Ice Climbers: ALL Victory Poses ft.

EVERY Victory Pose of the Ice Climbers in the Super Smash Bros. series! This video is in collaboration with ‪@AlexEXE‬:    • Victory Pose Comparison - Melee Veterans (...  .
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Welcome to my series of analyzing the origins of the Ice Climbers from their eponymous franchise that was translated to the Super Smash Bros. series, featuring special moves, stages, aesthetics, animations, and more, beginning from Smash Bros. Melee, after a total of 16 years of the release of their original titular and legendary game (17 years if counting their arcade expansion, VS. Ice Climber).

The duo were selected over Balloon Fighter and Pit, among others, to be the representatives of the Famicom/NES period of Nintendo's history. According to Masahiro Sakurai, the creator of the Super Smash Bros. series, he and the development team wished to include a character that originated on the Nintendo Entertainment System. However, Sakurai also stressed the importance of character selection additionally involving "things only that character can do." Ultimately, the Ice Climbers were selected; Sakurai explained that the other candidates failed in certain aspects in regard to feasibly becoming playable characters, whereas the Ice Climbers were selected because he and the development team were interested in using Ice Climber's simultaneous 2-player gameplay as the basis for the mountaineer duo's tag-team playstyle.

Franchise description:
"In Ice Climber, the player controls one of two children in eskimo parkas and wielding huge mallets (the game can be played solo with the blue mountaineer, Popo, seen only on-screen as the default first player, or cooperatively, where the other pink mountaineer, Nana, is controlled by the second player simultaneously), and the challenge is to scale vertical stages, titled mountains, to recover the Ice Climbers' stolen vegetables from a giant condor that flies around at the top of each mountain. Each stage consists of eight lower floors featuring barriers and blocks of breakable ice arranged to make jumping up and climbing each stage tricky. During this, the Ice Climbers must contend with a few varieties of antagonists native to this mountain: the relatively harmless Topi, which pushes ice into gaps to impede the player's progress; the more harmful bird, the Nitpicker, which flies around and can damage the player; and the pink-shorts-wearing, sunglass-sporting, upright-walking Polar bear, which pounds the ice to force the screen to move upward, and if an Ice Climber is too far down at the bottom, a life will potentially be lost. After eight floors, the Ice Climbers reach the second half of the stage, the "bonus" stage, where without enemies to be aware of, and the players must navigate a tricky platforming obstacle-course, collecting vegetables for bonus points, and when the duo reach the mountain's peak, the condor flies above the skies. To complete the stage, jump up with pinpoint precision to grab the condor's talons and end the stage with a huge bonus award.

Ice Climber has been a gem and relic from gaming history that would continue to stand itself out from the other Famicom/NES games and live up in the current timeline, like other games, such as Kid Icarus and Balloon Fight. Reflecting this, the Ice Climber series have garnered solid reviews from critics.

When HAL Laboratory was designing Super Smash Bros. Melee, they decided that one of these games would be introduced in the game as a playable franchise. The game selected was Ice Climber, and the result was the titular pair of Ice Climbers, Popo and Nana, as a single playable fighter referencing the simultaneous 2-player gameplay of Ice Climber, the stage, "Infinite Glacier/Icicle Mountain," as a playable stage, referencing the mountains in Ice Climber, and Topis and Polar bears as common enemies. In addition, graphics and layout from the original series were reused in the Ice Climbers' Target Test stage to serve as a heavy nostalgia trip. Melee introduced the modern generation of gamers to Ice Climber and renewed the latter game's appreciation by the community."

Ice Climber - Nintendo © 1984.
Super Smash Bros. - Nintendo © 1999-2018.
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