Horace Goes Skiing

The Good
Skiing is one of those sports that translates into the Dragon's color suite quite well- the normally garish "buff mode" a term popularized by Microdeal which refers to one of the two color sets in PMODE3, is an obvious choice when a game has to represent both white snow and brown and green trees. So with the color suite working in the games' favor, all we need to sort out is smooth game play, sound effects and music. Reassuringly the game starts with one of the best pieces of music on the Dragon at the time - this was before programmers became adept at pseudo multi channel sound, and by comparison some games were still making sounds that could be knocked up in basic by a ten year old using the PLAY or SOUND commands. To have a genuinely great piece of music playing at the start was a pleasant surprise that promised much- great music and the Dragon had by and large been strangers up until now, so the game seemed like it would be a sure fire winner, providing the collision detection was up to scratch, which it was.

The Bad
First up we have to play a small Frogger clone. Games that have many parts are not unusual- the 6809 machine had Tron clones, for example, but the rule is they had better be meaningful, and varied and this one did not feel meaningful to me, being long enough to get in the way of the main event but too short to generate involvement. Crossing the road to get ski equipment might sound like a great opportunity for a Frogger clone that someone had mailed into the office as a demo, but this is a simple clone of a Frogger game that had already been officially released on the machine by this point, and although the official version is not stellar, it certainly was not better than this and was quite involved compared to this quick knock off preamble to the main event of skiing. As we move on to the skiing it feels rather rushed- all the elements are there you would expect, trees, timing, obstacles,but if you crash too badly you get sent back to play more Frogger, which tells you something about the quality of the Frogger. The skiing section should have been longer and more involved- "Horace goes skiing for a bit and plays Frogger" is a less snappy but more truthful title. Skiing game play is at least smooth enough, and although the sound-fest promised by the lovely title music never materializes, the skiing bit has potential. Sadly the identification of hazards a bit random, and you are never quite sure where you are supposed to go, finding out by trial and error, a common fault in skiing games, especially on graphically limited systems, and it is over too quickly, giving us more Frogger. A menu allowing you to skip Frogger clone part and adjust the difficulty of the skiing would surely have been a better bet?

The Bottom Line
Overall someone thought they were putting out value, two games for the price of one, but really, one better game would have sufficed rather than two mediocre ones, and this was the last Horace entry for the Dragon, and the last time the company made games for the system, which says something. At least the intro music is lovely.