Winter Sports: The Ultimate Challenge for the Nintendo Wii is one of those games that you will either love or one that will have you throwing your controller at the TV. Winter Sports is a fun and diverse title that borders on being a sporting simulation. It can even feel a bit overwhelming at first. Luckily, once you give Winter Sports a few minutes, take time to learn the control scheme, and anticipate your movements as you would in real life, you will find that there isn’t a better winter sports simulation out there.

You can play nine different winter sports, with fifteen disciplines. The nine sports include ski jumping, alpine skiing, cross country skiing, speed skating, bobsleigh, figure skating, luge, skeleton and curling. Each sport has its own control scheme, and for the most part they feel rather unique from each other.

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What makes Winter Sports stand out are the intense controls. For instance while downhill skiing you hold the Wiimote in one hand and the Nunchuck in the other as if they were your ski polls. The game responds to your tilts and turns as you blaze down the mountain. Even when curling you have a level of extreme control that one just isn’t used to in this type of game. You actually feel as if you are sliding your puck across an icy playing field or racing down a snowy mountain.

There are also plenty of ways to play your favorite sporting events. You can play in Competition Mode, Career Mode, or you can play any single event in single or multiplayer mode. Competition Mode allows you to play a seven event, fifteen event, or virtual competition. The fifteen and seven event competitions are pretty self explanatory; you play through a set number of events and do your best to place as high as you can. The virtual competition on the other hand allows you to select your events allowing you to bypass events you do not wish to play.

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Graphically Winter Sports: Ultimate Challenge for the Nintendo Wii is sort of a mixed box. It feels a bit like an average PS2 port. The scenery is beautifully rendered, while the crowds aren’t quite as impressive. The motion capture for events such as the Figure Skating looks realistic, while the downhill skiers look a bit robotic. If as much work would have gone into the graphical localization for the Wii, as was obviously put into the control localization, then this could have been a beautiful game. What we are left with is an average looking game for the Wii.

Winter Sports has the standard fare of background music that does not overpower the on-screen action, but at the same time is not anything memorable. You also have announcers, which have become a staple of any sporting video game. The announcers sound believable and professional. At no point did they get on my nerves, and at times I even found myself interested in what they had to say. Even more so, they will adjust their comments about your performance to a point of near verbal castration when you are having a bad run.

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All in all Winter Sports: The Ultimate Challenge lives up to its name. It truly can be the ultimate challenge. Even when the difficulty is set to easy, you will find yourself missing every other gate, falling flat while attempting a double axle, and performing quite less than Olympic. Even worse, if you are impatient and don’t spend the time you need learning the controls then you will never have an ounce of fun. Take your time with this one; the controls react on an extremely realistic level. Anticipate your next move, and don’t get frustrated when you fail. Trust me, give this a couple of hours and you’ll be a pro and will have a blast with your buds.