When the 2010 Winter Olympics finally kick off this month there's no doubt in my mind the land will be awash with white, crunchy snow. Fun snow. Not like snow here, which is only fun for two hours before it turns brown, forces everyone to spend more money on their heating bills and quickly reduces the entire country to a quivering wreck. This official licensed videogame of the event definitely gets it white, with Vancouver 2010 doing a splendid job recreating the firm crunch of the snow-crusted arenas with some of Sega's trademarked crisp blue skies to boot.

Everything else proves more problematic. The game is slim pickings at best, with electing to represent only 14 events, pooled from 6 of the 15 available sports, from the already-sparse competition. 5 of those included are about travelling from the top of an icy hill/chute to the bottom. It's the complete antithesis to Beijing 2008's overambitious 32 events, which featured an assortment including skeet shooting, table and weightlifting. The blame for the meagre variety lies partially the feet of the winter Olympics itself, an albino version of its more famous summer counterpart, but there's evidently a conscious design decision on Sega's part to exclude sports outside the boundaries of the engine they're developed. Where are the much-needed figure skating, ice hockey and curling events, for instance? There should always be time for curling, I say.

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It also takes itself too seriously. After each Olympic event comes a celebratory podium scene, where the winner's national anthem is blasted out in full patriotic glory. The idea is obviously to show how, with any luck, your chosen nation has finished above the twenty-three others represented by the game, but seeing as how you're only ever pitted against a random shuffling of three nations it feels about as epic as a 50cc Kart championship. Was the general public ever expected to watch these scenes? Their only comfort is that they're easy to skip, and they also provide a golden opportunity to visit the toilet.

I'm also prepared to hazard a guess and say a decent Olympic soundtrack is anything but the limp, vacant pop-punk assortment Sega have provided. It's emo enough to make even a stroppy fifteen-year-old roll their eyes.

There's no structured single player mode, simply a screen where you pick whatever event tickles your fancy and then compete for a medal. If you desire anything higher than silver, though, the game forces you to relentlessly repeat the same courses over and over again, demanding you perfect your route and poise to a frustratingly high standard. It lulls you into an environment where failure at the last minute - usually more than enough to send you rocketing to the back of the pack - evokes a wrath unseen since the exciting bits from the Old Testament. While it regularly feels annoying and unfair, the game never once manages to conjure up anything Olympian.

Chasing the gold medals is surprisingly hard work; not once have I managed to finish an event more than half a second in the lead. There's no adjustable difficulty, so I can only assume the developers reckoned that the Olympics were tough and integrated that accordingly. Something must have gone wrong during because the desire to switch off is always greater than competing with the dull, lifeless likes of CPU NED and CPU CHI. I'll get you next time, CPU NED! Thank the heavens for multiplayer, that's all I can say.

It takes less than two hours to give each mini-game a fairly decent going over, though in half that time you'll have experienced every course variant on offer. Four of those events are downhill skiing, which is where the wintry game tries its best to excel. In some respects it works, with responsive controls and a sense of speed well conveyed. Whatever engine is powering this game is, in a parallel universe, being used to create an ace skiing game. Here, though, Sega fail to build on their momentum, instead chucking you down the same mountain path again and again and again. After experiencing Men's Super-G, Ladies' Giant Slalom and Ladies' Slalom you'll have plummeted downhill more times than the fourth Indiana Jones movie.

Ski Jumping marks a nice change of pace with a mini-game that asks the player to press buttons in time with the on-screen prompts. It also shows how the game does a good job of using sound to make an ace first-person camera, but it doesn't take more than a few goes to suss the timings and leaving success entirely down to whether or not the computer decides to score higher than you. Aerials fare much worse, requiring you to spin both sticks in time with an on-screen prompt of fluctuating rhythm while your Olympian does impossibly complex air manoeuvres in slow-motion. It's more than my brain can handle, with the erratic timings ensuring it feels far more broken than compelling.

Repetition has well and truly addled any semblance of gameplay by the time you hit up Luge, Skeleton and Two-Man Bobsleigh, which, for all intents and purposes, are almost exactly the same game with minor modifications to the control schemes. The game provides cursory tutorials and nicely prints all the buttons on the screen whenever paused, though the basic jist of most events is that there's a bit of button-mashing as you exit the starting gate and then you generally hold down the right trigger as much as possible to get maximum acceleration. It's not complex.

Challenge mode serves as a brief electric shock to the game's lifeless, unresponsive husk. But the effect quickly wears off as you realise it's little more than a way of redelivering the same content you've seen before, forcing you through the exact same events and courses under some thinly veiled guise of mini-mini-games, such as knocking over snowmen or earning points by building up speed.

And that's your lot. Online support is included, and is currently occupied by a moderate handful of unhappy punters and rabid achievement hunters who only have marginally more personality than CPU NED.

It's hard to tell what market Vancouver 2010 is aiming for. Fans of mini-games will be immediately deterred by the difficulty and po-faced reverence of it all, so it won't be long before they're back in the loving arms of Sports Resort and Mario & at the Winter Olympic Games. Anyone after a serious game will be quickly frustrated and soured by the shocking lack of content. It's a criminally malnourished set of events that never accomplishes anything more than a series of stale time trials that force the player into frustrating cycles of pause and restart. If that's your bag, it's been done far better elsewhere.

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By Martin Gaston