This is, one would assume, done because the seals tended to provoke responses like anamnesis' writeup below, whereas people have a hard time relating to hairballs, unless they read User Friendly. The two-player mode was the best, though- you'd have two players going at once and occasionally getting in each other's way.Īpparently at some point Nintendo changed things such that in later Ice Climber cartridges, the floor repair automatons were not seals, but wierd little balls of spiky white fur with beaks. In any case falling off the bottom of the screen meant death, and each level ended with a funky obstacle course in which you tried to climb weird irregular platforms and eventually jump into the arms of a giant pterodactyl (?) And some levels would have walls in them, some levels would have conveyor belt floors, and sometimes instead of ice blocks you just had moving, floating platforms.

They were kind of like mindless automatons performing maintenance for a huge self-serving self-maintaining machine, except that they were seals.

Things more complicated you had to deal with these irritating birds flying around, occasional falling icicles, and most importantly of all, seals which walked around looking for holes in the ice and then trying to fix them. And eventually you'd be able to jump through it. And so when you jumped you would knock out a section of the ceiling above you. Your little character you controlled, who was buried in a huge parka, had this kind of freaky hammer/axe thing he jumped. And if there weren't any holes you'd make them. The standard nintendo rule of if you run off the side of the screen, you appear on the other side applied.Īnd basically what you'd do is climb from floor to floor through holes in the ice. On the edge of each floor you had this kind of weird metal industrial-looking border thing that looked slightly different for each floor. You had a series of floors stacked on top of each other, with each floor floored and ceilinged by a layer of floating ice blocks. It's hard to describe verbally, although if you could just see a screenshot you would understand the whole thing immediately- you were climbing a mountain, basically, except not the standard large upward outcropping of rock caused by plate tectonics that we normally associate with the word ' mountain'- this was some kind of a multilevel industrial meat locker. It was really pretty simple the levels were all the same except for the placement and arrangement of the blocks and floors, although that made all the difference in the universe. I don't think many people have heard of it, but it rocked my world. This was, quite possibly, the coolest nintendo game ever.

Nintendo ice climber