Skiing is a 3 dimensional downhill skiing game. You have to navigate through sets of flags to the finish line as fast as you can. The position of the flags and hills is random, and you can generate new random courses from the main menu. You can also set the mode of play: simple or complex. In simple, moving the joystick forward speeds you up forward, pulling all the way back slows you to a stop, and left/right steers. Your maximum speed is not too high in this mode, so you can steer fairly easily, but wt will take you at least 1:10 to 1:30 to get to the finish line. In complex mode, hitting the joystick button is the equivalent of you giving yourself a thrust with your ski poles; now you can go MUCH faster, but your steering at high speeds is not very good. If you ram the button, you can make it to the finish line within 15 seconds. Unfortunately, if you go off course, or miss steering between flags, your score will not count.
A unique element of Skiing: it was one of the few cartridges designed to run on either 4 or 16K machines that actually changed in operation depending on the memory you had. In 16K, the screen updates were quite smooth from page-flipping (now called double-buffering, I believe) techniques, but in a 4K machine it had just a single page, always displayed available; this caused the game to flicker quite a bit on a 4K machine. Skiing was also one of the first (if not THE first) Coco game to feature voice synthesis ("Get ready, Get Set...;")
Title: Skiing
Author: Robert G. Kilgus
Publisher: Radio Shack/Tandy
Released: August 1981 (programmed 1980)
Requires: Color Computer 1,2,3, 4K or 16K RAM (16K recommended), cartridge, joystick.