Alright, admit it. How many of you heard of Ice Climber, the NES game and recent e-Reader remake, before Super Smash Bros. Melee, or had played it? That's what I thought, not that many. Really, all you know about Ice Climber is that it had two little Eskimo-like people with hammers, who were awesome at the Home Run Derby, but practically pathetic without each other. You may think this game is called Ice Climbers. Maybe the NES version was, but due to the e-Reader's incapability to handle multiplayer, you can only play one player, and thus there is only one Ice Climber jumping around (and the name of the game is thus Ice Climber-e). You remember how hard it was to jump without your partner in SSBM? SSBM got it pretty accurate. Without your partner, you were dead in SSBM, and the same is pretty much true in Ice Climber-e. The full Review follows.

This Review is rated on a 0-4 star scale, with 0 meaning pathetic, and 4 meaning excellent. Keep in mind this is the e-Reader version I am reviewing, as I have not played the NES version and do not know the exact differences (though I assume there's a multiplayer mode in the NES version).

Graphics: **

The graphics are average for the NES. Not too good, not too bad. They're right where you should expect, really. I don't mind them, nor do I care much about them. You can see the characters clearly enough, at least in my opinion. This is of course a very insignificant category, as it is most of the time in these older games.

Sound: *

Remember the catchy tune you heard at the Ice Climbers' home in SSBM? That tune is only in the bonus area, it plays very fast, and it is hardly recognizable (it isn't nearly as good). The other music in this game, in the main part of each level, isn't that good. The sound effects are average. In short, this game doesn't give you nearly the same sound experience as the level in SSBM, nor does it give you anything that you'll have stuck in your head.

Controls: ½

The controls are simple enough: A jumps, B hammers, left and right move your character left and right. What's not to like? The control on the jumps, that is. No, I don't mean that A is jump. I mean that you don't really get that much control of your character as he comes down from a jump. Imagine if you had hardly any control of Mario as he comes down from a jump. Goombas would be considered a pretty scary enemy. Now imagine if you're trying to jump through small holes in the ceiling, and land to the left or right of the hole, so you land on ground. It's very difficult to do. This problem is more to do with the gameplay than anything else, so I'll dock that score more below.

Difficulty: ***

Ice Climber-e isn't that hard for a little while, as the levels are straightforward at the beginning, but then you need to jump onto moving platforms as you progress through the game, and then navigate upwards onto conveyor belts. Considering you're trying to get a jump perfect, or else you have to try it again, it can take a while to move through the level, and with moving platforms and conveyor belts, you often find yourself going backward instead of forward. That's annoying. No, it's not like Super Mario Sunshine, where one wrong jump is a death and a start-over of the whole entire next-to-impossible-if-not-impossible level, but it means it takes a while to make it through the levels, and also it sometimes leads to death. This is not to due to the player's lack of skills, but due to the poor controls on jumping. If Super Mario from Mario 3 was jumping, with his jumping controls, this game would be a lot more fun, and maybe even a really good one. In fact, I'd like to see some Mario levels built like these, with better controls, of course. But more on that in a moment.

Gameplay: *

The very poor controls on jumping make this game annoying when it seems like it could be fun. Your point is to jump upward through the level, breaking through the ceiling above as you go, and hammering enemies as you encounter them to scare them away. You want to go up, not down, as if you fall down off the screen, it's a loss of a life, but usually that's a difficult thing to do, actually (because you come up through a small hole, you can only fall through whatever hole you came up through, so it's hard to die in that way, unless the screen shifts upward on you, in which case you may end up in a precarious position).

As in many famous failures, the concept is interesting, in fact a good one. The problem is the execution of the problem. Had the controls for your character been so that your player could jump more like Mario, you'd have fun with this game, as you would have much better movement. Instead, you won't have that much fun with this game as you would have had the jumping controls been better.

Levels: ***

I have good things to say about the levels: they are well-made, they have variety, they are challenging, and you can select any of them to play at any time, so it's not like you have to beat level 1 to eventually make it to level 32. They are fun for a little while, until the poor controls set in and take away your fun, making this game annoying instead. They are also a little too hard at the end, as with the poor controls, how are you supposed to do what they want you to do?

Replayability: *½

If you can overcome the poor controls, you will find that this game has a lot of levels to offer, and thus makes for an interesting gaming experience. 32 levels isn't all that bad for a NES game, in my opinion.

Fun Factor!: *

This game starts out pretty fun, but as I have stated, the difficulty jumping makes the game more of a chore after a while. Then it's more annoying than actually fun, and that doesn't make for a very interesting game. You'll enjoy some parts of it, and think that it's going to be fun, but ultimately it's frustrating because of things such as having to make a jump 20+ times since it's so hard to get the timing exactly right.

OVERALL: *

When I first played Ice Climber-e, I thought it would break the e-Reader NES remake "curse", which means that I feel that none of the NES remakes for the e-Reader are really worth buying. Now I got this for $2, which really isn't that bad. Of course, if you don't have an e-Reader, then it's totally worthless.

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