Skiflying
Review by Arild Bergh

The 9210 is becoming something of an (expensive) games machine. I loved the Bounce game so much I had to un-install it from the machine, and this is another classic in the making. Skiflying is a very simple game, but the simplicity is skin deep and you get hooked pretty quickly.

Skiflying (in real life) takes off where Eddie the Eagle fell off. It's basically extremely long skijumping (often up to 120+ meters) which started in the 1960s, for more information have a look at these pages.

Skiflying (the game) is simple: You choose between tournament (called Tour, possibly a bad translation) and practice (called Training), then select one of four hills to jump in and off you go. The variable that you have no control over is the wind which is shown in a small icon in the top right of the screen. You start the jump by using the down arrow, and you do the actual jump at the edge of the platform by using the up arrow. You can then lean forwards or backwards to extend the jump (depending on wind speed and direction) and you land by tapping the down arrow twice. Tapping fast down gives you a standard landing, and slow (more than half a second) gives a classic Telemark landing.

Here we go!

Here we fall...

What immediately strikes you are the graphics, they are fantastic! It runs very smoothly on the 9210, and each of the 4 hills have different, beautifully crafted visuals. The drawback is that it requires a lot of memory, I always had to restart the 9210 and not load anything else before I ran the game, in requires 3000 kb or more. In a machine where most programs run in 100 to 300 kb this is a lot. It is a feat anyway of course to run it on the 9210, but if the game would be able to use just 3-400 kb less it would mean less reboots. The memory requirements also means it's slow in loading, about 25 seconds to get the first menu and 40 seconds to switch hills. Once you're actually jumping (and falling) it runs at a good speed.

Much better than I would do in real life.

After each jump you get the score and the judgement of the 5 judges, from 0 to 20 points, based on the your jumping style. This highest and lowest points are taken away (as with the real thing) and the total is summed up. In training mode only the highest score is stored, in full tour mode you make several jumps in each hill on different "days" as in the real world cup. It then keeps track of your scores at the end of the tournament.

One thing to look out for is the landing, if you wait too long before tapping the down arrow you will have a fall.

The summer practise hill.

Some things could be improved. I would like to be able to go straight back to the top once I fall, rather than wait for the tumble down the entire hill... the humiliation is bad enough as it is, I don't need to see it every time :-). It was also difficult to judge how close I was to the ground sometimes, which resulted in a few falls. This is in part due to the small screen, but a different angle might improve it.

It's a stunning and addictive game... and safer than the real thing. Highly recommended if you don't have any real work waiting for you.