Glacier Patrol

Glacier Patrol
1983/1989
Telegames


I just sort of stumbled across Glacier Patrol, having never heard of it before.  The box art certainly is not on par with the old school Atari artwork that were found on most boxes, and would most definitely be a competitor in a bad box art competition.  The back of the box does a bit of a better job trying to sell the game though.

Yep.  That's a block of alien ice parachuting out of that spaceship.  Majestic, ain't it?

You play as Mountie Mac.  You are defending the arctic circle from aliens from the planet Aquafreeze (?).  To help you in your mission you are packing a nuclear powered heat gun that you use to melt alien blocks of ice that are being dropped out of a spaceship.  The ice would obviously shatter if it just fell straight down so the aliens have attached parachutes to the blocks to slow it's descent.  I find that rather amusing that these aliens have mastered technology enough that they can travel billions of light years through space, seek out a suitable planet (sadly, ours) and hatch a plan to envelope the entire planet in ice, thereby blocking out the sun's heat and turning the Earth into a giant ice ball that they can vacation on.  However, when it came to developing a plan to actually ice the planet, the best they could come up with was parachuting blocks of ice onto the surface of the planet???  Nice thinkin', Chet!

So basically you're going to be running around the bottom portion of the screen blasting away at parachuting ice blocks with your nuclear powered heat gun (not to be confused with the Ghostbusters' nuclear powered Particle Proton Packs™).  You don't have any lives in this game....which is due to the fact that there's nothing that will kill you on screen.  You're biggest (okay, ONLY) immediate threat are rogue snowballs that roll along the ground at a rather quick pace.  No worry though, you can easily jump over these.  Okay.  Actually, it's not so easy to jump over them.  Why?  Because every fiber of your being is screaming at you to press up on the joystick to jump.  However in reality you have to press down.  DOWN!  WHY IN THE HELL WOULD YOU PRESS DOWN TO JUMP?!??!?!?  So be prepared to be aggravated.

That rogue snowball just knocked me on my ass just as I blasted an alien ice block out of the sky with my nuclear powered heat gun!

That is pretty much the entire game in an icy nutshell.  Blast away at the ice blocks that float down.  If the aliens manage to cover the planet in ice, you lose and die a horribly frigid death.  If you manage to keep the ice from landing and rack up 10,000 points, the sun comes up and melts all the ice that's landed effectively clearing the playfield.  However, because each alien ice block only nets you 50 points when destroyed and there are no other ways to earn points, you're going to be at if for quite a while before the sun comes up.....and then it's just more of the same.

I won't say that it's a bad game per se, but there is alot about it that could use some tweaking.  The controls as mentioned above are in dire need of remapping.  It would be nice if there was a bit more going on too.  Shooting alien ice blocks and jumping over rogue snowballs gets a bit stale rather quickly.  The idea is quite interesting however and I'd love to see what a modern developer could do with the concept.

Apparently the game itself was originally created by the studio Sunrise (who also created the excellent Quest for Quintana Roo) though they never released this game.  It was instead picked up by Telegames and released later on.  Which is why the year of the game is split.  It was originally created but Sunrise in 1983, but it wasn't until 1989 that Telegames released the game (also re-releasing The Quest for Quintana Roo).  Both games were available to purchase from Telegames up until 2004.  If you want to find a cartridge in the wild you can find the occasional copy on E-bay or Amazon.  A Complete In Box copy will go for up to $250 while a loose cartridge brings in around $50.

After you get whacked by a rogue snowball you just sit there for what seems life forever.  Oh good, here comes another one!

It's not the worst game I ever played and it has a somewhat mesmerizing quality to it after you've been playing for a while.....like any other action shooter, you sorta get sucked into "THE ZONE" and next thing you know an hour's gone by.   Okay, maybe more like 10 minutes, but you get the drift.  If you get a chance to play it, give it a go.  If nothing else you will have then earned the right to brag that you saved the earth from an alien ice invasion!