Ice Climber

"A first generation NES game that is about as fun as sticking toothpicks under your fingernails."

Ice Climber for the Nintendo Entertainment System is a struggle to play due to the controls and the annoying game play physics. This game was one of the first developed on the NES having a copyright of 1984. This game, however, does not even compare to the first generation games.

Story:
I don’t have a manual to this game but I found a short synopsis of a story that was printed in the Official Nintendo Players Guide. The story goes something like this, in the arctic wilderness there is a mountain stashed with bushels of vegetables. Your character wants to climb the mountain, but the creatures that inhabit the arctic are going to get in your way, because they don’t want you to steal their vegetables. The story for this game is incredibly stupid, but a story in an action game really isn’t necessary anyway. Action games should be played for the fun of it, not because of a story; too bad that this game isn’t fun.

Game play:
The point of the game is to climb up 8 levels of each mountain. There are 32 mountains in all and it usually only takes a couple of minutes, if that to make it to the top of each one. At each level you must either break ice with your ice hammer to make wholes in the floor to jump through or ride on clouds and jump to the next level. The whole time you are trying to do this there will be bears, birds, and icicles getting in your way. Once you get to level 8 you will put on the top of the mountain, which is a bonus round, where you have a limited amount of time to collect as many vegetables as possible. The game would probably be fun, especially in the 2 player simultaneous mode, except for two crucial problems. The first problem is that the control of the jumping in this game is horrible. You jump basically straight up and only move a little to the left or right, so you have to be right on to make the jumps up the mountain. This game would have been much better if the jumping was more controllable and not so stiff. The second major fault of the game is that the detection of when you make it on a floor or don’t is way off. Sometimes you will jump up and fall right through the floor, even though it is clear that you made the jump. This can make one very angry and can cause many of a controller to be thrown violently at the wall, floor, or TV. If these two characteristics of the game were changed, it would have been a very fun little diversion. The difficulty of this game isn’t very high; if the controls were better it would have been a pretty easy game. There doesn’t seem to be an ending to this game, once you make it to level 32 you just start back at level 1, so your motivation for playing is high score.

Audio/Video:
The graphics are easy on the eyes and pretty stereotypical of the other NES games of that era. The sound is also very much within the standards of the other first generation games. I have no complaints with the game’s presentation.

Conclusion:
This game is not a classic and is something that should be passed up and forgotten unless you are a collector who wants every game ever. Even as a collector I would recommend waiting to find this game cheap, it is not worth more than 2 dollars and isn’t rare.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 03/09/02, Updated 03/09/02