Go! Sports Ski (PS3)

The Sixaxis motion sensing technology featured in the PlayStation 3 controller was certainly a timid step into the realm of motion control by Sony. Shaking or moving the controller wasn’t as natural a fit as the Wii Remote’s motion sensing capability, but similar to Wii games that utilized motion control, it wasn’t really the hardware at fault for the quality of its detection. The PS3 game Super Rub ‘a’ Dub is surprisingly responsive to the player moving the controller around, and in games like Piyotama and Pain it’s not too bothersome to shake the controller when it’s necessary. Other games like Saw seem to struggle to even pick up motion inputs and games like Lair over-relied on it to a fault. Go! Sports Ski, also known as Feel Ski in Europe, finds itself in an odd middle ground where the basics can be responsive enough, but some of the most important actions have incredibly disruptive issues with the motion detection required to play the game at all.

 

Go! Sports Ski is a winter skiing game that almost entirely relies on the Sixaxis motion controls for guiding your skier. You will need to navigate menus with buttons, but on the slopes your actions are all determined by how you hold, tilt, and lift the PS3 controller. Turning left and turning right is as natural as turning the controller like a steering wheel, and when the slopes are at their tamest it’s easy enough to navigate your skier around as you desire. The playable character can have different stats depending on how you customize them before each round of play, the male sportsman able to shift his clothes, skin tone, and whether or not he’s wearing a hat on top of the more vital ski gear. Gear 1 balances speed, acceleration, and turning well enough, Gear 2 is slower but has more control, and Gear 3 sacrifices control for the sake of speed, Gear 3 definitely hard to manage in a game where motion controls determine how tight you can feasibly take a turn. Still, the relationship between the basics of movement and the gear sets is fine enough, but then you learn that moving forward requires you to tilt your controller forward to build up speed.

This seemingly simple maneuver is surprisingly imprecise, and while the game literally opens by asking you to read the instructions first to presumably have a better handle of the game, the Instruction Manual option tries to open a webpage that is no longer available and was apparently even difficult to navigate around the game’s time of release. Still, tilting the controller forward to build up speed seems logical enough, and while it doesn’t mimic the motion of pulling forward with ski poles, it is required you tilt to get going if your skier comes to a stop for any reason. Strangely enough though, sometimes your skier simply won’t agree that it’s time to speed up, assuming the right stance for it but not gathering any momentum and barely drifting forward. This is mostly a concern when you’re in uneven or strange terrain, but it’s unclear why the skier will suddenly decide a random stretch of this ground is okay for him to build up speed again. It is certainly frustrating to be performing an action correctly but not get the result for unclear reasons, but it is likely this issue with building up speed is tied to the game’s tenuous grasp of physics.

 

When on the relatively plain stretches of snow, nothing will seem untoward about how Go! Sports Ski handles its physics engine. However, when you are near a mountainside and start skiing up a wall and manage to go completely horizontal with no risk of falling off even when you’ve reduced your speed, you start to realize something might be up with how the game tries to handle slopes. In one segment an icy cave replaces the snow slopes and this area is especially prone to strange physics as your skier can suddenly start rocking in all sorts of directions if you turn away from a head on course a bit too much. A few jump sections also have drops you can fall in, and while having the player actually have to ski these low roads is an interesting way to incentivize taking jumps properly, the fall can cause all sorts of problems if the skier ends up touching a wall on the way down or lands in any position beyond facing the intended route forward. Having a rather humdrum but functional ski game suddenly freak out when things go a little awry does definitely sully any potential appeal this game would have as a simple motion control skiing game, but there are still more issues in store for you as you play.

 

Jumps can be incredibly important to nail either because falling can cause glitchy behavior or missing it might put you on the rough terrain the game has trouble moving you through. However, the jump requires a specific upwards flick of the controller at the right moment, and the window for this and sensitivity to the motion can make it hard to execute this reliably. Even if you do get accustomed to the jumping, the game then allows you to do tricks in midair by moving the controller around. If you don’t want to do tricks and jeopardize the jump you need to sit still, but attempting these maneuvers can lead to the game leaving you in a tricky spot after where you don’t appear set for a safe landing but attempts to adjust would potentially cause more tricks. You can do one small one and hope for the best, but it’s often best to ignore this component to avoid any issues.

So, we already have a control scheme that interferes more than it immerses and one that seems to actively discourage certain actions due to its unreliability, but then Go! Sports Ski hits us with a revelation: there are only two ski slopes. Course 01 and Course 02 are the only slopes you’ll ever be able to ski on in this 2 dollar game, one essentially the easier course and the other requiring more skill such as jumping more often or navigating that ice cave. There is a fair bit of visual variety in going down these snow-covered mountains in that Course 01 has a little village and Course 02 has more mountainsides you can ski horizontally on, and most of the time if you can see snow-covered ground the game won’t use invisible walls to keep you from it even if it is a poor path to take. Still, the optimal routes are often pretty clear rather than something learned through experimenting with the options available. Neither course is bad per se but both become incredibly rote quickly even just trying to squeeze out what you can from this lean package. There is an option to have sunny weather or snowy weather for both, but snowy weather only impacts visibility rather than play, and since the records you set are shared across both versions of the course, you only ever really want to use snowy weather potentially in a multiplayer setting.

