Action/Platformer
October 1985 (Nintendo)
Finally, back to something good. Well, mostly at least. But I’ll at least start on the good parts.
In Ice Climber you go up levels made of ice armed with a hammer. Depending on if you’re playing the Japanese or US versions you can club either baby seals or giant cotton balls with eyes and appendages who try to stop you by attacking or filling in the holes you create in the ice. And there’s also birds who fly around doing the same thing, minus the filling in holes part. That polar bear on the cover? He comes around if you decide to be lazy and don’t do anything for a while and whisks you up to the next level.
Your character doesn’t really climb ever. Instead you bash holes in the ice and jump through. At the end of the level there’s a bonus stage where you have to collect vegetables and get to the top before the timer runs out. I’m not sure how vegetables grow in the arctic climate, but I’ll leave that for someone else to figure out.
Don’t think that this game is perfect though. It has issues knowing when you land on a platform. It seems like have to land with your entire character on the platform. I just pretend that the ice will break if I land too close to the edge. After all, it is a platform made of ice basically suspended in the air.
I love this game but the jumping controls do have serious issues
Then, so did Mario Bros. Arcade. Those were fixed with more familiar Super Mario physics in later remakes, in both Super Mario Bros. 3 and later in the Mario Advance series. This game totally needs something like that.