Release Date: March, 1993
System: NES
Developer: Tecmo
Known in Japan as Solomon Key's 2, Fire 'N Ice is so good that if you liked Solomon's Key, you'll probably hate it after playing its sequel. You play as Dana, the same hero from the first game. You also still have the ability to create and destroy blocks. Eliminated from this game is all the magic, secrets, moving enemies, and treasures. Most importantly, eliminated are the arbitrary clock and play control issues.
Back to the blocks. As Dana, you create blocks of ice. You destroy blocks of ice. You slide blocks of ice. That's it. Your job is to destroy the stationary flames on each level. Despite its simplicity, the immense strategy involved is enough to make the game consistently challenging and interesting over approximately 100 levels.
If you like The Adventures of Lolo games or Bubble Bobble, it'd be difficult to imagine you wouldn't like this one as well. The cartridge is rare, as it was produced late in the NES's life and wasn't very popular. But it's the kind of game that is just as enjoyable during emulation.
I've played Angry Birds for a couple days now and I'm already kind of bored with it. I come back to Fire 'N Ice every couple years and play through it again.
Whatcha playin?
I got Q-bert on my iphone and played it straight for a few weeks and actually mastered the original format (got to level 6 which is the final level which just repeats as you finish).
Whats been most fun is to watch my 2.5 year old son play the game that he calls "koo-burt" and think back to my playing the game on outings with my father 25+ years ago.
Congrats! When I was a kid and had @!#%@! on Atari, I still couldn't finish it.
Nice when your kids can enjoy more simple entertainment. Is kick the can next in his future?
You had E.T. for the Atari?
Heh. I did! And after a while I got good enough to easily win it. It truly is a bad game, but it was not the worst game I ever played for the Atari. It just had the largest gap between expectation and performance. It's too bad the programmer only had like two weeks to get the game ready for Xmas. I bet he could have made a pretty good game.
No, it's not even close to living up to the "worst game ever" status everyone puts on it. It's pretty awful, but there's still a massive, rock-filled ocean between it and the Sonic the Hedgehog game that came out for the 360.
also, Plumbers Don't Wear Ties for the 3DO
The worst I've ever played was Fight For Life for the Jaguar.
I finished the free Angry Birds I could download on Google Chrome. It's fun but not really a play over and over again type of game to me.
I love Bubble Bobble. Now I have to look for Fire 'N Ice.
PM me if you have trouble finding it.
VirtualNES has it online.
Sweet. Thanks, guys!
I've been playing Crackdown at Zack's recommendation. It's been a blast with no story to get in the way of all the building jumping action. (Its strangely satisfying jumping off a 20 story building to the street and kicking a car driven by a gangster, then picking up the car and throwing it other gangsters.)
For this weekend, though, I think it might be time to re-start Fallout: New Vegas on the most up-to-date patches, wasting about 40 hours of game play. Damn you Bethesda!
Yes! I'm glad you're enjoying it. The story is horrendous, but there's a ton of fun stuff to do, including orb hunting. If I was slightly more nerdy, I'd probably make the sound of collecting an orb the sound that incoming text messages give on my phone.
It's been a while since I last played, but OpenTTD sucked me in. It's a clone of Transport Tycoon Deluxe. The default graphics haven't changed, though you can download updated sets. Also, no AIs seem to be included by default, which makes the middle part of the game boringly easy. The basics of the game are easy to grasp, and you get to learn the intricate details on train switching.
ahh, bubble bobble. i randomly get that song stuck in my head from time to time...
I picked up Assassin's Creed 2 just in time...to pull all the furniture out of the living room for a recarpeting project that's going to take at least 4 or 5 days. Ah, anticipation.
Haven't played much else except Angry Birds lately. I still find a lot of entertainment in that game even a year and a half later.
Question: Should I bother finishing the first Assassin's Creed before getting the second, or just read the plot ending on wikipedia?
The ending is by far the worst part of the game - no stealth, no free-running, just long, tedious swordfights. I guess the very end was kind of cool, but you're probably not missing anything by spoiling the plot via Wiki.
Supposedly the second game fixes all of this.
I believe I stopped playing at the very end, so maybe I'll just look for a youtube video of the ending cinematic and move on to the second one since I've heard its a million times better.
I never got around to beating the first one. I got like 60-70% done on my roommates XBox in Ireland, then got it for my PS3 when I got home, but re-beating everything was just annoying. Especially when I didn't have the weapons I had grown accustomed to. I never played any of the sequels, but my brother did and enjoyed them.
One of my best friends really wants Fire N Ice since he never got to play it when it came out. The cart's fairly valuable, but I am thinking of hunting it down for him for Christmas one of these years.
I bought & started Catherine last night, and I'm already in love with it. If you don't know anything about it, it's like a cross between a visual novel & a puzzle game. The basic gameplay has you watching some story scenes, and then spending time in a bar drinking, conversing with people, etc. Once the main character goes to sleep, he has nightmares, and he's forced to climb a tower of blocks. The gameplay there switches to a block puzzle mode where you need to move & stack boxes in order to climb before the tower crumbles below you. I played about 90 minutes last night, and the presentation is great (not shocking given it's by the makers of Persona), the gameplay is fun & challenging, and the story seems relatively mature. And I mean genuninely mature, not what passes for mature in most games. You should check out the demo if you're remotely interested. I can tell this is going to be a really, really fun ride.
