Party Game Sundays: Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games

Since it was Noukeo's Birthday we decided to play a game that we thought might not suck. In order to do that Noukeo purchased Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games. Prior to this past Sunday I had never tried a Mario & Sonic Olympic game, because I'm a very jaded person.

In the 90's when Mario and Sonic were in the middle of Nintendo and Sega's console war no one ever thought that they would be in the same game together, but if they were it would be the greatest game of all time. Instead the game that came out was Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games in 2007. Instead of taking the time to play it I wrote it off as a shitty mini-game collection. There must have been people who really liked it though, because they keep pumping them out now.

This image is amazing. I don't know how I was ever down on this.

Even though I was jaded in 2007, I am even more jaded now. I have lived through numerous Party Game Sundays and have seen true despair. I now realize that while Mario and Sonic could have come together in a cooler game this is completely fine. Nintendo at least puts a little effort into their games, because they want the Mario brand to mean something. That's not the case with most of the games we play on Sunday, so I'm always down for anything Mario related. More often than not the game will be pretty good.

I've decided that the name of this game is too long and no longer want to type it. M&SOWG is actually a very fun game. As you may have guessed it has mini-games themed around the Winter Olympics. Things such as bobsledding, figure skating, and hockey are all available to play. The cool thing is that since there aren't an overabundance of these games each one is developed very well.

I want to go bobsledding in real life.

There were four of us playing, so we formed an Olympic team. We had to work together to score well and earn medals. We were playing in festival mode. We were trying to be the best team by the end of the month long festival. Each day would consist of playing two mini-games. We began by training in the game so that we could learn the rules. The event I remember the most at the moment was bobsledding. All four of us were in the bobsleigh and we had to tilt the wii-mote in order to turn. It was super weird, because if one person was being an idiot the whole sleigh would veer off course. The goal of most of the bobsledding events was to collect coins. It's always surprising to me when motion controls actually work.

Outside of the mini-games themselves the game was just well put together. You can go around the Olympic village and spend coins you've earned from events on various things. You can buy clothes and cosmetic changes for event objects such as snowboards and sleighs. If you play as your Mii you can even unlock sweet clothes. As you progress you can also unlock new music from both Mario and Sonic games and have it play during events.

I've always wanted to see Luigi snowboard.

We only played halfway through a festival, but I'd really like to play through the rest of it. We didn't get to play hockey, we just did the training. It was dumb, because we were just shooting the puck into ice blocks and not actually playing a game.

I could actually see myself playing M&SOWG on my own time. The newest game in the series is for the Wii-U and I'm sure it's of the same quality, if not better, so maybe I'll pick that up as well at some point.