Snow Bros Special Download
Andree Vandestreek
Toaplan's Snow Bros. is basically a take on Bubble Bobble, really, but the difference is that Bub and Bob's inaugural appearance is a masterpiece, and Snow Bros. is a weak imitation. The game surely has a cult following and prices on the secondhand market are sky-high, but it's just not that fun to play. Movement and jumping feel floaty and weird. Everything is sort of grotesque-looking, but not in that Binding of Isaac gross-cute kind of way. You walk around freezing enemies. You collect various items for points. There's very little to it and its appeal seems to extend only to its fans. A Snow Bros. fan, can you imagine?
Maybe that's a little unfair. After all, the game runs smoothly at 60fps even when the screen is busy. There's some appeal in the unusual character designs. The new intro sequence is well-drawn and quite cute. See how we're scraping the barrel here? There's just so little to get excited about. We're thinking about other single-screen games. Remember Tumblepop? It wasn't even that good. Six out of ten at best. We prefer it to Snow Bros., though.
But what do you do in it? Not much. The Snow Bros. (sigh) have the power to throw snow at their enemies, turning them into a giant snowball which can then be pushed to send it off on its way, destroying any enemies it happens to hit. This could be fitfully fun, you know, but once you've chained one group of enemies with a flying snowball, you've sort of chained them all. They're not really interesting enemies either, they just potter about waiting to die. The game seems to make up for their deficiencies by loading every single platform with them. Occasionally, the Snow Bros. can fly, when they pick up a green potion which lets them zip all over the screen and basically automatically win the level. The potions are a whole thing; they'll appear all over the field and grant increased speed and power. Taking a hit means you lose all this, but it doesn't really meaningful affect the difficulty because everything feels identical.
The level layouts are pretty uninteresting, too. You clear every level in exactly the same way. It's monotonous stuff, and playing with a friend doesn't remedy that because there's really nothing to get your teeth into. There's no reason to go head-to-head, and co-operating isn't interesting in the slightest. It's the sort of thing you'd put kids in front of to keep them quiet.
Sure, there's the Survival (one-life) and Time Trial modes (the latter of which at least lets you save your progress), but they don't offer anything new on top of the 80 stages already here. Admittedly that is 30 more than the original game had, but with Snow Bros. we're looking at the kind of game where we'd personally prefer fewer levels. Maybe it could have... two levels. Or maybe just one? No levels might be a decent idea.
Snow Bros is so simple that there's almost nothing to say about it, and it's not simple in the fun, easy-to-pick-up sense; it's the kind of simple that quickly begins to show up just how little there is of consequence to do. It's not broken, and we didn't expect Snow Bros. Special to turn into a driving simulator or anything, but 80 straight levels of this is enough to drive anyone crazy.
Stuart is a seasoned reviewer, games writer, and author who also makes comics, videos, and podcasts. You can hear him regularly on Retronauts and his book, All Games Are Good, examines the games that nobody else writes about.
@Deepdoop did you check out the scoring policy?
"A game with a four may well have some redeeming features, but we're clearly issuing caution to stay away from this game. Broken gameplay, bugs, bad control schemes, inflexible options, and repetitiveness - all these are factors which may contribute to a score of four."
Love it or hate it they did a good job preserving the original vibe of the artwork in this remake. Nearly every Bubble Bobble remake, while having superior gameplay to Snow Bros., has looked like hot garbage.
I liked Snow Bros back on the NES and this looks to be a greater ay to revisit that game. So I'm looking forward to getting this. More so on sale cause that's how I buy my games these days. Backlog is big
I don't think this is a fair review at all. The whole point of the game is a pick-up-and-play arcade experience that's about stretching your quarter/life as long as you can. You stack powerups, chain combos, collect 'S N O W' letters to hit the bonus round. When you die, you lose all of your stacked powerups, start off weak again and attempt to build yourself back up. All this in an attempt to get the high score before your game ends.
To each their own, I guess. I just find it weird to see a pretty good little game like this disparaged so harshly when so many 'visual novels' and big-boobed anime fan service Sims get high scores and are labelled 'must plays'. Maybe I'm out of touch?
Like, come on, how is this even a fair thing to say at all? It's crazy. I usually don't speak up about reviews I disagree with, but this one seems unnecessarily harsh. Like, were you paid by some rival company to trash this or something?
