Fire & Ice
Graftgold of the U.K. released Fire & Ice for the Amiga in 1992. Fire & Ice is a platform game notable for its precise controls, super-smooth scrolling and absolutely stunning graphical effects that include cascading waterfalls, columns of bubbling water and copper-list sky gradients that transition between day and night.
In Fire & Ice players assume the role of Cool Coyote as he battles Suten's minions over seven worlds. The object of Fire & Ice is to collect the six key-parts that unlock ice doors while avoiding or killing Suten's minions.
Cool Coyote can walk left and right, jump low, jump high, duck, speed up his fall and fire ice pellets that ricochet about and freeze enemies. Cool Coyote can shatter frozen enemies by moving or jumping into them. In addition, Cool Coyote can enlist the services of Puppies, launch screen-wide snow bombs and employ special weapons by collecting metal discs, such as multi-shot.
Fire & Ice hazards include falling stalactites, spike pits, wreaths of flame, bubbling lava and physics-based rolling and tumbling snowballs. Fire & Ice also employs switch-activated temporary ice steps and bridges whose duration depends on world temperature.
Cool Coyote's appearance sometimes changes based on world. For example, in the snowy world he wears a ski mask whereas underwater he wears goggles and snorkel.
Published by Renegade, Fire & Ice was designed by Andrew Braybrook and Phil Williams, programmed by Andrew Braybrook, drawn by Phil Williams and John Lilley, and composed by Jason Page.
Fire & Ice Features
- 16-color 320x256 display (+ copper list gradients)
- 304x192 active drawspace
- Multi-directional variable-rate parallax screen-scrolling
- 7x Worlds
- 30x stages in total
- 6x Bosses
- Trainer for the first 4 worlds
- Floating point-indicators
- End-stage stat-tracking
- Animated intro & outro
- Toggleable in-game music
- Passkey copy protection
Fire & Ice Worlds
- Arctic
- Highlands
- Underwater
- Jungle
- Inca
- Egypt
- Psychedelic Party (end-game)
Criticism of Fire & Ice
- The Cool Coyote sprite is the same color as Sonic.
- The Cool Coyote sprite is too big in comparison to platforms and enemies.
- The controls are consistent and precise, but also too slow and floaty.
- The animated banner at bottom-screen is unneeded and reduces active drawspace size by 46 vertical pixels.
- Set-piece design is undesirable in platform games.
- World-locations are too broad in scope.
On a technical level Fire & Ice is brilliant, but on a design level not so much. In 1992 I would rather a 16-bit port of Gribbly's Day Out of 1985.
Amiga Fire & Ice was distributed on 2x 3.5" 880kB DD diskettes. It was not installable to hard disk drive.
Fire & Ice Atari ST 1992
Graftgold released Fire & Ice for the Atari ST in 1992. The Atari ST version of Fire & Ice displays in 16-color 320x200. ST Fire & Ice scrolls sluggishly in comparison to Amiga Fire & Ice. In addition, ST Fire & Ice sky gradients are much more limited, and its active drawspace is only 198x110.
Indexes:
- History of Computer Platform Games (Chronological platform game coverage)
- Amiga Games Reviews (Index to all Amiga game reviews)
- Computer Game Reviews (Index to all computer game reviews)
- The First REAL Amiga Game
- Best Amiga Games
- History of Computer Games 1976-2024 (Master Index)
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