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The heroes of the average platform game are usually warm and friendly, but Nick and Tom Snow are as cold as ice. Hardly surprising since they're snowmen. Naturally, it's hard for such chilling dudes to find girlfriends - most of their dates end in disaster as their maidens run screaming to their mothers, hands frozen and clothes dripping. Luckily the daughters of a wealthy textiles merchant, who get free thermal underwear, have taken quite a shine to the Snow Brothers and together they spend happy hours rolling snowballs and sampling strange potions.

Alas, such joy neer lasts and one local bad-guy, while collecting a supply of black capes from the merchant's home, kidnaps the two daughters! The merchant pleads with Nick and Tom to his rescue his treasures.

Now the boys are putting their snow-chucking talents to more effective use against Local's hench-fiends over six levels of snowballing platformery. Let's ball!

Toaplan's Snow Bros for the Megadrive is a close conversion of their coin-op of the same name.

Encase Nick and Tom's enemies in giant snowballs and roll them around the screen attempting to trap others for extra points. Collect the potions that occasionally appear for extra speed and strength.

Most enemies would laugh at the idea of being attacked with snow. Not so for these baddies, as snow sticks to their hides like nobody's business! Nick and Tom take advantage of this by encasing their enemies in giant snowballs! These frozen fiends are then pushed and sent tumbling into the others for mucho pointos! Should the lads feel like it they may hitch a ride on a snowball and direct it wherever they please!

At the start of their quest, the Snow Bros only possess the most basic of snow-producing capabilities. But they upgrade their attack method by means of skill. Rolling snowballs into Bad-Guy's lackeys sometimes reveals a bottle of potion. There are four types of potion in all and there is a list of their effects:

1. Dark Blue
   Enlarges the Bros' snow-throwing capacity, turning their little handfuls into stonking great fistfuls.
2. Light Blue
   Some drinks are said to expand the mind, this one expands the whole of the Bros' bodies for invincibility!
3. Yellow
   Enables the Bros to shoot their icy loads much further.
4. Red
   If there's one thing the Bros crave for the most, it's speed! So this one's the answer to their prayers.

Gasp at the array of bosses garnered from every tenth level. Boss one is not much trouble, only throwing minions from left to right. The second adversary is a mortar-bearing toad that takes some beating. After that, it's a weird trip through googly birds, fire monsters and bubble-heads.

Should the Snow Bros take too long in clearing a stage a ghostly Jack o' Lantern arrives on the scene and hurries them along. It does this by releasing pesky ghosts all over the play area. There's no way of killing the ghosts - they are, after all, quite dead already - and so the best the Bros can do is stay frosty but not takes things too easy.

There are two ways of accumulating a high score in Snow Bros, aside from the usual points from snowballed enemies.

Smiley Face:
Upon collecting the Smiley Face icon, a gang of magical smiley faces drop from the top of the screen, changing the scenery's colour as they do so. When wrapped up in snow, these faces develop a nasty abscess in the form of a letter - an S, an N, an O or a W. In case you haven't guessed, these form the word SNOW. Once the word is complete, a massive bonus is collected!

Multi-hit Bonus:
By successfully rolling a snowball over a complete screenful of enemies, bonus tags fall to the bottom of the screen. They only remain for a short period of time, though, so speed is essential.

This is an amazingly addictive game even though it's easily beaten. Even after the end sequence, there's still the compulsion to go back and try for better scores.

Another point in this conversion's favour is it's so close to the original coin-op. As the arcade machine was, and still is, so popular, being able to acquire this cart for a mere £40 is a bit of a bargain.

Still, this style of platform game isn't everyone's cup of iced tea. So, while it's a lot of fun, especially for two players, even the Hard difficulty setting fails to add any significant stretch of life-span to its value. All in all, a solid title but there are many other new titles about, more demanding of people's cash.

What a beezer of a conversion! Put this cart and the coin-op together and you'd be hard-pressed to spot the difference. The zany graphics are bang on, and the game plays as smoothly as it did in the arcade.

The one snag is the amount of easy screens which (exactly like the arcade version) allow you to whizz through big chunks of the game on a single sitting. Eighty levels sounds a lot, but each one has a stringent time limit, forcing you to race through the game.

The gameplay is brilliant though, and I'd recommend Snow Bros to firm devotees of the arcade version, despite being a bit easy.

Presentation 78%
P. An almost exact replica of the coin-op. The option to alter the difficulty and sample the music.
N. The coin-op is now getting on a bit, the attract screen is very basic indeed.

Graphics 82%
P. The graphics mirror their arcade counterparts almost perfectly. The sprites are colourful and smoothly animated.
N. Compared with games like Sonic II, Snow Bros graphics look quite limited.

Sound 77%
P. Plenty of jolly tunes of the type that make a grown man puke, but suit Snow Bros down to a tee. There are also many colourful sound effects.

Playability 89%
P. A "just one more go" type of game, more so because of the fluid controls.
N. The password system takes away some of the fun of progressing through the game.

Lastability 68%
P. Though the game is easily played, mastering each level is a hard task. Those with a tendency towards point-grabbing need look no further.
N. The game is easily completed within a day.

Overall 83%
A great conversion of a classic game. Without the passwords, the challenge level is pitched just right. Ignore these and this is definitely worth a look.