NES: Ice Climber!


Ice Climber was distributed for the Nintendo in 1984, so even if you want to complain about some of the gameplay aspects, you really can't: the technology wasn't there yet. At that day and age, we were still floored from being able to just play these sorts of games at home - it'd take a good decade before we really got into neat storylines and cool graphics, basing our judgments solely on those attributes. This will be a short review because, frankly, there's not much to tell. Ice Climber wasn't exactly deep, unless we're going to go into a psychoanalysis of Eskimos who'd risk death to find eggplants. And I'm not ruling that out for later.

But, if X-E is my own public journal of all the modern medias important to me, I think it's important that Ice Climber gets the nod. It's inclusion in Super Smash Melee for the Game Cube piqued my curiousity. I had never played the game as a kid, only heard about it: it definitely wasn't one of the top games out there, and certainly, there's not much in that cartridge that'd sprout a huge word-of-mouth campaign. What we have here is an old, simple game that, if nothing else, serves as a reminder of how we got to where we are today in the gaming industry. If you thought Ice Climber sucked, that's okay - I did too. But it's important nonetheless. These types of games paved the way for today's consoles and game producers.


So, what's it about? Hard to say - unlike Mario, Rana and Popo didn't exactly have an intense storyline to follow. At best, I can tell you that they're hammer-wielding Eskimos who need to gather vegetables. The only thing in their way is ice and a bunch of seals and birds. This isn't exactly high-concept stuff. But so what, either was Pac-Man. Besides, Eskimos are almost totally overlooked in our society. Nobody cares about them. No matter how many times they put some stupid special on television detailing ice fishing and igloos, the public at large still deem Eskimos entirely uninteresting. I think it has something to do with the general ugliness of the lot - let's face it, Eskimos aren't gracing fashion magazine covers for a very good reason: they tend to look more like an offshoot species of the Jackson Chameleon rather than our northern relatives. BUT THAT'S OKAY, because if it weren't for them, JD would've had a much harder time finding a word to circle in Heather Duke's copy of Moby Dick.

Some people are immortalized in grand statues or postage stamps. In the Eskimos' case, they get a shitty Nintendo game from the early 80s. Oh well, they're still miles ahead of the French.


Your goal, simply, is to head on up while collecting bonus points by picking up vegetables, namely eggplants. Not just normal eggplants though - eggplants as tall as the title characters themselves. Eggplants that big are worth hoarding, so think about it before you start complaining. The world spends billions upon billions on food every year - if you had the option of just running around Alaska picking up huge tomatoes for sustenance, imagine all the cashola you'd save. Plus, you could just hire Eskimos to do the work for you. They work cheap. Hell they'd probably do it for you if you threw a few sardines in their mouths. They're a lot like penguins in that regard.


It won't be easy though. To gather the supernatural eggplants, you'll have to avoid contact with the many killer seals and condors of the arctic. Apparently, a new breed of seal has infiltrated the icy tundra - a murderous manatee with poisonous skin: you touch, you die. Other enemies include polar bears wearing pink thongs. Eskimos don't have it easy, believe me. On the plus side, if they had a bottle of cherry extract, all they'd have to do is scrape their bedroom wall and they could have snowcones whenever they wanted.


Your hammer serves a dual purpose - for one, it's helpful in breaking the many layers of ice. You'll need to do that if you stand any chance in collecting eggplants. Course, it helps that you're a Super Eskimo that can jump 15' high, but that's beside the point. The ice in the game is nothing to balk at - it's rough, and to avoid monotony, it inexplicably changes colors from level to level. You've never seen a sight more pretty than fuchsia ice. It's like these killer seals are pissing battery acid all over the place.

Furthermore, you can kill off your enemies with the hammer, racking up more bonus points. It's a lot like real life in some ways. But instead of beating seals over the head with a mallet for their fur, you're doing it so they won't stand in the way of your vegetable collecting. It's almost PC, but not quite. There's a few really annoying aspects of the game that stand out - namely the swift conveyor belts that you need to jump on, despite having little ability to successfully jump sideways. It's not the ice climbers' fault though - you try jumping 15' feet upward and to the left while wearing that coat. It's not easy. And it's not like they can just take off the coat either - not only will they get hypothermia, they'll be more suspect to the killers seal's apparently poisonous fur coat.

While the one player version gets pretty mundane after awhile, playing it with a friend is a guaranteed good time. If you don't want to work together, you can compete against each other, trying to kill the other one by climbing up the ice faster and knocking him straight to Hell.


As previously said, the Ice Climbers are back in focus due to their inclusion in Super Smash Melee. They're basically backup characters nobody wants to use, because we're all discriminatory to Alaskans because they're like shitty Indians who don't even have casino ownership or tomahawks going for them. Still, they're kinda fun in the game since there's two of them - if you work the versus mode while playing by yourself, try pitting your character against three sets of Ice Climbers. There's no greater feeling than KO'ing six Eskimos simultaneously - unless of course you find a way to knockout seven or eight of them.


Oh yeah, those eggplants you're collecting? Seems they're alive. Either that or what you're really doing is rescuing other Eskimos trapped in vegetable-themed sleeping bags. Either way, I'll stick to Bubble Bobble. I'd rather help out a cute dragon than an eskimo. I hate Eskimos.


- Matt
matt@x-entertainment.com