Developed by: Nintendo R&D 1, Published by: Nintendo
Introduction & Bias:
Ice Climber is a pretty interesting piece of Nintendo history. It's not so much that I think the game is some legendary classic as I have a whole article to prove that idea, but I think that this game, more than most, is proof that Nintendo is excellent at making sure they get as many eyeballs and dollars out of its old content to obfuscate how little they output today. I don't think that Nintendo drags its feet in the present but it is the nature of the video game industry beast that any new ideas or old ideas made new takes so much more effort to product that we don't get the days of ten to seventeen simultaneous game release gluts anymore. Case in point, I did not know this first party existed until Super Smash Brothers Melee was released for the GameCube in 2000.
Through SSBM I learned that the Ice Climbers were a pair of short, parka wearing people who acted well in tandem and had a lot of old-school charm. Their jumps made old noises, they shot a basic themed projectile (ice, instead of Mario's fire), and used those easy-to-draw, classic video game weapons: hammers. And so, of course, thanks to the creativity of SSBM's interpretation of the Ice Climbers I needed to go back and see what I had missed. My familiarity with Ice Climber makes writing about this game both easy and difficult because I do have a fair amount of experience playing this title. But since my hour of play time was not used for gameplay discovery it was difficult to make that time compelling.
First Impressions & Presentation:
If nothing else, Ice Climber certainly knows how to get the party started. In spite of the black background of the title screen the title card itself actually makes clever use of the faux 3-D text layer with dark blue letters that looked carved into a lighter blue block of ice. Good theming there, Nintendo.
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| Pictured: An easy high score to beat |
Couple the good theming with a jaunty intro screen music tune and I am looking at a game that does a good job at setting my expectation meter to "fun". There are three selectable options, 1-player, 2-player, and Mountain. Since I don't have any friends I only played the 1-player mode but I do know that 2-player mode does feature simultaneous gameplay and that's pretty neat. The Mountain choice is a stage select that lets the player pick amongst the game's 32 different stages. For as notorious Nintendo is for making very difficult games it seems that a lot of these early titles were nice enough to give options to pick up from where the player left off without needing to have a save function. That is a pretty clever design decision.
Letting the game go through its attract mode introductions does allow the player to get a feel for the rules and objectives of the game. The goal is simple: climb the mountain. This is achieved by jumping up all of the numbered platform levels of the stage to reach the top. Aiding the player character is the ability to jump high and swing a hammer at the same time. The first demonstration shows that the player is protected from above when they jump as the hammer swats flying dinosaur enemies directly above them. Jumping also lets the player break blocks to allow passage up to the next level. Opposing the player are the aforementioned airborne dinosaur enemies, small yetis that fill in broken floor tiles with icicles, and unbreakable blocks which have a distinct look compared to destructible bricks.
The introduction to each stage shows a preview of the whole mountain as the player will watch a quick fly-through of the level. They will witness a pterodactyl fly straight up the mountain carrying an eggplant in its talons. I wish I was making that up. The preview of the level only shows permanent features of the mountain which apparently includes 40 second timers embedded into the icy peak and the words "BONUS STAGE" literally floating in the air.
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| Not pictured: My speculation that if this naturally occurred on mountains we'd have fewer mountain climbers and more mountain-based casinos |
Other game rules I learned is that the player can wrap their position left-to-right on the screen. So if the player walks off the screen to the right they will appear on the left. This is an important lesson I missed and I only discovered that on accident later in my play time. I also learned that the player can use their hammer to attack foes to the side and that the player dies in one hit. Of course. I would expect more durability from even small humans if they were capable of climbing mountains.
The demonstrations play to complete silence but the sound design is pretty good overall during actual play time. There are two main themes in the game: the first being the title music that is also repeated during the bonus stages and the second is a more subdued version of the theme that plays during the main climbing portion of the levels. There are plenty of sound effects for jumping and hammering and the simple graphics do a good enough job of warning of danger and keeping all of the objectives clear enough against the contrast of the black background.
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| Pictured: Basic gameplay at its most clear |
Unlike some other titles I have reviewed so far Ice Climber actually does develop new layers of challenge as levels progress which is to its credit and detriment.
Experience & Conveyance:
Stage one of Ice Climber is a pretty straight forward affair. The only obstacles the player needs to overcome are the challenges I outlined earlier. All I needed to do was break through the platforms and proceed up to the top of floor 8 to get to the bonus stage. It is a good thing that the first mountain was such a warm up as there is a decent amount of subtlety to the game's jumping mechanics that need to be mastered quickly.
