Salt Lake 2002

"Like Linford's Double False Start At Atlanta...A Wasted Opportunity"

Salt Lake 2002 is the official game of the Winter Olympics. Wouldn’t that suggest that we’d be taken back to the coin-op days when button-pressing madness meant we’d be in bed with achy fingers every night? Well, unfortunately, ATD got it a little wrong with Salt Lake. Lets see why…
Graphically, Salt Lake isn’t a slouch, but it doesn’t have those extra special effects that make a game stand out. While the athletes have strange looking faces at time, they’re rendered fairly well but the backdrops are very mundane looking.
Graphics are just a polish on the game itself, it’s the actual events we’re after and here’s where it hits you…there are just 6…and that’s all your getting. A shock to the system when we thought Track And Field was mean in the events given there. This is really the biggest downfall of all here for Salt Lake 2002. Then you discover that 3 of them involve going through gates and it gets ridiculous!
The 6 on offer are Downhill, a speedy course which tests your ability to stay on the track, Slalom is the same, but extremely hard and ATD knew it too, by letting you restart after missing a gate! Doesn’t that ruin the whole point? Ski Jumping is over far too quickly, and is a little too easy to do. Snowboarding is livened up by the fact you’re racing against someone else but once again its going round gates. There’s no quibble about these events involving gates, it’s just that they all are played so very similarly. The least they could have done was change the control system, or at least given some differences in the way they’re produced!
Bobsleighs up next, but the graphics look very blocky and it doesn’t give a perception of speed, and so is a wasted opportunity, and Aerials is the only real different sport, settling for co-ordination skills of button pressing, rather than steering left and right. To say this game is lightweight is putting it lightly.
It’s a dreadful shame though as these kinds of games can be fantastic if enough thought and effort is put in. There is only event that you can directly compete in with multiplayer mode, which is disappointing, and with a license like the Olympics, there are so many events that could have been added to make the game a gem, but instead the simple easy route was taken and as a result, this game screams “rushed” at you every step of the way.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 01/02/03, Updated 06/30/03