Snow Bros. Nick & Tom Special review – Bubble Bobble’s biggest rival

metro.co.uk:

A long forgotten 90s coin-op gets a surprise makeover with new graphics and new levels, as the best Bubble Bobble game never made returns.

Bubble Bobble, and its complicated family tree of sequels and spin-offs, has always been a GameCentral favourite, but while developer Taito were masters of the deceptively deep arcade actioner there are other games that have worked almost as well. Contemporaries like Dig Dug and Bomberman had a similar energy and so too do more modern indie equivalents like Super Crate Box and TowerFall. However, if Bubble Bobble has a true arch-rival then it is Snow Bros.

Originally released in arcades in 1990, Snow Bros. received less home conversions than most Taito games and if you’re reading this and thinking that you’ve never heard of it before then that’s perfectly understandable. A lot of that has to do with creator Toaplan being one of the smaller arcade makers and best known for 2D shooters such as Tiger-Heli and Truxton, so they never had much leverage on the 8- and 16-bit formats of the time.

Toaplan went bust in the mid-90s but many of their staff went on to work at studios like Eighting, Cave, and Gazelle, that still specialise in such games. We don’t think CRT Games, who worked on this Snow Bros. revival, are another spiritual successor, as they’re based in South Korea, but they’ve done a great job of updating the visuals while retaining the old school, classic gameplay.

The story here is, of course, irrelevant but for the record two princes (the unprincely sounding Nick and Tom) are turned into snowmen and have to rescue their sisters from evil lava demons that have invaded the kingdom. The problem with reviewing Snow Bros. is not the narrative simplicity but that it’s impossible to talk