Dang, that sounds right up my alley; can't believe I hadn't heard of it. I'll check it out, thanks.
Catherine has been getting pretty tepid reviews, largely based on the arbitrary nature of the endings, and the fact that some occasional text-based questions posed to the player determine the character's fate rather than in-game decisions.
that reminds me of a game called Tender Loving Care. Basically, the only thing that affected how the story line went was psychological questions the player answered in between exploration. Then it tried to create a story that the player would like based on their responses. However, replay value was awful, because you had no idea what answers triggered what plots/endings.
This sounds very similar to most visual novels, I think, though the way the "decision tree" in Catherine is laid out it is slightly more complex to try a bunch of different things. I think morality in games is very difficult to handle in a way that isn't ham fisted. Even in Catherine you have a "good/bad" meter as you play through the game. I understand it's there to drive you towards whatever ending but I wish it wasn't there.
That being said, I know if I go through the game on a second run for different endings I'll likely play on Easy difficulty, and follow an FAQ. Haha.
in this day and age with all your options, FAQ is the way to go on replays. Heck, it's often the way to go on first plays if getting stuck means you won't pick it up for two years.
This is the truth.
The main gripe I've seen is that one reviewer did everything possible to fill up the "good" meter and his reward was the worst of the eight endings.
Weird. The reviews I've read haven't mentioned anything like that. I'm being as honest as possible in responding to stuff, so I'm curious what my ending will be.
that you're a terrible person?
I wonder if they've finished the game. It could be that some experiences are squashed partially because of the ending.
In the last few days I have managed to accidentally wipe away two of my gamesaves. One game (Pixeljunk Shooter 2) is awesome so I've just been playing through again, but the other - the fourth Jak and Daxter game, which was built by an outside company - was only good enough for the one playthrough. I'm pretty annoyed, as I'd passed the halfway point.
Outside of that, as always, I'm playing a little of everything. Comet Crash, Vagrant Story, inFAMOUS. I've stalled on Mass Effect 2 because we moved just as I was getting deep into the game, and after we arrived I temporarily couldn't find it. Now I'm afraid I've forgotten what was going on when I got stalled.
Vagrant Story is probably my favorite PSX RPG, what a good game.
I'm still early in the thing - I'm finally getting around to my first playthrough - but it seems on par for me with Suikoden II.
Not buying Suikoden II is one of my greatest regrets. They had 5 copies for $29.99 at my Wal-Mart and I passed on it. My greatest ever gaming regret was not buying a sealed copy of Earthbound for $4 when Best Buy was clearancing it out. Thankfully, I have a copy of Earthbound now that I got for a reasonable sum. I'm still without Suikoden II, and I'm still mad at Sony for not allowing Konami to bring the port of I & II for PSP to the US.
It's a downloadable, dude. Hook up to the PSN.
Earthbound for four dollars? Holy crap. Did that include the big box with the strategy guide? I paid $55 for it on-line in 2000. It's about double that now, last time I checked.
Yep. It was a brand new copy. They had a waist high stack of them sitting on the floor around when the PSX first came out. I remember vividly where it was in the very old configuration of our Best Buy. I was 14-15, didn't have much money, and wanted the "latest & greatest," so I saved my money for PSX games instead. Le sigh.
Copies of it are routinely going for over $100 on eBay. I traded a copy of Persona 2: Eternal Punishment for my cart only copy of Earthbound. I was hoping to trade it for Earthbound or EVO: The Search for Eden, and got Earthbound. EVO is a slightly more reasonable $65 these days, but the Earthbound prices have skyrocketed, so I ended up with the better trade I guess.
The best deal I ever got was a complete rental copy of Harvest Moon for SNES for $2. I also got Mega Man 7, X2, and X3, but gave them to an aquaintance for Christmas that year. I regret it since he & I aren't really friends anymore, and darn it, I want X2 & X3 pretty badly for my SNES collection!
E-Bay has given me Final Fantasy II ($40), Chrono Trigger ($80), and both Lufia games (about $35 a piece), plus Earthbound. That was about ten years ago, and it's amazing what people will pay for complete copies of games, especially if it's "sealed."
Then again, nothing compares to Stadium Events, which regularly goes for tens of thousands of dollars. One middle-aged woman once found it in her attic, a gift she never gave to her son or something. She put it on E-bay having no idea what it was worth.
I read that story. Some cool guy stepped in and said "pull this ad until I help you understand what it's worth." She ended up getting huge money for it, and sent some his way.
I played that game as a youngster, but had no idea how rare it would end up being. If only I had a time machine...
I had thought I'd played it back when I read that story, but it turned out to be another (also rare, but not crazy rare) Olympics-style game. As far as I know, I never saw a copy of that one.
The local K-Mart had about 15 copies of 1992 Gold Medal Challenge in stock and on shelves until a couple months ago. It is... considerably less rare, and only mildly amusing for the fact that a big box store still had an NES game on the shelf.
I vividly remember the look of the game matches the Google search I did of Stadium Events. If there was another game that looked identical under a different name, then I could be in the same boat as you.
They don't look that much alike, actually. I initially thought I had the same game based on the description, but when I dug for photos it was immediately clear they were different games.
according to Wikipedia, Stadium Events is the exact same game as World Class Track Meet, only with different titles
Oh man, Suikoden is my personal favorite JRPG series (which means it's basically my favorite series in general) ever, and that's about 80% because of Suikoden II.