The chances are you don't really care what I did last Sunday but stay with me, it's kind of relevant. After a morning spent mowing the lawn and generally pottering around the garden my wife and I walked to the local pub mid-afternoon where we sat in the garden, had a couple of drinks and watched the new born lambs playing in the field opposite. We then walked home enjoying the fact that since the clocks had gone forward we could do so in daylight. While I grant you none of that was hugely exciting (although we had a nice time thank you very much) it was a day full of significantly non-wintery things. These undeniable signs that we've finally put the worst winter in years behind us comes at precisely the time 49 Games have decided what we all really really want is a new winter game.

Winter Sports: The Next challenge 2009 as it's so called is the sequel to the original Winter Sports and comes hot(ish) on the heals of last year's Summer Athletics. Crucially neither of these were very good which gives you a fair clue as to what we find here.

Pop the disk into your and you're greeted with a fairly standard set of options. You've got your career mode which sees you representing your chosen country and competing to get them to the top of the leaderboard in various competitions each containing a preset series of events. Once the current competition's leaderboard has been topped you'll unlock the next and so the cycle continues. Potentially interesting here is the ability to earn experience points as you play which can improve your skills in whatever event you assign them too. I say potentially, because they make no observable difference in reality and come across as wholly pointless.

The second of the game's central modes is the campaign which offers up forty-two different challenges. These aim to provide something a little different from simply trying to finish first in an event (perform a perfect start, successfully land a ski jump over a given length, do some maths while you play, seriously). These are spread out over an on-screen board with surrounding events becoming unlocked as you complete the current one in a similar system to the one 08 used. These more eclectic challenges are actually the game's single high point (well perhaps not high exactly but you know what I mean) and if it weren't for the seemingly random difficulty spikes that interrupt your progress to a frustrating degree it'd go some way to pushing the eventual score up a tad.

There's always a good chance when you do one of these multi event sports titles that you run the risk of being a jack of all trades and master of none. WS09 actually manages to be worse than that, failing spectacularly to provide a single genuinely enjoyable event instead serving up a series of badly thought out, difficult to control and frustrating to play disciplines all held together with the gaming equivalent of sticky back plastic and prayer.

There are sixteen events spread over ten different types in WS09's cannon including Ski Racing, Bobsleigh, Skeleton, Ice Skating, Figure Skating and Curling. Unfortunately the one thing that links them all is fiddly controls with a mixture of button bashing, rhythm and quick time event-esque moments to master. The seemingly random nature of gaining said mastery is one of the game's main failings. Never do you feel fully in control of things with success often feeling more down to luck than skill. The half pipe is a perfect example of how to take something familiar and loved by gamers and make it a million times worse. Not only do you have to hit a button to start a trick at the edge of the half pipe rather than letting momentum and gravity do the work but you're then forced into a stupid quicktime style series of forced stick movements and buttons while the action is paused to complete the move.

The more straightforward events are no better either even basics like slalom feel clunky, the bobsleigh runs itself almost to the point where you feel like you're watching someone else play and success in the speed skating is a mystical dark art never fully explained.

Of course one thing that could have eked a little fun out of the whole sorry experience would have been an mode. However, such basic concessions to the modern gaming world are clearly out of the reach of WS09 where multiplayer/online competition is limited to split screen action which, to be fair, is more fun than single player.

It probably doesn't really need mentioning at this point but just in case you were hanging on the notion that even if it didn't play well it'd be something to show off visually I can reveal that no, it's not. In fact it's actually pretty dreadful with a game engine that wouldn't push a last gen console and seems intent of making all on screen humans look like they've just undergone very bad head transplants. On the plus side the painfully bad cut-scenes and medal ceremonies that crop up with alarming regularity can be skipped and during the events themselves you're too busy watching the on screen control prompts to really look at what's happening in the action.

Ignoring, as is really only fair, the poor timing of its release there's still a multitude of reasons why you shouldn't spend your hard earned money on Winter Sports: The Next challenge 2009. Mow the lawn, look at the lambs or just enjoy the extra daylight, whatever you do with these warm spring days make sure it's more enjoyable than playing this.

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By Paul Newcombe