REVIEW: Ice Climber

Game: Ice Climber
Original Launch: October 1985
Relaunch: October 2010
Rating: 3 Stars


Ice Climber is a vertical platform game developed by Nintendo. In this game you play Popo and Nana, two Eskimos chasing a condor up a mountain to recover stolen vegetables.

Which one is the pterodactyl?

I’m pretty sure that the condor is actually a pterodactyl but that doesn’t make the premise make any more sense. Because Western audiences were overly sensitive to the topic of baby seal clubbing, the baby seals in the Japanese version were changed to ferocious Hoth Wampa beasts. Also present are the obligatory annoying birds. Other characters include a polar bear who wears sunglasses and a bathing suit, just in case you aren’t taking global warming seriously.

Fearsome Hoth Wampa beast pictured above

You ascend each of 32 mountains by running, jumping, sliding around on various platforms. Each mountain is pretty short but punctuated by 7 or 8 impossible jumps. Near the top you reach the bonus round in which you collect your stolen veggies and reap bloody revenge on that condor/pterodactyl thing. The jumping is twitchy, imprecise and frustrating to the extreme, so your odds of getting to the top of any level past the first few are pretty bleak. As luck would have it, you can hammer pretty much any enemy in the game as long as they are at ground level. You can kill flying enemies by jumping into them as long as you have reached a certain height of your jump before bumping the enemy. This is actually pretty confusing and amounts to yet another frustrating facet of game play.

32 levels of this...

The characters from Ice Climber are playable characters in the Smash Bros. series of fighting games. However, the inclusion Popo and Nana in a series about staying on a platform is about as appropriate as including Amy Winehouse in a game about sobriety. It also features a co-op mode which could be fun if you were a clinical psychologist chronicling Player 2’s spiraling decent into madness.

The problem is that even after you suffer through the learning curve and master the horrible jumping, the game never really becomes fun.

Honestly I really did want to love this game due to the bizarre premise and cute characters, but the punishing and frustrating game play made playing through the game’s 32 levels feel about as painful as climbing 32 mountains.