Horace Goes Skiing Revisited Reviews

i like horace skiing with him is relaxing thankfully no yetis here

this is the best game i have ever played it kinnaped my wife and kids, and threw them down a mountain, but i got to look at horrace, the modern day jesus!

Horace is the greatest design of any character in any media ever created.

Horace Goes Skiing Revisited is just as Janky as the Original, with Minimal Content and Absolutely Horrible Collision Detection it does it's Predecessor Justice, Obviously it's Not the Best, but for Only £0.89 you May as Well Buy it just for a Trip Down Memory Lane. For people who aren't Aware of the Sinclair Spectrum However, you May want to Skip this One.

Now this is Horace how I remember him: Going skiing. First, I've got to say the intro was a surprise. I won't spoil it, but somebody went above and beyond in setting the mood, and I appreciate it. We come to the title screen and I could take issue with the minute or so I spent hitting every key just trying to select the start option... Before finding that it was Ctrl, of all things. And I could take issue with the only choice under Settings being sound on or off. But once all of that was established, it was off to the ski shop. Horace Goes Skiing is an odd marriage of a Frogger clone (but slightly more frantic) minigame and then the main skiing bit. It just works. Computer gaming in its purest form, just two buttons and a score. As with the port of Hungry Horace, I can't really complain about anything here. The Spectrum-style graphics are preserved and it seems to feel right. There's the addition of "Endless Ski" mode, which is surely good if you never cared for the Frogger bit. I found it strangely sparse compared to the normal levels, sometimes a big chunk of empty white screen, nothing but that one lone tree that still somehow draws you in like the Sirens of myth... A better game than Hungry Horace IMO, and I assume this means we're getting some spider action on Steam sooner or later as well. Recommended as a taste of the early UK 8-bit era.

I bought this game for my dad since this was his first ever video game he played on the ZX Spectrum. I recently showcased this game and let him play it for a while. I have never seen the old man this happy before!

A little context for the non-Brits out there: Horace Goes Skiing is a game that was originally released in 1982 after Hungry Horace (also available on Steam). It was primarily developed for the ZX Spectrum but did receive a C64 port a couple of years later. It's a simple affair - cross the road to buy a pair of skis while avoiding the traffic, cross again to get to the ski slope, and ... ski. Repeat ad infinitum. It doesn't get harder over time. This is essentially a semi-faithful remake of that game built in Unity. It does what it says on the tin - it offers a playable version of Horace Goes Skiing, now in widescreen and with smooth movement. It's visually almost entirely based on the ZX Spectrum version, but offers up a rendition of the C64 title tune as the Spectrum version's audio was tantamount to ear rape. It lacks some of the flourishes of the later C64 rendition such as how Horace knocks over flags when he hits them. The hit detection is ludicrously bad. There's a distinct sense of a missed opportunity here. Horace Goes Skiing cannot really be considered to be a "good game" by modern standards, but it could have been tweaked into one. An option to switch between Spectrum and C64 visuals (and possibly modernised visuals) would have been welcome, as would the ability to actually save the high score, as a high score is the only noteworthy goal in this game. A sense of progression could have been introduced by having progressively harder ski slopes and offering some variation in the roads to be crossed. All this wouldn't have been possible on the Spectrum 16K of the era but could now easily be achieved while leveraging the nostalgia that a lot of 40-somethings feel for this game. For the meagre price, it is at least a funny little gag game to show off to Generation X friends who might be feeling a little nostalgic. But as a game, it needs some substantial reworking.