Alpine Ski (Taito, 1982)

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Alpine Ski is an arcade game that was released by Taito in January 1982. As the player, you take the role of a skier in a downhill slalom race and ski jumping competition. The game is played from an overhead perspective and you must dodge trees and other obstacles along the way. Your goal is to finish in the shortest time possible. Missing gates incurs time penalties and collisions with obstacles will of course slow you down.

I don’t recall every playing the arcade version of this game but I did play a clone on the Commodore 64 simply titled “Ski” if I recall correctly. It is a fun game if you are taking turns and competing against someone but otherwise it gets boring pretty quickly.

The arcade game is based on the Taito SJ System hardware which includes the following specs:

CPU: Zilog Z80
Sound: Z80 + 4x General Instruments AY-3-8910
Video Resolution: 256×224

A number of games by Taito used this hardware, the most famous of which are probably Jungle Hunt and Elevator Action. MAME emulates this hardware well so that is the route to go if you want the true arcade experience. Alternatively, Alpine Ski was also released as part of the Taito Legends 2 compilation of Taito games for the PlayStation 2 and PC in 2007. It was also released for the Sony PSP in 2007 as part of the Taito Legends Power-Up compilation.