of a marker flag. Completing a race breeds a sense of accomplishment, even if you do happen to be 38th in the standings.
However, a bit like an RPG, your skill points increase synchronously with your success in the tournament. Climbing a few rungs up the ladder will enhance your abilities just a little notch, so that the seemingly impossible races in the later stages of the World Cup are eventually made to seem at least vaguely plausible. And so too your personal abilities will increase, as you learn to dextrously weave your fragile skier through the hordes of marker flags that seem intent on disrupting your progress.
To play SR requires a moderate level of skill. To master it, devotion and time are prerequisites. Each set of races leading up to the grand finale requires a set amount of championship points until it can be unlocked. Hence, you’ll find yourself re-running all the tracks several times, trying to squeeze an extra second here, or higher place there.
Slalom is definitely the trickiest of all the disciplines to get the hang of. Quite simply, you have to carefully glide your avatar through hundreds and hundreds of slim checkpoints, which are craftily placed so as to keep you wrong-footed (or wrong-skied) for much of the race. Giant slalom is a little easier, with bigger checkpoints and greater distance between them, but which advantage is unfortunately used by the AI as well.
Super-g is simply a nippy checkpoint race that thankfully has far fewer turns than the slaloms, and downhill takes it to a whole new level, forcing you to claw your breath back at speeds of up to 160 kph. Quite how candidly that adheres to the reality of skiing I couldn’t possibly comment, but I can most assuredly advise you that it goggle-blisteringly fast.
As an age-old axiom never quite got round to quoting: ‘the faster they go, the harder they fall’. Oh yes, the harder they fall. With something very similar to a ragdoll physics engine, SR has your brave little sportsman tumbling downhill at remarkably frequent intervals. It takes little effort to convince your hapless chappy to dismount his plastic steeds and plunge down the slopes at quite literally ‘breakneck’ speed, with limbs flailing into grotesque contortions that the human body was certainly not designed to perform.
I suppose the biggest question though is whether this game manages to recreate the experience of skiing to a satisfactory degree. As a fairly keen skier myself, I would testify that the sport is one of the most exhilarating I have ever tried. There is nothing quite like the rush of haring down a black run, or taking scarily big air off a mogul. Unfortunately, SR never quite manages to reach those heights. Although technically accomplished and a reasonably competent little skiing simulator, there is a distinct absence of tension, even when sailing at searing speeds down vertiginously inclined slopes.
Another slight gripe is that fact that the game has lowered its remit squarely at the world championship, and thus restricted itself solely to the four primary disciplines. Not a huge issue certainly, but it would have been nice to see some extra modes available to hold our attention longer, even as unlockable extras. An editor that lets you set up your own courses remedies this slightly though.
The graphics serve their purpose adequately, with a decent draw distance to admire the pleasant scenery, and some pleasing snow effects. A particularly nice touch is the way your skier starts to distort at high speeds, stretching languidly backwards in a stylised motion blur. The cardboard cut-out spectators don’t really add a great deal to the atmosphere though. Sound effects are moderate throughout, but with a few maddening additions like that cretinous spectator who insists on rattling a few tin cans together to herald my departure every time I start a race.
But SR still manages to entertain, and does so with a certain amount of style. After the hard slog of building up your stats and getting to grips with the unforgiving controls, it is a very sweet reward indeed to finally scrape your first victory. You need a lot of skill and a degree of luck to make it, but the palpable sense of achievement is well worth the effort.
With a conspicuous paucity of other skiing titles to choose from, I have few reservations about recommending Ski Racing 2005 to you. It’s not revolutionary, it’s not spectacular, it’s just a pleasant exploration of the word ‘enjoyable’.
Adam Shirley
