Top 10 Greatest Snow Levels in Video Game History By AdamThomas  [19 more lists]

It would be a crime if Mario wasn't on this list. It would probably only be a misdemeanor, but like the obligatory nature of the Ice Level in general, Mario's got to make an appearance on every videogame list ever.

If you're like me and getting a bit older, you'll surely remember dodging flurries in SMB 2, or melting blocks with fireballs in SMB 3. Or maybe you started with Mario 64, and had a devilish time sliding after penguins.
More recent players might have enjoyed the Penguin Suit antics and four player follies of New Super Mario Bros. on the Wii, but most of these stages amount to the variations of the same thing: dodging s**t while you slide around like a maniac!

Mario ice levels are pretty much the definitive examples for the rest of the gaming world. You've gotten used to how everything feels, to the momentum of the character you're controlling, to how they jump, their "weight", all those fine little details that allow you to make those precision leaps that prevent you from constantly pancaking at the bottom of some screen pit. But then it's about halfway through the game (often specifically world 4 for some reason) and in that brief moment between defeating that last boss or clearing that flag, mother nature crapped 12 new layers of cold onto the world like you fed her laxatives made of bitterness.

It's like just getting this far pissed off Walter Sobchek, and now you're entering a world of pain. Everything was nice and easy before, but now the ground has almost no traction and those little sensations that you've spent so long getting a feel for are useless. And does the rest of the level get any easier to compensate? Oh h**l no, this is a world of pain. In fact if anything, the difficulty in the platforming often gets a bit tougher, and that lack of traction leading to the "butter shoes" condition you've now come to hate, seems to be taken to account with every tiny platform you've got to land on. A world. Of Pain.

Perhaps I've played too many of these levels over the years, but none of the actual Ice levels in the Mario platformers really stand out. I suppose it's part of the problem that comes along with defining the concept, but everything is just one degree of generic too much to imprint itself on your brain. Look at Mario 64, a great example as there are two perfectly good Ice levels in the game, and neither is objectively "better" than the other. One has that sweet Penguin Slide, the other has a kick-ass Snow-Man Mountain! A lot of these stages just sort of end up canceling each other out! Besides, Mario games in general tend to save their meanest levels for lava zones, and so by comparison, the Ice world usually isn't too bad.

The level that stuck out in my mind though, was Sherbert Land in Mario Kart 64.

This track takes everything that's frustrating about an ice stage, then asks you to deal with it while moving at 60 miles and hour. Plus it's got a nasty lake to fall into and apparently the entire cast of Happy Feet to get in your damn way. Stupid frigging PENGUINS! Plus you're still dealing with the fact you'll be dodging sh**ls and bananas like you just gave an unpopular speech to a gaggle of peasants.

But best of all though, might just be the fact that this was the first time (for me at least) that this misery was SHARED. Somehow hearing someone else sitting next to me lose their s**t as they slid into an arctic oblivion, made my pain bearable. It probably means I'm a bad person, or it just means that I've started to truly learn what the holidays are all about: shared misery.

Also, is it just me, or does Nintendo have a crazy hard-on for Penguins in Ice levels? I mean, you race a Penguin in Mario 64, you dodge them in Mario Kart, you even start wearing a Penguin Suit in New Super Mario Bros. I know the buggers are cute and all, but there are more creatures from the land of ice that aren't Bjork right? I mean you've got . . . polar bears, walruses, uh . . . penguins? Yeah, OK Nintendo, you win.

Oh Mega Man. If there was ever a series that has universally caused more shattered egos and nagging doubts of failure on as large a scale, I don't know it.

Sure there are plenty of harder games out there. You can fire up Battletoads or Ninja Gaiden. You can download I Wanna Be The Guy for some true ridiculousness, but I don't any of these ever hit the massive popularity the Blue Bomber had gained in the late eighties and early nineties. These games were large scale anguish and ultimate exultation upon victory for the masses.

