Ice Climber: Physically and intellectually challenging

If there are video games that I want my daughter to master, it\’ll be those that challenge you both physically and intellectually. I don\’t know why, but I find Ice Climber, a classic Nintendo Entertainment System video game developed and published by Nintendo, as something that might fit the bill.\r\n\r\nIt sure as hell gave me much of a challenge back in the late 1980s when NES newbies like me already had their fill of Super Mario Brothers and Hudson\’s Adventure Island.\r\n\r\nThe challenge Ice Climber poses becomes even greater in cooperative mode, where two players SHOULD cooperate to get through the vertical maze, dodging icicles, riding clouds, collecting eggplants, and clubbing seals, birds and yetis and reduce them to a pulp. Yes, Popo and Nana SHOULD cooperate. Most of the time, however, coordination between two players, such as me and my cousin Keegan, is iffy.\r\n\r\nHere\’s a good reason from SydLexia\’s Valdronius on why Ice Climber players should cooperate:\r\n\r\n

I\’m still not sure if this game is supposed to be competitive or co-op on two player (mode). All I know is that many friendships were ended when the other player jumped up to the next platform, dumping your ass into the bottomless pit. The physics of the game made jumping rather troublesome as well. While the Ice Climbers could leap a good 15 feet into the air, they had a horizontal jumping capacity of roughly three feet. This often dropped them into holes as well.

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