Snow Bros. Classic Collection is a misnomer, as the classic Snow Bros. isn’t on it. That’s also possibly why the game has fewer than four reviews on Steam nearly a month after it was released.
Snow Bros. is a classic. Fellow DDNet contributor, Alex, and I might have the occasional bout over whether Snow Bros. or Bubble Bobble is superior (it’s Snow Bros., BTW), but there aren’t many others in the “single screen platformer” genre that come close to these two at the top of the genre.
If you’ve never played a single-screen platformer, you should at some stage. In simple terms, they’re (usually) arcade games where your character needs to make their way around a stage that fits in a single screen, without any horizontal or vertical scrolling to extend the play area (which is what makes the platforming different to, Super Mario Bros, though to be really confusing, the original Mario Bros. IS a single screen platformer). Once you’ve defeated all the enemies in a level, you’ll be moved to a new arena, which will also be a single screen, but have a different layout and set of enemies.
In Snow Bros., you defeat enemies by throwing snowballs at them. It takes a couple of snowballs to encase an enemy completely in snow, turning them into a snowball themselves. Then you can push the ball, which sends it rocketing around the level. Any enemy it touches is automatically defeated, and spits out bonuses for points and powerups. If you clear an entire level with a single enemy snowball, you get a massive points bonus.
Snow Bros. has 50 of these levels, with boss battles every 10 levels. It’s an arcade-tough game though, so it’s going to take you a very long time to start seeing the levels past 20, let alone make it all the way to the final level (assuming you play like I do and restart every time there’s a Game Over screen, rather than press the button to insert another virtual coin and continue from where you lost your last life).
I genuinely love Snow Bros. I discovered it as a very young kid when arcades were still a thing, and to this day, now that I have an arcade table of my own, it remains a regular Sunday-evening-and-beers unwind that is precious time to me. My love of Snow Bros. is so great that I bought this “collection” without looking into it, just for the sake of it. And then the crushing disappointment hit.
I exaggerate (although only just). However, the reality is that the Snow Bros. arcade game is not in this collection. There are just three titles in the collection, and they’re all console-compromised ports of the arcade original: The Game Boy, the NES and the Mega Drive ports. It’s also an incredibly thin package with the only bonus feature being a music player. I wasn’t expecting a Digital Eclipse-like effort to get the developers together and make a documentary about the game, but, I mean. C’mon. An art book or scans of the manuals would have at least been something. All this “package” offers is a launcher and some emulated games.
In fairness to those games, the Mega Drive version of Snow Bros. is very playable, and close enough to an arcade-perfect port that even the purists should be able to enjoy it for what it is. There’s even some cut scenes and story in it (which the arcade original didn’t have), and Snow Bros. is bonkers enough that it’s a fun addition. I have a personal soft spot for the Game Boy version, too (technically called Snow Bros. Jr). In fact, it will likely be my most played in the collection. I have so many memories of the number of car and train trips this game got me through on my original model Game Boy. Playing it again is pure nostalgia, and indeed Snow Bros. Jr is one of the first games I boot up every time I buy one of those Anbernic emulation consoles. I also have three physical copies of the game that I’ve bought over my trips to Japan for some massive prices to play on my Analogue Pocket.
However, that’s all nostalgia, and Snow Bros. Jr is a very compromised port that more rational players than me would find near unplayable now. The frame rate is shocking, the levels only have a tiny percentage of the number of enemies that the proper arcade game has, and the sluggish pace beyond the frame rate means it’s just not a very exciting game.
And for the record, this isn’t the only game where nostalgia means I have ended up loving a game most people hate. I love Castlevania: The Adventure on the Game Boy, because for months after I received the console for Christmas, I saved my money every week. Eventually, I had enough to buy my first Game Boy game on my own, and asked my father to buy me a game when he was in the city (I grew up in a very small town with no game shops). He picked that one out because he thought the art was my kind of thing. I played it obsessively, partly because it was the only new game I had for six months until my birthday, but also because it ended up being something that had a lot of emotional resonance to me. I do realise it’s not very good. Just like my relationship with Snow Bros. Jr.
But I digress.
The NES port in this collection, doesn’t get the benefit of my nostalgia. I actually hadn’t played it before, and I find it to be a charmless port, with one really broken error in coding: With all other versions of Snow Bros., when you capture an enemy in a snowball, other enemies can’t walk through that snowball. It becomes a core tactic in playing the game. With the NES port, though, they can wander on through, which has resulted in so many deaths for my snow guy, and I do not care to re-learn how to play this game just for this port.
The one and only saving grace of the entire collection is the rewind button. Snow Bros. is genuinely difficult beyond the first few levels. For players who want to get a massive score, and also complete the game, you can now complete the game with a single set of lives by simply cheating and rewinding every time you get hit by an enemy.
Or you could just buy the Snow Bros. remake, also on the Switch, and get good at the better version of the game.
While I’ll always be a fan and advocate of Snow Bros., a retro collection that somehow overlooks the main version of the game it’s meant to be celebrating is both a pathetic effort at licensing, and an utterly pointless product, to the point that it’s an insult to the fans to put it out in the first place. I’ll be the only person on the planet that gets value out of this, because I’m the last fan standing of Snow Bros. on the Game Boy. To everyone else, it’s worthless.