Mega Man stages are totally willing at a moments notice to just start raping your expectations whenever you get to a new screen. Oh, did you just figure out that nasty moving platform pattern whilst dodging enemies, that's good, now try these disappearing blocks! Got past that eh? Eat a nasty mid-boss! Not too hard? Now just run for your life while doging huge pillars of lava/energy/crushing weight! The levels just seemed perfectly designed to lower your spirits.

Plus they're usually great at using environmental factors to truly mess with your head. Some of the best water and fire levels to be found are here, and who can forget Air Man's stage? I know these guys didn't.

Since the environment can be such a hazard, the Mega Man Ice and Snow stages can often be the worst of the worst, and since there are so many games, there's a lot to choose from. Chill Penguin had one in Mega Man X, and there was that Blizzard Buffalo Stage in X3. Plus there's a new one in Mega Man 10 with Chill Man, but really I think we have to take a step back and look at the one to start it all: Ice Man's Stage.

Watching the attached video is hilarious, since these guys use every trick in the book to get around all the retarded traps here. The damn stage has got it all: tiny moving platforms, slippery surfaces, nasty enemies and even those damn fading blocks.

The saving grace here though is simply that Ice Man himself, who is probably the most comfortable Mega Man boss in existence (that coat looks awesomely warm), is a push over. If you have the Elec Man sub-weapon.

Hold on wait. He was weak to electricyt? But, there's a Fire boss in the game . . . that doesn't make any seeeeeeeeeennnnssseee!
*head explodes*

Sonic the Hedgehog has had a rough lot in life. Like many former child stars, he found plenty of early success at the beginning of his career, but fell in with the wrong crowds and turned to one craptacular game after another to feed his ever-growing habit: snorting Chili dogs off of Amy Rose's ass.

Unfortunately, I'm sure you can find that exact image somewhere on the internet if you really want to.

Sure, he seems to be trying the whole "bring it back to basics" thing with the release of Sonic 4, but I dunno. It seems like a washed up metal band trying to put on a reunion tour. He might deliver exactly what made him great once again, but it's hard to forget the far-too-many years of awful he's subjected us to.

But once, he was great. No more so than in Sonic 3, where every single thing that could be done to make a sonic game awesome was done. You had better power-ups that actually gave you vastly different game mechanics (although the electric shield was far and away the best), you had some awesome hidden areas and great level design, plenty of blast processing to keep the stages scrolling at a jet-engine speed and even a new equally cool rival to contend with in Knuckles the Echidna. H**l, the game would even get to be backwards compatible with the cross-over title between the two mammals in an unheard of (at the time, and still never repeated exactly) method of linking cartridges together.

When you actually made it to the Ice Cap Zone, you knew things were going to be crazy from the start, since the first thing the marketing team had decided upon was," Hey, we know we have a cool character. What would make him even cooler? Snowboards!"

Yup, you start off snowboarding down the slopes until you finally crash into an ice cavern and have to start busting through it as fast as possible.

It's a great couple of levels and some of the very best in meth-addled Hedgehog gameplay. But watch the video and listen to that music! Absolutely amazing! I wonder who srote such kicking tunes . . .

Oh wait. Really?

Michael Jackson?

Yup. In an effort to stay on the bleeding edge of "what kids think is better than owning your own amusement park", the King of Pop himself created almost all of the musical tracks worth a damn in Sonic 3. Of course, this fact was very quickly downplayed, since at the time, the first of the major allegations about the one-gloved one started to surface.

But it does start to make Sonic's career path make way more sense. I mean, along with Macaulay Culkin, Sonic was probably right there in wonderland, getting his fill of Jesus Juice between smashing Robotnik's minions. The two have never been exactly the same again.

Donkey Kong Country isn't really that hard a game. But for its time, it was rather beautiful, and it let everyone know that the Brits at Rare could make a game as equally fun as Battletoads without resorting to the cruel tactics of making a game as hard as Battletoads.

It re-invented the Ape that once stole Mario's girlfriend into . . .well Mario, pretty much. Although at least he wasn't trying to save some obnoxious love interest who was bound to get captured with every installment while the audience rolled their eyes. No, the way to an apes heart is through his stomach; so if you steal his botanical bonanza of bananas, then you've found a way to access his inner Legion of Doom.

