For reasons known only to Bowser and Eggman the pair of comedy villains have decided to ruin the Winter Games and host their own. Eggman captures five of six snow spirits – the magical creatures who are apparently responsible for making all of the snow. The intention was to capture all six but one went escaped and Eggman in his infinite wisdom told Bowser this would not be a problem. The one remaining spirit did what all snow-creating spirits would do and went in search of help. In a stoke of fortune Mario and Sonic were hoping to attend the cancelled Winter Games and the spirit stumbles upon them. The news upsets the blue Hedgehog and Italian Plumber, who are annoyed as they planned on making snow angels, and they team up to take on the pseudo-evil duo in an attempt at putting things right once more. I accept that this title is primarily aimed at children but it seems the developers took this one step further by asking a child to name the snow spirit and his home-town. Frosty from Frostown. I imagine both “snowy” and “whitey” were discounted due to the first being slightly too obvious and the second appearing to be racist.

As you progress through the adventure you are met with various physical barriers. To get past these barriers you must first compete in an event and meet the associated challenge. Once you successfully complete a challenge your reward will be a magical star which Frosty can use to unlock the barrier and allow access to another section of the town. The adventure didn’t interest me and this may have something to do with a lack of urgency in the narrative and the villains of the piece being roughly as competent as Laurel and Hardy on a bad day. I would have preferred a little more honesty from the game which should have dropped the “adventure” masquerade and replaced it with “a selection of short sporting events” because that’s pretty much what this amounts to.

The events are split into two categories: Olympic and Dream. I found the Dream events more interesting than the Olympic ones but these are outnumbered as I presume the developers strived for some degree of authenticity to go with the official Winter Olympics tie-in. There are three main controls across each of the events and these are either left and right shoulder buttons, d-pad and buttons, or stylus. I often find the controls in DS games to be on the clunky side and this title is no exception. My favourite event is Snowboarding and I prefer the Dream version as it’s a lot like Mario Kart on a board and be quite fun. Other than Snowboarding the only Olympic event I had fun playing was Ice Hockey and even that was hit or miss.

The graphics are actually quite nice for a DS title and there’s a good selection of characters to choose from each with their own visual style. I found the theme music to be similar to the worst kind of elevator music but since it repeats itself constantly it makes you feel as though you’re trapped in a never-ending elevator from hell.

I found this title to be reasonable despite the clunky and sometimes unresponsive controls. I find it a shame, given the enormous popularity of the two title characters, that a game featuring both Mario and Sonic fails to offer something a little more interesting. This is okay. Nothing special.

6/10

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