It was also specifically designed to play at home on PlayStation 2, unlike its arcade-exclusive predecessors.Īlpine Racer 3 features four main ways to play: the Extreme Winner’s Cup, single races against three opponents, a slalom mode in which you weave through gates, and a time attack mode where it’s you against the clock on any of the courses you’ve unlocked. Rather than adopting a quasi-realistic approach with lycra-clad skiers competing in the kind of downhill events you’d see as part of the Winter Olympics, it instead jumped on the then-growing “extreme sports” trend by featuring a cast of selectable characters with unique appearances and personalities, and also incorporated snowboarding and skiboarding as well as straight skiing. English is weird and stupid.)Ģ001’s Alpine Racer 3, unlike its two predecessors, went in a slightly different direction from its two arcade-exclusive predecessors. (Aside: did you know it is “skiing” but not “skiier”? I learned that today. It was particularly noteworthy for eschewing standard control schemes in favour of players controlling their skier with their feet on movable, ski-like foot stands. Sometime around the PlayStation 1 and 2 eras, winter sports games started to place a heavy focus on technical, trick-based gameplay rather than the straight racing of early titles such as Skiing. And I kind of missed that simplicity.Įnter Namco’s Alpine Racer 3, the third installment of a series that began as a 1994 arcade title.Ī contemporary of the developer’s popular Ridge Racer series and running on the same System 22 hardware, the original Alpine Racer carried a lot of Ridge Racer’s intuitive immediacy into a slightly different type of game.
My interest in this type of game dates right back to the imaginatively titled Skiing on the Philips G7000 Videopac (aka the Magnavox Odyssey 2 for American readers, where the game was known as Alpine Skiing) and the slightly later Winter Games from Epyx for various home computers.
But I’ve always found something appealing about games involving skiing and suchlike. I am one of the least sporty people I know, and I find the prospect of winter sports particularly terrifying.
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