 Sometimes when I'm burnt out on stuff, I like to play a single-screen puzzle game, like this one here, Snow Brothers for NES, made by Toaplan, who made arcade games like Hellfire, Twinhawk, and the infamous Zero Wing. Yes, even the Genesis port, complete with the All-Your-Base-R belong to us. So, this is just a short video on a simple game. This is an arcade port, and a reasonably faithful one too. And as you can clearly see, this game is pretty much bubble-bobble with slightly different mechanics, where you have to go up instead of down. You play as Tom and Nick, and, surprise surprise, you gotta rescue the princess from the Evil King Scorch. Just one side, like one of these games to play from the vantage point of the person getting kidnapped, and you just get yourself out. I mean, who needs these Tom and Nick guys anyway? The princess can take care of herself, right? Anyway, you have to clear each screen of enemies, and to do that, you hit them with snow until they're nothing but a giant snowball. You can start pushing them and press the B button, and the snowball will go hurtling down to the bottom of the screen, eliminating any enemies in its path. So while at first it's easy to approach this one, just making every enemy a snowball, eventually you want to get to an enemy that's high up, so you can send them careening downward, getting rid of as many other enemies as you can. You can also bounce a snowball up by standing beneath it and pressing A. The big hook here is that it's multiplayer, and some people bristle when I mention that, but this game isn't any fun to play single player, and that's not my intention at all, this game is fine either way. I'm just saying, co-op puzzle games like this go by a lot faster when you've got two people playing, so you're able to see most of the game. You start with three lives, and there's one hit deaths here, lose all your lives, and press A when the zero up top starts blinking, and you can continue. You get four continues, but unfortunately the continues are shared when you play two player. One flaw I have to point out, however, is that sometimes you can get stuck, your jump won't be high enough, so you just sit there waiting for an enemy to drop by. I know it's easy to dismiss snow brothers as a bubblebob will rip off, but the level design here is pretty well done, the enemy design works well within the format, and the bosses are especially challenging without feeling unfair. There's also power ups, which the manual refers to as hot sauces. The red sauce has you running and jumping faster, the blue sauce gives you more power, so you can throw larger snowballs, and the green sauce lets you throw snowballs farther. What's nice is that these potions stay with you until you lose your life. There's a couple other rare sauces that give you invincibility, or it has you warp to a bonus room where you can earn extra lives. There's also weird little touches here and there, like if you take too long to clear a room, this dude with a jack-o'-lantern for a head shows up and starts messing with you, and you can't get rid of him. It's the same as the whale in Bubble Bobble. Yeah, that's like the fourth time I've mentioned Bubble Bobble so far. It's impossible to avoid that comparison with this game, and I'd still definitely recommend Bubble Bobble over Snow Brothers. But if you want more 2-player single-screen puzzle action beyond Bubble Bobble, then Snow Brothers is what you're looking for. The boss fights are really what set this one apart. They are tough, but still doable. However, I should mention that the NES cartridge goes for well over $100, so if you're gonna play this one, you might be better off with the original arcade ROM if you can find it, or you can play Snow Brothers Jr. on Game Boy, which is pretty much the same thing, and there's also the Mega Drive version, which was only released in Japan. Just beware of the NES cartridge, but if you prefer that addition, then play it whichever way you can.