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Winter Sports 2008 allows you to compete in many of the staple winter sports from the Olympic games. Of course, the word 'Olympic' is never mentioned in the game, but in some of the modes of play you'll hear the commentators talking about Olympic records or famous competitors in that event — if they're not talking about the recipes of one of their grandmothers.

The game begins (after all of the logos) with an opening ceremony quite reminiscent of certain international winter sporting events held every four years. Athletes are grouped by country flag, there's a floor show and a polar bear mascot, and fireworks up in the sky. Once you're through the ceremony, or you've skipped it, you'll come to the main menu.

From the main menu you can access the Options menu. You can look at any records that have been previously set for the roster of events. Your solo play options are Campaign mode, Career Mode and Single Events. All of the multi-player options are under Competitions.

You have the standard game options, like adjusting the sound and viewing the game credits. You can set the menus and spoken language to be either English or German. For general navigation, you can decide if you want to use the Wii Remote to point and click or navigate using the Control Pad. You get to set whether you want to see medal ceremonies (if you've placed in the top three) at the end of each event. You can adjust a few different display options for the remotes. There are two options that I think will most affect game play. The Ghost function is a "Ghost" version of yourself that races along with you, showing your best time on that track. It gives you a very tangible way to challenge yourself. For the skiing options with gates, you can toggle on or off marker arrows above the gate posts. I think the difficulty would really rocket up with these markers turned off. I couldn't make the gates most of the time even with the markers on, but we'll get to that later. The default is for them to be on.

In the Competitions menu, you have options for a 15 game competition, a 7 game competition, a virtual competition (which has to be unlocked), or a classic competition (which also has to be unlocked). Since my daughter is not known for her patience with really long games, I opted for the 7 game competition for us to try. At this point we got to set our difficulty level — from one snowflake to four snowflakes. We went with one. Within the competition, there's a single player mode or a multiplayer mode with up to four players. You can decide if you're going to take turns or with two players if you want to compete in a split-screen mode.

You'll need to pick a team for each of your players. If you haven't already created a team in the single player modes, you'll need to create one now. Note that you are only allowed one team of each nationality. My daughter was quite determined that she had to have 'our' flag (USA) so I picked the Great Britain flag for my team.

If you do split-screen, one player is in the top area and the other in the bottom. Whichever player is further behind will see a ghost image of the other player on their screen ahead of them. If one player makes up time and passes the other player, the ghost image switches screens to reflect that. I'm kind of torn on the split-screen mode. Yes, it is interesting to race directly against the other player, but having only half a screen made it that much harder to see what you're doing — which is really bad when you're downhill skiing and need to make it through the gates.

Whichever display method you choose, you are competing for points with the other player(s). You get three for gold, two for silver, one for bronze, and a pity-party thereafter (just kidding about the party).

It took the two of us a good 45 minutes to get through 7 events. If you decide to try the 15 game competition, more power to you — just make sure you have time and stamina in good quantities of both.

The virtual and classic competitions are both unlocked by completing all of the challenges in the campaign mode. You get to design the virtual competition — you can pick up to 18 games for your competition (meaning you can put the same thing in more than once). The classic competition has some of the venues from the 2007 version of the game. Since I have not yet (and may well never) unlocked these modes, I don't have any first hand experience with what they're like.

I have tried career mode with my team Alla. Even though I've played it, I honestly still don't understand quite how it works. Apparently there are four different leagues to be played through with both 7 and 15 games competitions to be played within each league. If you win a medal in one of the competitions, you get experience points that you can distribute between the different game disciplines. Supposedly the experience points improve your athlete in some way, but I haven't found anything (in game or out) that explains what form this improvement takes. In career mode I'm sent from event to event in the order chosen by the game. Which I don't automatically choose the order in which I play the games; I've found that if I go into the pause menu, I can choose to skip an event. I have no idea what this does to the whole league progression idea.

Campaign mode starts from an odd looking grid. It's kind of a honeycomb looking pattern. You have to succeed in one of the available challenges to unlock additional challenges and degrees of difficulty. Supposedly when you get to the other edge of the challenges, you're competing with the records of a Boss competitor. When you've completed every part of the honeycomb, you have officially unlocked the classic competition.

I was glad to see that the developers included an option for single events. This is a good way to practice individual events if you're having difficulty with them in one of the other modes. Supposedly, once you unlock the classic competition mode, you can also choose a venue for your single event.

There are fifteen different events divided between nine disciplines. In alpine skiing, you'll get to race Downhill, Super-G, Giant Slalom and Slalom. Of all the games, I really did the worst with skiing. I have read the instructions multiple times, and I'm on the easiest setting, but I am still spending most of my time crashing into the fence (and listening to the commentators talk about what a good thing it is that the fences are so well made). I continually miss the gates. At least in Downhill I keep going down the hill. I am bloody awful at steering between those gates in the other games. I'm overcorrecting it seems, or I'm doing something weird and my skier looks like they're turning so far they're about to go backwards. Given the choice, I'm not going to do skiing events when there are other things I like so much better. The only positive part of the skiing was how hard my daughter laughed as I crashed from fence to fence to fence — careening down the course.

Ski jumping caused me problems too. I don't know why, but I'm missing the mark that tells me it's time to jump. Forget about checking the windsock for wind direction and speed. I can't even get off the ground. Honestly, a real skier would have died by now as bad as I've done with this event.

My cross-country skiing wasn't all that great either. I had the movement down for the skis, but I went at it too hard and made my poor guy run out of stamina. He's barely moving along the course and those commentators are heckling his efforts all the way. I will be trying this one again. I feel like I actually have a hope of improving with practice.

Speed skating went really well for me. This is one of the few disciplines where I actually earned gold medals (in easy mode anyway). I really cranked it to get my skater going fast. Man, are my shoulders tired at this point. You really have to get the controls (Wii Remote and Nunchuk) going fast in a good rhythm, and you have to keep it up the whole race. And then you get to do the second race.

Figure skating was really a lot like playing a rhythm game (something I've been doing on my DS lately). You have to move the Wii Remote and Nunchuk at the right time for your figure skater to earn the high scores. There are 67 moves you have to make. The best I've done so far is 44. I will keep trying at this one, but only after I've taken a break. I improved through the first few games in a row, and then steadily dropped after that. I was just too tired to get the moves just right. I like how this game is done, but I did want to note that you will be skating to the same song every time. I don't know if the controller movements change (I just can't keep track of that many) but the song remains the same. One thing I really like is that the skater is responding (to an extent) to the quality of my play. I've played a lot of games where the graphics are the same no matter what you do. In figure skating, if I don't make the moves, my skater does not complete her jumps and falls clumsily to the ice in a variety of ways.

The bobsled competition has both a four man race and a two woman race. From my perspective, there wasn't much difference. It's the same race on the same course. You get two races that are added to get your final time. I had a lot of fun with bobsled. I crank the Wii Remote to get a really fast start and then turn the remote sideways to steer my sled into those curves. If I don't time it right, my sled touches the boards. Blue is a little touch and red is a bad touch. Again, the commentators will let you know if you're doing poorly or get excited if you're making great time.

Luge and Skeleton are both done on the same track as the bobsled races. They too were a lot of fun. I guess I like the ones where you're going really fast (as long as skis aren't involved). You build up power for your starts slightly differently, but the steering is the same — holding the Wii Remote like a steering wheel. As with bobsled, you have to be careful about rubbing the boards. Too much contact and you really lose speed.

Finally, they saw fit to include curling. I'm not sure why. As much as I enjoy watching the winter Olympics, I really don't care to watch curling. Even the commentators don't seem thrilled to be calling this one. I've tried a few times and still have trouble figuring out how to tell the game I want to throw the stone. Clearly I'm not getting the scoring right either. The other teams were showing scores in the 300s, where I had 40. Ouch. Curling, you are not my friend.

In all of the games, the outdoor graphics are really nice. I've watched enough games that I know what these venues typically look like, and these were well done. Some of the look for the athletes was a little more hit and miss. The more they were covered up, the better they looked. The ones with a lot of exposed skin (like figure skating) had kind of a 'plasticky' sheen to their skin. It just looked odd.

The commentators are just in the background in most of the games, but the voice acting is actually very well done. They sound like commentators chatting. It's easy to ignore them, but if you listen you'll hear anything from comments on famous Olympic athletes of the past to recipes to comments on your performance. At one point, during a truly awful ski run, I even heard one of them say something to the effect of 'the only thing that can save this run is to go to the pause menu and restart the event'. The other guy is like 'what' and then the first one 'oh never mind'. It was hilarious.

If you are a fan of winter sports and like the active gaming experience of the Wii, Winter Sports The Ultimate Challenge has a lot to offer. There's a nice variety of sports and you can set the level of challenge you want. The casual player can drop in for individual games that they like and the weekend warrior can jump all over the challenge mode. I know Winter Sports will be a game that my daughter and I keep coming back to. One final word of advice though — don't let the child be player one. My daughter kept skipping the instructions at the start of each new game, and you are going to need to read them, at least the first time or two.