Slalom (NES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
275A playthrough of Nintendo's 1987 skiing game for the NES, Slalom.
This playthrough starts on Snowy Hill and runs through the end of Mt. Nasty. The levels start to loop after this since there is no ending.
Slalom doesn't draw much attention these days, but it is one of the more "historically significant" games of the NES's early days. It was the first game developed by the newly christened Rare, Ltd., and it was the first official NES release to have not been developed in Japan. The story goes that Rare had asked for a license and their request had been flatly denied by Nintendo of Japan. Unwilling to accept this, the (legendary) Stamper brothers allegedly reverse-engineered the NES's hardware and put together a demo that impressed Nintendo into changing their minds. You might be asking yourself, "What became of that demo?"
You're looking at it.
The game was originally released in arcades in 1986 as Vs. Slalom, and as one of the final "black box" titles, Slalom's NES port arrived in early 1987 in America, and six months later in Europe. However, despite Nintendo's praise, the game never saw a Famicom release.
Slalom is as simple as you'd expect from a game of its vintage, and that's largely what makes it so playable still today.
There are three mountains, and each feature eight unique trails, though you don't see them all in a single game. The goal is to make to the end of the trail within the time limit, and your progress is shown by a "map" at the top of the screen. You gain speed by holding up (giving you a rather privileged view of your skiier's pert bum), and you get finer control of your steering by releasing it. You can also use the snow mounds (or "moguls," as they're apparently called in ski lingo) to take to the skies, and while airborne you can hold the down button to "freestyle."
The trails are covered with all sorts of obstacles, and it's wise to avoid them when you're traveling at 100+ km/h. Hitting trees, flags, snowmen, and Sunday skiiers will send you flying face-first into the ice, and it doesn't take too many mishaps to prevent you from finishing on time.
You can make things a bit easier on yourself, though. At the end of each race, you earn a bonus based on how much time you had remaining and how much freestyling you did. This bonus determines when other skiiers will start showing up in the following race. The higher the bonus, the longer you'll be free of those neon-clad pests.
It's a difficult game for being such a simple one - compared to other black box games, I'd rate it about as difficult as Mach Rider - but like so many early Nintendo games, it was Slalom's simplicity and challenge that kept me coming back to it. I still find myself loudly swearing at the TV when I'm playing it, but that doesn't stop me from trying again and again. It's pretty addictive like that. If you ever played SkiFree for Windows 3, I'm sure you know the feeling that I'm talking about here.
In its own time, Slalom's claim to fame was its graphics. The console had already seen some impressive faux-3D thanks to Nintendo's own Mach Rider and F1 Race, but Slalom's sense of speed and its smooth animation put it in a different league. It's little wonder that it impressed Nintendo as much as it did.
It still looks great and it has aged better than many other games of its era. The basic color schemes and clean, simple lines feel more stylish than gaudy, and the trails are clearly laid out and well telegraphed.
Once you take a bit of time to adapt to the control scheme, you'll find the same sort of endless replayability here as you do in games like Rad Racer or RC Pro-Am. It's easy to learn and hard to master, just as you would expect from any good 80s arcade game.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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