If you love the Olympics, but not enough to pay the exorbitant fees to watch them live in Vancouver, try getting a little closer to the action — virtually — with the Vancouver 2010 Official Minigame on Facebook.
This Olympic game is a stripped-down version of Sega’s video game with the same name, allowing virtual athletes to play mini-games based on four popular events — ski jumping, short track speed skating, snowboard cross and giant slalom. Just like the real-life Olympics, players are rewarded gold, silver or bronze medals depending on their performance.
The social aspects of Vancouver 2010 seem standard for a Facebook game — invite friends to play (and build up your ‘team score’), plus the option to post your scores on your Facebook wall for bragging rights. There’s also a series of leaderboards, so players can see how their skills stack up against others in your country and across the globe.
The four mini-games have a distinct retro vibe with simple (but not pixelated) graphics and controls that generally involve some combination of the arrow keys, spacebar and mouse. The events can be played on normal, hard and expert, and considering we had a difficult time playing on normal, we can’t imagine what kind of joystick jock you’d have to be to survive on expert. Out of the foursome, ski jumping was easily the best — mostly due to a few creative timed clicking mechanics required to pull off a killer jump.
Overall, this collection of mini-games is good for a quick five-minute fix, but then we were ready to move on. There also seems to be some major loading problems with the game, so we had to continually refresh our browser to get the darn thing working.
Granted, our expectations were on the lower side, especially since this Facebook app is mostly an advertising vehicle for its big brother — Vancouver 2010 for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, which you can buy directly from the game. This follows a recent trend of big-name video game companies using Facebook as a way to market big-budget games, as we saw with the recent Dante’s Inferno application, and we expect to see other big name games following along as the year rolls on.
Play Vancouver 2010 on Facebook Now >
Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
Sega’s Vancouver 2010 game makes tracks on Facebook via http://blog.games.com/2010/02/16/segas-vancouver-2010-game-makes-tracks-on-facebook/Games.Com
Related posts:
- Family Feud & Friends on iOS makes the Facebook game mobile Filed under: Other Games While Family Feud on Facebook draws...
- Pocket God iPhone game makes its way to Facebook with female Pygmies, brand new powers Filed under: Other Games Bolt Creative has brought their hit...
- Prepare yourself for Flying Kingdoms, Vostu’s next big Facebook game And we’ll be damned if it doesn’t look just...
- Top 25 Facebook games for August 2010 Filed under: Farmville, Cafe World, Mafia Wars, Bejeweled Blitz, PetVille,...
- These three Facebook updates will change the way you game In a Facebook event tonight, Mark Zuckerberg and the other...
