Virtually Overlooked: Slalom

by JC Fletcher { Oct 23rd 2008 at 6:15PM }

One of the less famous "black box" early NES games, which falls roughly in the Volleyball/Urban Champion level of fame rather than the Super Mario Bros. level, or even the Hogan's Alley/Donkey Kong Jr. Math level, is an unassuming little game about downhill skiing. Slalom was video game consoles', and America's, introduction to a company who had already risen to relative fame in Europe for their computer games: Rare.

They would later become a fixture on Nintendo systems, providing many of the most memorable games for the NES (and also stuff like Beetlejuice) for various publishers before becoming a Really Big Name for their N64 games. It's a good thing they went on to become the Rare we all know, because even their reputation for googly eyes, collectathons, and endless delays beats being known as the company responsible for making thousands of gamers play a game about staring at some guy's butt.

Slalom is a racing game cleverly disguised as a skiing game. It features courses along three mountains of varying difficulty: Snowy Hill, Steep Peak, and Mt. Nasty. The goal isn't to outpace other racers, but to avoid them, and the trees, snowmen, sledding children, and other obstacles, while skiing between flags and reaching the goal before the time limit.

Rare picked the skiing theme for a specific purpose: by making the "track" solid white and the sides solid grey, they could make a very smooth racing engine. The lack of detail on the side of the road, or moving lines on the road, help to mask any choppiness that may be present. This is only possible because the track is snow! The only noticeable scrolling elements are gameplay-related: flags, moguls, and other skiers. Even the background of mountains in the horizon is a static image across the top of the screen.

The lack of background detail benefits more than just the smooth scrolling: the skier sprite is impressively detailed for the time. Turning seems fairly well-animated, in that there are two separate degrees of turning. But for some reason, the most care seems to have been applied to the skier's rear, which you end up seeing all the time. It really looks inappropriate.

Why is it so detailed? Why is it so ... shapely? We get that his one-piece ski outfit is fairly snug, but do we have to see such contour? It looks like he's wearing nothing at all! Nothing at all!

Nothing at all!

Virtually Overlooked is a weekly feature that spotlights games that aren't yet on the Virtual Console, but should be. Want more Virtually Overlooked? Check out the first year!

Tags: nes, racing, rare, skiing, slalom