The Closeout Warrior

In a back story that didn’t make a lot of sense (and isn’t especially relevant) two brothers were turned into snowmen by a generic evil-type person. They are determined to get back to normal, and to do so, must defeat throngs of enemies with the power of snow.

Each level is one screen with a series of platforms. You have unlimited, though tiny, shots of snow that you can lob at whatever rabble appears on the screen. Your goal is to cover the baddies with snow and then kick them to dispatch them. If your snowball hits other monsters on the screen, they’ll be KO’d as well, garnering you bonus points. It’s in your interest to set up chain reactions for the points (every so many nets you an extra life) but also for the hot sauce. Why snowmen use hot sauce for powerups is a mystery, but they give your little guy the ability to hurl more snow, hurl snow further, run around faster, or float around and flatten things. The first three can be combined and stay with you until you lose a life, which you will do. A lot. You’re pretty fragile in this game, the first hit kills you every time, unless you’ve eaten the hot sauce that lets you float around and bump into things, then you’re invulnerable.

The game’s numerous stages are punctuated by the occasional boss fight, huge things that take up most of the screen and are invulnerable to your pathetic little snow volleys, so you get to hit the smaller enemies that appear and crash the big snowballs into the creature to kill it.

I was able to actually finish the NES port of the game, and restored the brothers to their human forms, but inexplicably there seems to exist a 2 and a 3 in Japan. Story inconsistencies aside, I imagine it’s a lot more of the same, which in this case might not be too bad.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 at 3:18 pm and is filed under Arcade, NES. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.