Snow Bros. Nick & Tom

aka: Snow Bros Jr., Snow Brothers
Moby ID: 12076
Arcade Specs
Buy on Game Boy
$99.97 used on eBay
Buy on NES
$494.99 used on eBay
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Description

Nick and Tom are two Princes living the dream with two beautiful princesses. When suddenly the evil King Scorch freezes Prince Nick and Tom and kidnaps the Princesses. Now Nick and Tom find themselves with abilities dealing with snow and ice. These two Snow Brothers will need to hunt down the evil King Scorch and rescue the princesses.

Snow Bros. is a fixed-screen platform game where players must defeat all enemies on each level (screen), 50 altogether. The Snow Bros use snow as their weapon, throwing it at the enemies to stun them. When lots of snow is thrown at an enemy, it becomes covered in a flurry and unable to move. These can be rolled into giant snowballs and pushed or kicked into other enemies. If left alone, enemies will eventually defrost and become angry at the player. The enemy filled snowballs are a much stronger weapon then the regular handful of snow and are the only effective weapon Nick and Tom have against the bosses.

Spellings

  • スノーブラザーズ ニック&トム - Japanese spelling

Groups +

Screenshots

Promos

Credits (NES version)

17 People (15 developers, 2 thanks)

Planner
Character Design
Sound Composer
Chief Programmer
Programmer
Special Thanks
Director
Presented by
  • Toa Plan
  • Capcom
Cover Artwork (US/EU)

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 76% (based on 27 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.5 out of 5 (based on 27 ratings with 1 reviews)

A simple but perfect fixed screen platformer

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.

Arcade · by pelida77 (36) · 2023

Trivia

Amiga version

Snow Bros. was due for release on the Amiga back in mid-1991, but was for some reason abandoned. The game was rediscovered and released for free by Amiga Games That Weren't in 2006. Unlike the other versions, the Amiga conversion contains only one player option.

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  • MobyGames ID: 12076
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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Paul Jones.

Arcade added by Trypticon. Game Boy added by keth. Android added by Kabushi. Amiga added by Martin Smith. iPad, iPhone added by lights out party. NES added by Multimedia Mike.

Additional contributors: keth, Sciere, Alaka, Игги Друге, mailmanppa.

Game added February 12, 2004. Last modified January 27, 2024.