Leger vs. Ice Climber (NES)

I am kind of thankful of being kept in the dark concerning the origins of Ice Climber until being a grown up of sorts.

Ice Climber always felt kind of bare bones in that it just threw some 32 mountains to ascend at the player, but at the time that made sense.

Trying to get to grips with the mentality of having it all served to you at once, being able to pick whatever stage you wanted to play (just like in Wrecking Crew where all 100 puzzles are available from the get-go) the sense of progression can be somewhat lacking.

Not that you could not play the game from the beginning, stop playing after getting a Game Over or continue where you left off just like in any a bit more modern offerings, but it had to be on you to do that decision.

So I just climbed some mountains, tried out some later ones only to realise how fucking hard they were to ascend or played the game with a friend as a competitive thing.

The first one to kill of the other one by any means available was declared winner.

To play it today, from beginning to end, initially with the self imposed challenge of having to beat each mountain without dying (but with the added benefit of being able to restart the current mountain if death occured) somewhat changed my perception of the game.

I have always liked the odd physics and how the interaction with the environment works in Ice Climber.

Often said is that the collision detection is broken but I would rather go with it being quite hard to get a grip on.

Handling the climbers, trying to jump up to the next floor of the mountain (they all consists of eight regular floors with a tall bonus section on the top where it is perfectly okay to die with nothing lost but the chance of scoring more points) is not as easy as it might seem at first.

Not only is it of uttermost importance to make perfect jumps to not bump into the floor above or fall through it on the way down again, picking away at blocks in the way while stopping (or taking advantage of) white fluffy creatures filling in the gaps with new blocks is also a thing to take into consideration.

Some floors are behaving like conveyor belts constantly moving the climber in one direction or the other, some consists of nothing more than moving clouds of various sizes and some have to be constructed by the fluffy creatures to exist at all in a usable fashion. Also, certain blocks are unbreakable.

Spending too much time without progress upwards will have a polar bear with sunglasses and purple thongs to appear, using its weight while jumping to lower the entire mountain a floor.

Oh, and there is also an annoying bird flying all over the place which kills instantly upon contact if not beating it with the mallet first.

Upon reaching the bonus section, above the eight floor, nothing but picking up fruit that a huge condor have stolen and dropped, reaching the top and timing a jump to grab the very condors feet is on offer (for those chasing a high score, others may just kill themselves off to go to the next mountain without having to bother about losing a life).

It all begins rather simple with nothing but entire floors consisting of nothing but breakable blocks, but just some few stages later things start to get really difficult to deal with.

Enemies and clouds moving faster, icicles forming and dangerously dropping down at an alarming rate, floors cosisting of conveyur belts and tiny platforms to stand on while trying to jump and land on small clouds having to be used to break a hole in the floor above.

The difficulty reaches insane heights and just thinking about managing to beat the entire game from start to finish without a Game Over floating up on the screen seems nigh impossible and so much of a frustrating task to deal with.

At least until calming down, starting all over from the beginning and realising how much of a difference all the progress through the levels have made; Having learned how to deal with the physics, getting the timing of jumping onto and from moving clouds or conveyor belts and seeing the layouts of the mountains inprinted into the mind.

Suddenly Ice Climber turns into pure fun and plants a feeling, in me as a player, of actually being able to deal with the challenge on offer.

As a launch title for the NES in Sweden, back in 1986, Ice Climber is one hell of a game and proudly stands amongst the other eight games in the black box series released that very year.

But, like I said, I was kept in the dark.

Ice Climber was actually was lifted from the Nintendo arcade VS. System where the game offered two different sets of 24 mountains to ascend, more enemies, winds blowing and clouds moving in more varied ways, special stages appearing after every eight mountain beaten, different colour schemes and a progression system which marked a beaten mountain as beaten.

The arcade version, released a year prior to the Famicom version, actually feels like a sequel more than a prequel because of it having much more content and being a fleshed out game in most ways.

In my alternative universe VS. Ice Climber should have been released as Ice Climber 2 on the NES, just like it got a port to the Famicom Disk System in Japan in 1988.

But I digress, Ice Climber as I got to know it back then is great no matter what.