Children love to swing. The dizzy feeling is especially fun when the world starts spinning. A feeling that today's big kids also know. But with their high-tech toys in the form of virtual reality goggles, this motion sickness is perceived as rather disturbing. At least the professionals in the circus tent on their high trapeze swings may not be scared of heights in order to bring the fascination to the audience without accidents. In any case, in the perfect computer game world, the player is one hundred percent protected against a fall, without having to expose himself to the danger of the real experience itself.
Let's be honest: There are heaps (almost mountains) of winter sports games, and most of them are downhill or slalom races, which play like yet another racing game, in which they simply replaced the car sprite with a ski racer sprite. Actually there might be nothing wrong about it , but to those, who always wished for a more original approach to the alternative winter extreme sports, I want to heartily recommend Ski or Die. There you have to compete in five unusual disciplines (from snowball fight to inner-tube racing) against clock, man and high-score and attempt to make the best impression on the snow fields.
Virtual sports should be physical exercise, too! No, this is not a review of a modern-day Wii title – the idea goes back to much earlier time. The first game to famously follow this premise was Activision's Decathlon.
Granted, the kind of physical exercise is largely one-dimensional. Instead of the wholesome, healthy training of the human body which participation in an actual decathlon would represent, legendary designer David Crane boiled all the challenges down to hand and wrist strain. Not exactly healthy, neither for the joints, nor for the controllers of the console, both of which notoriously needed replacement after too much time playing Decathlon.
