NES Week: Day #2

Out of all the games to get characters in smash bros. The one I’ve always been confused about are the ice climbers. They’ve never really been that powerful in smash and I’ve never heard anyone really praising the game. Maybe it was time that I tried the game to see why they were in smash in the first place. Who knows…maybe it would be a kid Icarus situation?

Personally I really don’t find ice climbers to be that good of a game. If anything, I’m confused as to why Nintendo respects it so much. For starters the jumping is terrible. You don’t really notice how terrible the jump physics are until the platforms come in. I promise you that no matter what I do I can’t land on the platforms because ‘oh your only on the very edge so I guess that means your not on it’ and the controls feel so stiff with you trying to manoeuvre the climber to jump on these platforms and somehow catch the pterodactyl at the end. It all feels so stiff and when the platforms are really slippy that’s just when I lose faith in everything…

Stiff controls, terrible platforms, not the worst enemies, they should get a new job that doesn’t require them to jump

Jump arc this, jump arc that. How about you jump off this game's dick?

Ice Climber's not anything particularly special, but I respect it far more than I ever did before. Starting quip aside, I genuinely do like the funky jumping. It's clearly designed around-- the entire game would be trivial if the physical execution of climbing was easy to do. You have to be aware what your actions will lead to because they're so committal, and I like that. It's not dissimilar to other NES games with "bad jumping controls."

I also played Ice Climber with a friend, and I have to say: the game is a surprisingly coherent multiplayer experience. Maybe one of the best on the NES. All the stuff I just said holds true, except now you have to consider the needs of another player. Getting too gung-ho and scrolling your buddy off the screen is distilled co-op essence.

There's still a lot to be desired; there's too much downtime in this game for my taste (optimal scoring, waiting for platforms to be built, etc.) and the presentation sure is that of a black box NES game, but Ice Climber's a decent little thing. I feel bad for hating on it so hard. Give it a chance!

Thanks to Smash Bros., I was curious in trying out the game where the Ice Climbers came from.

While I like the soundtrack, and the game has charm... man, do these controls suck ass. Jumping feels really heavy, and landing on platforms is a bitch.

After a while, I was not having much fun, and just stopped playing the game.

If there was another Ice Climber game with better controls in the future, I'd be all for it, but as for this one... nah.

--Nintendo team meeting circa 1984--

"Hey, let's make a game about jumping."

"Yeah, let's also make the jumping itself horrendously homophobic."

"Sounds fantastic, it'll sell mucho copies."

All of them immediately shit their pants and start scooting their asses across the floor

Now, I'm not a game programmer and I know that making games in 1985 was a lot harder, but I feels like if you're making a vertically-based platformer where most of the gameplay is jumping, you're going to really want to nail the feel of the jump mechanic. Never have I played a game where the controls are so terrible that they effectively take a crowbar to the game's kneecaps the way that Ice Climber's terrible jump mechanic ruins an otherwise solid game premise.

A lot more playable on the Nintendo Switch Online service where you can easily rewind the game so that you can keep trying to make certain jumps, but don't bother playing it on the original hardware. I own a physical cartridge of this game. Don't suffer from my mistake.

Alright ideas but man the jumping mechanics just kill everything. You have to be so unbelievably precise to land on any platform that I slowly had to learn to clip through the edge of the platform to actually land my jumps by the end of the game. Pair this with the annoyingly slippery blocks that litter the entire game's level design and this game really does feel like the equivalent of trying to get a thread through a tiny needle head. I liked the sprites and music though and levels with a fair amount of breakable blocks usually weren't that bad. And I also thought the enemy designs were cute.