Now DKC wasn't the hardest of games out there, but everyone knows exactly the point where it starts to test you: Gorilla Glacier, aka, World 4! The very first stage, Snow Barrel Blast, is probably the best example: you get the traditional slippery slopes on ever narrower platforms, blizzards that provide a nasty visual distraction, and some really nasty timing on a series of barrels you have to navigate through (the dude in the attached video skips the toughest parts with a shortcut - smart man).

It's everything you can love to hate about an Ice world, plus nasty cannon-shot riding! Though not every stage takes advantage of the cold weather (like one where you navigate a dark cave with a parrot providing some mood lighting), they are all pretty tough. In the end though you get to finally face off against the nastiest and most obviously arctic themed of foes: a giant beaver?

Um. OK. Sure I guess it makes sense, because you know, beavers live in the cold water? Right?

Well at least the music in these stages is pretty solid. It's a bit quieter, and sticks to the winter theme a bit more closely, but still quite amazing. Once again Video Games turn out to be the exact opposite of reality: once the snow starts falling, the music becomes awesome.

Because you'll know that if you've ever had a job at a mall, you have heard the same damn Christmas album 12,000th times. Or maybe it's just that your manager just loooves that one track by Tom Jones, one that doesn't even fit in with the theme of the album I might add, and so now you've heard ,"What's up Pussycat?" so many times you just want to travel to Las Vegas and rip Tom Jone's head -

Sorry, flashbacks.

Actraiser is a weird little game that far too few people remember where you played as well . . . God, if he occasionally liked inhabiting mannequins and used his time in them to slay eldritch terrors instead of trying to get laid.

It's an odd case of a very, in fact completely religious game, that's surprisingly non-offensive and non-denominational. You're not Roman or Greek Deity, you're not Norse, nor Egyptian, and only the vaguest bit Christian. And that might be because you spent most the game talking to a naked boy/cherub thing. This game is probably going to end up serving as the scripture for the First Amalgamated Church . Mark my words, you know it to be true.

To accomplish this strange conflagration, the game consisted of two basic types of play: you had a fairly simplified version of Sim City (though this too was an mash-up since there was the hint of a Flying Shooter too) as you directed early civilizations into prosperity while they worshiped you, and then you had those mannequin possessing 2D Action levels in the vein of Castlevania where you decided that screw it, sometimes the Lord just wants to kick a little ass!

And so you traveled from land to land, freeing the ignorant humans from the troubles of the day. Troubles of starvation, droughts, floods, GIANT FLOATING SKULLS! And they rewarded you with . . . well prayer, faith and obedience I guess. But maybe that s**t is like Taco Bell to a deity, delicious in a tawdry sort of way; but you always end up making room for more after a while.

Since you played as God on the mortal plane, you naturally had to have moments in the ethereal locations, but the final area seemed to combine the two: If there is a videogame h**l that was truly frozen over, it was Northwall.

By the end of the game you were in the icy tundra, and so the game started to really give you lots of s**t. Oddly enough, it wasn't really the action stages that used the cold to its full effect, it was the simulation portion: You had to kill hundreds of those skeletor-starships in the area before you could start to help the locals, and the permafrost needed divine intervention before it could start to melt off. This had to be done before you could begin to tackle the demon-frost caves themselves. The entire time this is going on, the place is in a constant blizzard and you really start to wish that you could give some pants to the tiny cherub that's acting as your divine messenger boy/fighter pilot.

You know, looking back, if any actual religion was as unabashedly awesome as Actraiser, I'd worship it. It gives us a no-nonsense, kick-ass-and-take-names deity who does pretty much everything himself and even communicates with mortals pretty often. There's no "test of faith" here. No "the Lord works in mysterious ways". This god is about as subtle as a pillaging viking wielding a Jackhammer and and air horn.

It might only be a vaguely Christian God, but it's definitely an American one.