@FNL Not really one to comment here much but I REALLY agree with this. Snow Bros. may not be everyone's cup of tea but it's not really fair to say the remake is bad just because this particular reviewer didn't like the original game, if anything that's just pure bias. The DLC criticism is fairly valid at the very least, but I guess this game is considered a cult classic for a reason :/
Yeah, I purposely avoided saying that there wasn't ANYTHING of merit in the review, because I totally agree about the DLC - I'm flabbergasted that they're charging additional for the monster mode, but the rest of the review... Yeeeeesh. It reads like they asked a First-Person Shooter reviewer to review a dating simulator.
@FNL @TurboSpork It really reads like that, the reviewer just doesn't like the game at all, especially since it's not Bubble Bobble. Oh well, I had a blast with this game on the arcades, so of course, I'll buy this one, a charmingly simple game that it's actually quite fun IMO.
@FNL I agree with you. I've always found Snow Bros to be a blast. I could understand maybe giving it a 6, saying it's not for everyone, but a 4 is downright calling it a BAD game, which I think this doesn't even come close to. Maybe some old games don't hold up to certain people, but unless the game was viewed as awful on it's release, I don't think it's really fair to trash this one. It seems like a labour of love that was brought to a niche audience.
Really, I find this game like a more accessible Bubble Bobble. If there's one thing I can complain about Bubble Bobble, it's that one level where you have to precisely jump on your bubbles to reach the top. I would actually recommend this game to younger audiences.
Much like his Dr. Mario 64 review, the entire thesis seems to be "well actually, this game is bollocks and was never good because other games do what it does better." Maybe a fair point, but I always felt that Snow Bros. had enough to differentiate it from Bubble Bobble, especially if you're a score chaser. The mechanic of getting to the top of the stage, balling up an enemy, and trying to chain as many enemies as possible while snowballing down is a solid bit of arcade game design of you ask me.
Well, the great thing about opinions is that everyone is entitled to their own, and we can respectfully disagree or agree. So, I'm totally fine with that. I can't stand visual novels, but I think it's cool that other people enjoy them.
I used to play Snow Bros on my Gameboy back in the days and can recall that I quite enjoyed it. It seems strange if they made the new version worse than it used to be, but remasters and rewhatevers seem very bland when they stick too close to the originals as well.
@Deepdoop That's the EGM way of thinking, to score games solely on "fun". A boring game should be a 5 if it is at least properly functional. Remember that bugs and poor game design can make a game worse than "boring".
This review is crazy. I'm a huge Bubble Bobble fan, and I've always preferred it to this game in the arcades, but when I got around to playing it, it always felt like fun to me. This is such a mean-spirited review I cannot believe it's on Nintendo Life.
@Deepdoop But if a 0 is "at least it's playable", then what are the games that aren't playable going to be rated? We'd need to add negative scores.
I'm thinking the old hypothetical situation someone points a gun at you and demands you finish the game or else. You going to be finishing that game ("playable bad") or let them shoot (unplayable)? There has to be a ratings distinction for that.
Terrible, terrible review. The main selling point: it looks like Bubble Bobble bit it's not Bubble Bobble, therefore it sucks. Also, calling Snow Bros a D tier arcade game gives me the measure of how little the review knows about the whole arcade scene. And I'm not even talking about the remake here.
I refrain, plain wrong, biased and shallow review. I can agree with a bad rating if it's backed by reasonable opinions, but that's not the case. This review gets a 0/10.
@AlienigenX I loved this game in the arcades, but I never had money as a kid. Anyways I just wanted to say I love the Klaus Nomi pic. Now I'll have "Total Eclipse" stuck in my head for the rest of the day
Aw, this saddens me Stuart! Snow Bros is honestly a great take on the single screen puzzle format as long as you constrict yourself to single credit runs, attempt to go the distance, and do your best to increase your personal scoring. Credit feeding any arcade game is boring!
I just feel bad for the new, upstart developer whose sales will suffer because one of the few reviews of their game was written by someone who wanted to be a comedian more than they wanted to critically evaluate the product.
@FNL Was agreeing with you until "visual novels" came into your comment. (But I still agree with most of what you said. And honestly that part of your comment felt out of place with what you are getting at.)
c80f0f1006