The first Olympic title on the N64 – and, curiously, the last one on a Nintendo platform until Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games. Olympic video games are usually collection of simple games based around Olympic Sports, often catering for multiplayer – and while Nagano does the first, it doesn’t really focus on multiplayer.

There are 10 sports – some with a few variations and all are slow and tedious at best, and outright uninteresting at worst. The Skiing and snowboarding slaloms are best, but they’re both slow with some slight turns as you go through gates. The halfpipe is probably the worst, which has you copying input commands before you jump and your snowboarder doing a trick.

The AI is also insanely good at the game, so unless you manage to master the unclear and terrible controls, you’ll be happy if you make it to 15th place. The snowboard slalom is an odd exception, as I fell over a few dozen times and still won by a significant margin.

The massive let down in the multiplayer side is the complete lack of any simultaneous events. You all have to take turns setting records. Speed Skating is against an opponent, but in multiplayer you all race against a CPU player. Only curling, which is a turn-based sport, has any kind of interaction between players. On top of that, from what I can tell, each player still needs their own controller.

Nagano Winter Olympics is a shoddy sports minigame collection with poor controls and a terrible multiplayer mode.

Poor

We tried playing single Nagano events until we were really good at them. We tried the seven-event championship mode. We tried multiplayer championships. At no time – not even for a second -did we have any fun whatsoever.

Jonathan Davies, N64 Magazine #12. Review Score: 32%

Remake or Remaster?

Both older and newer Olympic titles have done a much better job than this.

Official Ways to get the game

There’s no official way to play Nagano Winter Olympics ’98