GAME CLEAR No. 296 -- Mario & Sonic at the Sochi 2014 Olympic Winter Games

Mario & Sonic at the Sochi 2014 Olympic Winter Games (2013, Wii U)

Developer: SEGA, Marvelous
Publisher: Nintendo, SEGA
Clear Version: Wii U
Clear Platform: Wii U
Clear Date: 5/15/26

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Why should I care?
It’s one of the rare unported Wii U exclusives and the last standalone Olympic Winter Games tie-in. It’s also fairly cute and fun!

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🔱 Did you know? 🌻
Russia invaded and annexed the Crimean peninsula of Ukraine mere days after the conclusion of these Olympic Games. This was the beginning of an illegal, immoral, and imperialistic war of aggression that continues to this day. If you haven’t in awhile, consider donating to a this solidarity network or doing a little something to provide aid in whatever way suits you best. 🇺🇦

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Arnold Schwarzenegger voice: stay cool

The 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Games were the first Winter Olympics I’ve paid much attention to in quite some time, and certainly the ones I watched the most of. As one does, I thought to myself, “I would like to engage with this concept in the form of a video game.” I don’t recall my exact path to purchasing this specifically, but having already busted out the Wii U to play Sonic and the Black Knight in early February, it’s not hard to imagine how I might’ve ended up ebaying this not long after. Anyway, having come into this with no other experience with the Mario & Sonic franchise, I was expecting very little of a minigame collection on a beleaguered console, but there’s actually a lot to like here!

I think I was probably just sort of fundamentally wrong in my biases. The thing about minigame collections is they are often actually plenty fun! Wii Sports helped ship like a billion Wiis because it was so good. The Wii developed a shovelware problem from third parties trying to bottle the same lightning, but that didn’t mean they were all bad.

That brand of fun is the kind I felt I was having while playing this game. Although the various Olympic events are packaged and presented in a few different ways (including a nonsensical little story mode, the conclusion of which is the reason I am writing this blog post) that essentially amount to playlists, Mario & Sonic at Sochi 2014 is fundamentally a bunch of super-simplified sports. You tilt a controller to ski and snap it upward to jump or flick the stylus upward on the Gamepad’s touch screen to toss a curling stone and then scribble on it to sweep in front of the same stone. That’s Wii Sports, baby.

I’ve been a pretty consistent defender of Kinects and Wii Remotes and things of that nature on this blog. I think they can often be very fun in the way a traditional controller cannot be. I probably agree with calling them “gimmicky,” but a gimmick is not necessarily a bad thing. Although none of the games in this package are particularly demanding or technical, I found they generally felt pretty good. In downhill skiing events, the experience of tilting the Wii Remote and Nunchuk side to side like poles was both intuitive and responsive. Lifting both to perfectly time a jump was never finicky and felt nice to do. A perfectly fun reduced simulation of the event.

Hammering the shoulder buttons of the Gamepad to launch a bobsleigh and then tilting it to navigate the course felt good too. The classic Wii controllers and then-new Wii U Gamepad are used in pretty equal measure throughout the game. Both serve the action well. The one sport I struggled with a bit was figure skating, which has the widest variety of gestures, some of which I felt were not always reliably picked up. I can offer the mode some forgiveness for featuring an excellent selection of musical accompaniments from the source franchises and for the joy of watching Waluigi skate so gracefully.

In addition to the bevy of real events, some sillier events are playable as well. You can race sleighs pulled by Bullet Bills through Mario Kart-style courses, engage in Olympic snowball fighting, or play a golf/curling hybrid. Somewhat surprisingly, I actually generally found these less fun than the real events, but I can appreciate the whimsy.

The overall presentation of Mario & Sonic at Sochi 2014 is also much higher effort than I expected. It’s got good music (the main menu theme has been stuck in my head for days), surprisingly pretty graphics, and sells the Olympic broadcast vibe during the events pretty well.

What I missed out on entirely here is the multiplayer aspect. I played through this game’s story mode (whose plot is so threadbare it does not warrant mentioning) by myself and have not played so much as a single event with someone else. Much of the joy of Wii Sports was playing it with my dad, who really struggled with traditional controllers (I still enjoy to recall how he could beat me in football games on sheer playcalling despite his graceless real-time control of the players). The simple motion controls evened the playing field. There’s also just a silliness to the whole affair of flailing the little things around in friendly competition. This game would be a great vehicle for that too.

That I could still manage if I really wanted to. I’m fortunate to have some folks in my life who would be like “hell yeah brother” if I floated the idea of a Mario & Sonic at the Sochi 2014 Olympic Winter Games party. What I can’t do is enjoy the game’s abundant online features. The Wii U’s Miiverse social network is long dead, and with it any aspect of international competition that this game rightly leaned into. After every personal best, the game prompts you to upload your time or score to the online leaderboards. You must politely decline or face a sad little error message. On the main menu, the game also features a little TV feature on the Gamepad. It features five channels, in which Toads present news, such as your friends’ new records or the achievements you’ve unlocked in the game. Most of these are driven by online activity, so it’s permanent slow news days in 2026.

In that sense, I’ll never get the full experience of this game. So it goes. I can at least play it by buying a disc, as I did, which puts it in better standing than the 2018 games, whose tie-in with Ubisoft’s Steep has long-since been delisted to the best of my ability to tell. Milan-Cortina has no video game tie-in at all. Sochi is thus the most recent Winter Olympics video game that is reasonably legally accessible (if you have a Wii U lol). A shame it had to be given Russia’s actions immediately following these games. Fortunately, we as a society have learned from our mistakes. I look forward to watching the World Cup live from my home country, which is led by the dove-like winner of the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize.