#46: Snake Rattle n Roll (Rare/Nintendo, NES, 1989/1991)

The frictionless surfaces that comprise the world of Snake Rattle N Roll make for entertaining chaos in the early going, when the stakes are low, but as the challenge ramps up, and the platforming becomes more intricate, the entertainment gives way to frustration as your lack of control makes tricky jumps even trickier, and frequently sends you plummeting to your doom. But that alone isn’t enough to ruin the experience; loose controls can be compensated for, they aren’t an insurmountable obstacle.

No, what really kills the fun of the game is the isometric viewpoint, which can sometimes make it impossible to determine the exact height of a particular platform, and so the challenge, more often than not, turns from pulling off a particularly tricky jump to figuring out which jumps are actually possible through trial and error. Which, in a game with limited lives, is something of a problem, to put it mildly. We could, perhaps, try to read a symbolic message into this; when your assumption about the way the world works don’t match up to the reality, you might just end up diving head first off a cliff. But frankly, I just can’t muster the energy. I’m done.

I’ve had it with these isometric snakes on this isometric plane.