Ice Climber: 1HN Cooperative Block Breaker

Back in the late 80s, one of THE first NES games I received from my mom and dad was Ice Climber. It's a simple platformer in which you play one of two parka-wearing climbers named Popo (who wears blue) and Nana (who wears red). You can guess the gender of each, though it doesn't matter.

Anyway, the great thing about Ice Climber (this is back in the late 80s, mind you) was that you could play cooperatively (or competitively) with another player. Unfortunately, as an only child, I rarely got the chance to play alongside someone else, but I was used to that.

The point of the game was easy to understand: break the ice blocks of the floor above your character using your hammer, and then jump through the hole to go up. Do this as many times as it takes to get to the top floor, from which you start the bonus stage. Along the way, you encounter ice-pushing white flightless birds and red bird-like flying creatures (pterodactyls?); the white birds do not try to harm you directly, but do if you touch them, but the red birds (pterodactyls) almost always seem to gun for your character. If that's not enough, there's a polar bear that will appear if you linger too long on a lower floor and stomp to make the screen rise one floor. If this happens while you are on the bottom floor of the screen (or if you fall through an ice hole in the bottom floor), your character dies.

To defend yourself against these baddies, you can use your hammer to bonk them at floor-level, or you can jump into the baddie (especially if it's the flying red bird), as you do when you break ice blocks. To lend to the cooperative intent of the game, you cannot mallet your partner, though you can push your partner through holes (if you are so malicious).

Ice Climber is the type of game that you can pick up and play with a friend for a half-hour of mindless fun, either helping each other or interfering with each other. Each subsequent level adds new difficulties: moving floors and cloud platforms, fewer blocks on which to stand, greater frequencies of creatures, and the like. When my sons play Ice Climber, they neither play cooperatively nor competitively -- they just try to do something with their controllers to make the characters move and survive. Their gaming sessions are hilarious and frustrating in equal measure. Nonetheless, once you and your friend begin to master Ice Climber, you may find the game stimulating, at least for that half-hour.