Snow Bros. Nick & Tom

The Good
Toaplan was a Tokyo based developer who is probably amongst the greatest Arcade Shooters devs of all time. By 1990 they released what became an instant classic: Snow Bros. This was actually the second try of Toaplan in the genre, one of their first games was a top down fixed-screen action game: Performan (1985).

Similar to Fairyland Story (1985) Bubble Bobble (1986) and Don Doko Don (1989) Snow Bros is a fixed screen action platformer, meaning you need to clear the screen of enemies to move to a new "floor". You hit them with snow, which stuns and slowly solidifies your enemy critters into a ball that you can then kick and roll while wiping everything in its path. The more enemies you kill with this ball the more items you can get; with a huge point bonus picking up sushi for killing everything in the screen with just one ball (and the opportunity to get an extra life). As power ups you got blue, red and yellow potions that strengthen your shot, speed up your character and give your firing more range. There's also the rare Green Potion that makes you invincible for a short time. Every 10 floors you get to fight a Boss, making a total of 50 floors.

The controls feels perfect, the shooting and the jumping are very responsive and fast. There are some limitations of course like you can't jump down platforms through floors, but they all seem well though out and in service of the game. Sometimes you need to drop down a hole to appear on the upper side of the screen, other times is better to climb up one of your snow balls. You also get invincibility frames after rolling with a ball, that you can use for your advantage. The graphics are beautiful, colorful, well animated and cute... The design of the main characters, enemies, backgrounds and bosses are all memorable. And the Music, made by Osamu Ohta is really catchy and fun: First 10 floors tune "Yukidama Ondo: Snowball Temperature" its forever engraved in my brain.

The Bad
After floor 20 the game becomes relentless, particularly with the bosses (that is if you even get to see another one). In classic Arcade and Toaplan style the game becomes very hard. It was designed to go through with two players: and that's a problem if you are playing alone. You have less than a minute to clear the screen before an almighty Pumpkinhead appears and starts chasing you to kill you short after... sometimes you have 8 enemies to deal with; you can even get trapped in platform holes, so you need to always carefully plan your jumps... but fast.

The Bottom Line
With Snow Bros. Toaplan perfected the fixed screen genre, adding strategic elements and modernizing its pace, and thus pawed its way to a new breed of games like Parasol Stars (1991), Tumblepop (1992), Pop'n Magic (1992), Bubble Symphony (1994) and the sequel to this game Snow Bros. 2 (1994) In the Arcades at the end of the day when you almost run out of quarters, you always give it a go to good old Snow Bros, very cheap but solid mindless fun. The last quarter was always save for it. Funny I don't remember a lot of the more expensive machines, but sure enough i have fond memories of playing this one.