Like in real life there is little the player can do to influence the trajectory of a jump once they are airborne. The player can move maybe one or two small brick's worth of distance to the right or left if a standing jump is performed. The real way to get anywhere is to make a running jump. The run does not have to be that long; maybe only two or three brick lengths to get the full horizontal distance from a jump. This forces the player to be pretty methodical and plan ahead for a lot of jumps to ascend to higher levels as the option to simply jump in place to proceed is not often a viable one.
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| Pictured: Fire Mario would have a much easier time in this game |
Things get tricky starting in level 2 as a new element gets introduced: scrolling clouds. Some floors of a mountain will have no permanent platform to stand on so the player must wait for a cloud to float by which is, of course, solid both on the top and bottom. In some stages the cloud floats by at breakneck speeds so the player needs to anticipate its arrival, jump to break blocks on a higher floor, and then finally ascend. Usually the cloud scrolls by so quickly that the player will need to wait for three or four different clouds to pass by to finally get to the next floor. Once that level of play gets reached all hell starts to break loose.
The player in the later levels can eventually find themselves in this situation: The player stands on about two or three bricks trying to jump on a cloud. The cloud moves fast so landing on it happens almost by accident. The player then needs to jump up immediately to break through to the higher floor. Failing to jump back down to the tiny platform means death because somehow the lower floors have disappeared due to the ratchet scrolling. On top of this, a yeti works on the floor above to undo the players progress, birds swoop in from above, and oh, yes, the floor the player is trying to jump on to is a conveyor belt so there is a good chance they will slip off the higher platform anyway. To compound the troubles the player may be hit with the soft time limit of the game: a standing polar bear wearing pink swimming trunks and sunglasses (still not making this up) will walk out, jump, and scroll the entire screen down to apply pressure if the player is not making quick enough progress. All of this is handed to the player while they still need to somehow make a running jump to finesse their ascent. The game gets brutally hard in the middle and later stages.
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| Pictured: Hell frozen over! |
The player gets three whole lives to work with and only a single chance to earn more. Even though the player can manually select the mountain they died on last to restart their progress, the three life total can be chewed through in a just a few seconds if they end up respawning on some impossible platform over and over again. At the end of the day the different levels end up turning more into puzzle games than platforming games. The would not necessarily be a bad thing if it wasn't for the fact that the mechanics of jumping require the game to move at one speed while the game itself insists on moving about twice as fast as needed.
Verdict & Score:
Ice Climber was not a game that got brought up as a title that the cool kids owned from the early NES library. There were many copies of Mario Brothers, Duck Hunt, and Excitebike but I was ignorant to this game existing until Smash Brothers brought the Ice Climbers out of the archives. I can see why this game might not have caught on. The pick-up-and-play features of the other games does not really apply to Ice Climber. The overall goal is simple but the difficulty curve ramps up far too quickly to be user friendly. 30 years later I think the title can be played well by more experienced gamers and offers a more entertaining experiences than titles like Clu Clu Land but I think Ice Climber fails to ascend to a level higher than average.
As foreshadowed just one sentence ago I will give Ice Climber a 5(6) out of ten. It may be able to break the mold of an average Nintendo game but only barely.
Factoids & Trivia:
To me, Ice Climber doesn't feel like it has its own trivia (though it does have some) as much as Ice Climber feels like Nintendo trivia. I predict that this game really wouldn't be well known at all if the characters had not been revived for Smash Brothers. The imagery of the Ice Climbers were used here and there besides Smash Brothers, most notably in a couple of Kirby games. The titular character would wear an Ice Climber inspired parka when he has a freeze based powerup. Even then, the Kirby games where this happens were released after Smash Brothers so it stands to reason that if the Ice Climbers were not used then the reference in the Kirby games would not exist.
I think the most interesting trivia item I found regarding the differences between the Japanese and North American versions of the game is that the yeti creatures in the NA version were actually seals in the Japanese game. I guess Nintendo of America did not want to have any seal clubbing in their games. Exploding bubble fish are OK, but seal clubbing is just a bridge too far.
It is also clear that development of this game was one of Nintendo's earlier efforts as the game's director considered this a warm up to later efforts. Like Super Mario Brothers.
Probably due to the name recognition alone the game is fetching $15-$20 on eBay.
Not a lot of trivia this time so I will share an Ice Climber remix that I like. Enjoy!
That's it for me today. Check out the next article where I will present a game I like and actually has one trivia fact I only learned about recently: Kung-Fu.
Sources:
NES box art:
Ice Climber on Wikipedia:
Ebay prices researched on March 25th, 2016.
Remix selected from:
www.ocremix.org
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