Ice Climber
1984/Nintendo
...Review by Polas - 11/18/01...

As you're probably aware of by now, Nintendo's fighting phenomenon for the Gamecube, Super Smash Bros. Melee, features the Smash Bros. debut of an odd little duo known as the Ice Climbers. What you may not know if you're a younger gamer, or even if you happened to be toasted for most of the mid-eighties and missed it, is where exactly these two screwy little eskimo things came from, and why they're fighting among elites such as Mario, Bowser, and the like. Well, that's where old Polas steps in and informs you that more than 15 years ago, even before Super Mario Bros, the Ice Climbers starred in their very own Nintendo game. Sure, they look mightily impressive these days...

.....

...But what did they look like the last time we saw them?

.....

We've come a long way.

..ICE CLIMBER: Our hero, although I'm not quite sure what's so heroic about climbing the same series of 32 blocky mountains ad infinitum, but you do what you can. Ice Climber's primary (and only) apparatus in this game is the hammer. The hammer allows you to defend yourself against enemies, as well as break blocks above your head. In addition, Ice Climber can jump, but as you can see, his huge ass weighs him down. Because of that, you have almost no horizontal mobility after you jump, and will almost always land in a pit or on an enemy. Sorry gals, but the pink Ice Climber only appears in 2-player mode, and I'm not even sure if she had a gender back then...

..FURBALL: I suppose you could call this the main enemy of the game. Touch one, lose a life. They plod around aimlessly until you give them a good whack with the hammer. That only renders them harmless as they bumble about in the opposite direction, however. The only way to permanently eliminate them is to force them into a hole in the floor at a higher level.

..EVIL BIRD: Yep, the gaming generalization that all birds are evil dates back this far. Birds WILL die if you smack them with the hammer, but they fly around in odd patterns and are a bit tougher to smash than the Furballs. They usually swoop in when you're trying to make a perilous platform jump. The more you off, the more points you get at round's end.

..OTHER CRAP: OK, there are two other things to look out for. The first is that stupid little ice block the Furball pushes. When you break a block from below and send a Furball in the opposite direction, he returns with one of these. If you touch it, you will freeze and die. If he moves it into a hole, blocks will reform. This can hurt or help you. The other thing is just a stalactite, they form on blocks as well as the bottom of moving platforms. I don't think I need to tell you what happens if you're under one.

So what's the point of this game? Well, back before SMB, and especially on the Atari but also in some very early NES games, pretty much every game's point was to keep going as long as you can through repeating levels in order to attain the highest score possible. To do that here, you have to scale an 8-level "mountain" by jumping (A) into blocks from below with your hammer, then using the newly made holes to jump to the next level. Just don't fall back down into these holes as you ascend, or you're finished. Your hammer (B) will also protect you from enemies. This keeps going for 32 levels; after you beat Mountain 32, you go back to Mountain 1, just with more falling stalactites. At least Nintendo gives you the option of starting at whatever mountain you want. As you progress, conveyor blocks, repel blocks, and moving platforms make things a smidge more difficult.

.....

Gameplay is essentially divided into two areas: the aforementioned 8 level ascension of rows helpfully marked with little numbers by some unknown Ice Climber of the past, and the Bonus Stage. Even if you fall in the Bonus Stage, you don't lose a life, you just move on to the next Mountain, albeit having to stare at a hysterically sobbing Ice Climber for several moments. If you complete the Bonus Stage, a few extra thousand points will be yours as Ice Climber happily waves his dopey little flag around.

As far as the schematics of the Bonus Stage, there's a reason you don't lose a life if you fall - the jumps, especially with your highly frustrating anvil-ass of doom, are usually pretty tough to make. In addition to the ice platforms, there are more often than not a slew of moving cloud platforms to be scaled. Throughout the Stage, there's a load of eerily-eyeballed vegetables that will increase your score, but sometimes trying to snag them can mean falling into the abyss or not having time to get to the very top of the Mountain, as a 40 second timer kicks in when the Bonus Stage begins. Once you reach the very top of the Mountain, you must grab a vulture's talons for some reason to fully complete the round.

.....

After every Mountain, your totals are tallied up: how many birds you whacked, how many total blocks you broke, etc. That's the game in an ice block.

We may never know why Nintendo opted to delve into video game history and thrust the Ice Climbers of all characters into next-gen glory, as it seems we'll never again be able to throw a Super Uppercut as Little Mac, or perhaps beat the hell out of the Dog from Duck Hunt in an amusing minigame. But for what it's worth, Ice Climber is one of the best "high score" games that I know of, and is a good way to pass short amounts of time. And hey, it could be worse - can you say Clu Clu Land?


Return to the main page