I was hoping for great accessibility in Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games on the DSi XL since I just finished playing two other games that didn’t really let me get away from being disabled.

Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games is my first ever encounter with using the shoulder buttons on my DSi XL and it ended up being not so pretty. I turned on the game, fired up a quick romp around the short-track with Blaze and preceded to almost double the time I was shooting for, which I believe was 55-seconds; I ran it in 2 minutes.

Obviously I needed to turn down the difficulty because once again, normal difficulty was too much for me. By that I mean, close the gap a little between the CPU and I. I know better than to think switching difficulty would make the controls any easier for me to use, but I had to try.

After that failure, I took on hockey, luge, cross-country skiing, snowboarding, and then ski and shoot.

• Hockey relies on the touch screen, which I found was the simplest game of them all.
• Luge is pretty much a D-pad affair wherein all you’ve got to do is not hit the wall.
• Cross-country Skiing is a lot of rapid button pushing followed by steady button pressing, followed by more rapid button pushing, and all the while steering up and down the screen.
• Boarder-cross is navigating a downhill course with the D-pad, hitting a button to crouch, another to jump, and yet another to drift (kind of a sliding turn).
• Ski and Shoot is Cross-country Skiing mixed with a shooting at targets.

Hockey was really fun and by the end of two games, I had the controls figured out and had even managed to score a goal. Boarder-cross wasn’t too tough either, and had I not ran myself off the course, I might have even gotten someone close to the rest of the pack.

My only problem with Luge was that the track was too thin narrow for my liking, and after using an XBOX 360 controller for so long, switching back to using a D-pad to do more than swap between the grenade launcher was a little harder than I thought it’d be.

If all of the games within Mario & Sonic at the Winter Olympic Games were like these, I’d probably still have the game in my DS, but sadly they’re not.

Events such a Cross-country Skiing, Ski and Shoot, and Speed Skating are much more difficult. I don’t think there’s much more I could say to convey my disappointment than to say that I’d expect more from a company like Nintendo.

Curling was tried, too, and a good time was had by all. I’m not sure about the physics of Curling. I have no idea about sweeping the ice. What I do know is that it’s more fun than it sounds.

The controls are really simple, you choose where you want the "Curling Thing" to go, when you’re ready, you tap the touch screen to start forward, tap it again to throw it, and when you want to steer the "Curling Thing" to slow down or to steer it, you scribble in the direction you want it to go.

As you can no doubt tell, I am deeply involved in the lingo of the sport.

Overall, it’s a neat game that I wish I was more able to play but sometimes there are good games for AbleGamers, and sometimes games turn out to be unfriendly.

At A Glance

One-handed: 5.5/10

With games like Ice Hockey, Curling, and Luge, which can all be played relatively easily with one-hand, it’d be really easy to give Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games a high mark, it’s games like Cross-country skiing, Ski & Shoot, and Boarder-cross that drag the score down to a barely passable 5.5

Hearing: 7/10

There is not really anything in the game that needs to be heard. Sure, each character has its own line they say before each race, and it wouldn’t be bad at all if it were captioned, but how important is it to hear Yoshi make whatever noise it is that Yoshi makes? In my opinion, not all that important, so Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games is just kind of average in this department.

Visually: 8.5/10

The only visual issue I came across was in the on-screen dialogue and in the tutorials on how to play a certain game. While I don’t think it’s that important to follow the dialogue between Sonic, Mario, Toad, and whoever else, I do think it’s on the bogus side of the coin to not have your tutorials at a fairly respectable level of contrast between the font and the background.

Mobility: 5.5/10

This goes hand in hand with the one-handed score. Some games left me in the "yeah, I could play that again" frame of mind, and others left me wanting to take the cartridge out mid-event. That makes it barely passable.

Overall: 6.6/10

I think I called this a neat game earlier in my review, and if not, it is a neat game. Now that I’ve got a Wii, I will be getting Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games from Gamefly to try out because I think there are a lot of possibilities that could be taken better advantage of with its controls than on a handheld.