 

To try and achieve some sort of longevity, the two courses can be played in three modes: Battle, Time Attack, and Slalom. Time Attack is a very basic race against the clock to set the best time, although the basic time is easily beaten and the online leaderboards raise the question of if you really want to be the best player of Go! Sports Ski to even show up on them. Slalom works a little better as a single player experience, the player earning points by hitting alternating giant red and blue snowflakes that serve as the gates. Missing them means missing out on points, and since the basics of turning don’t ask for too much of the player, this mode can be played reasonably well enough so long as you don’t run into the usual issues too much. The weird thing about Time Attack and Slalom though is that even though you can save your ghost to race against to better your performance, the Online modes of these is actually just the single player mode except now it will submit your scores to the leaderboard. There’s practically no reason to play it offline as a result, but it’s still an option split across two menus rather than the game consolidating the submit function into practice mode.

 

Battle is the only true multiplayer in the game, there being no computer players to compete against but you can play it split-screen or with other players online. Oddly enough, you can play this single player, but that essentially just turns it into Time Attack but with a few quirks. To make this more of a competition the game adds in a set of pick-ups you can use to alter how the race downhill unfolds. These are used instantly on pick up, meaning if no one is nearby one meant to interfere with other players will do little and defensive ones will only really protect you from problems like messing up a jump or crashing. Speed boosts are the simplest in concept though and welcome enough, allowing you to get a slightly better time then in the basic Time Attack mode if you grab them. It’s not very likely players will race too close to each other due to all the factors involved in whether or not you move as you desire, and even if you were hoping to have some kids just mess around in this mode despite the game’s motion sensing quibbles, each mode has a hard five minute cap on how long someone can be on the slopes. A regular player will be able to clear a slope in half of that even if things are going awry, but even if your standards and skills are low, you can be disqualified for either taking your time or suffering one of the unfortunate setbacks that make consistent play in Go! Sports Ski such a tossup.

THE VERDICT: Go! Sports Ski’s pair of playable levels and trio of modes make it a fairly thin package that doesn’t diversify play enough, but on a basic level the slopes are navigable enough when all that’s involved is turning your skier with the motion controls. However, when jumps, tricks, or unusual and uneven surfaces get involved in play, the ski simulation starts to run into issues with detecting your intended motions and simply moving your character around a 3D space. Skiing up walls, sliding backwards, failing to build up speed until an arbitrary patch of ground is reached, and other woes impact any play besides going down the basic best path for a course, and the mild impact of things like the power-ups in Battle mode don’t do much to make the normal play any more exciting. Tepid when functional and aggravating when arbitrarily out of control, Go! Sports Ski certainly doesn’t make you want to hit its two slopes for any length of time.

 

And so, I give Go! Sports Ski for PlayStation 3…

A TERRIBLE rating. Had there been issue with the basic need to turn left and right, then Go! Sports Ski would be truly irredeemable, but there are inoffensive stretches where all you need to do is navigate your character around a rather plain snowy space, Slalom even making that a bit challenging in an acceptable manner. However, when the shape of the terrain starts to get more creative, aspects like ice are introduced, and jumps become more regular features, Go! Sports Ski burns up what little good will it had as things start feeling less and less like you have full control over your athlete. When you start seeing him move in ways that defy gravity it definitely starts to become clear the physics aren’t up to where they need to be for this to be a decent skiing simulation. The modes that do embrace unrealistic ideas like power-ups don’t implement them well enough to make the break away from realism work for it either, but the real issue is that if things aren’t working in a game with hardly anything to even experience, it makes it much harder to justify even taking a look to see if you’ll l like it. 2 dollars may be easy to throw down on something small, but if you’re only getting two slopes designs to be completed in 2 minutes each and there’s nothing to really make them stand out in a positive light, it’s easy to give this skiing game a hard pass and not have lost out on much for doing so.

 

Sixaxis has its moments in some games, but adding motion sensing into the PS3’s controller lead to Sony publishing a lot of small downloadable titles that were either built around it or had to cram it in somewhere. Games like the puzzle game Piyotama slipped it in an inoffensive capacity by having it simply shuffle pieces a bit, others like Super Rub ‘a’ Dub kept its concept limited to “rubber ducks in floating tubs in the sky” so it only had to contend with making that absurd but small idea work. Go! Sports Ski tries to imitate a real sport and builds itself with the trappings of one but lacks the expected control and competent physics to execute that properly. With so little content on top of the unreliable gameplay, Go! Sports Ski definitely comes out one of the worst games created from this initiative by Sony that was meant to show how Sixaxis could benefit gameplay, this awful skiing experience instead showing how it can fail in the wrong hands.