Sneaky Snakes (Game Boy) Playthrough - NintendoComplete

A playthrough of Tradewest's 1991 platformer game for the Nintendo Game Boy, Sneaky Snakes.

Sneaky Snakes is Rare's Game Boy-exclusive follow-up to their popular NES game, Snake, Rattle 'n Roll, released about a year earlier.

I loved Snake, Rattle 'n Roll way back, and was really excited when I saw a feature for the new Game Boy title in Nintendo Power. It took a few years for me to finally get ahold of a copy, and it was fantastic. I loved every second of it.

Well, maybe not every second. There were those moments...

Let me back up a bit. Snake, Rattle 'n Roll gave you control of a snake's head and challenged you to escape from an area. The exits, however, were controlled by a scale: they would only open if you were heavy enough, and a snake head on it's own isn't terribly heavy. To beef-up your snake, you had to run around killing enemies with your stabby tongue and flip manhole covers so that they would release "segments" that, when eaten, would add themselves into your body. It was incredibly difficult, but the isometric graphics, bouncy music, and tight controls kept things fun.

Sneaky Snakes plays almost identically, but for one massive difference - the game is no longer "3D." It is now a side-viewed 2D platformer. This was probably a wise choice in developing for the Game Boy (though years later Rare showed just how well it could be done on the Game Boy with Monster Max), but the original's already stiff difficulty level went through the roof with the switch to 2D on such a low-resolution screen. The graphics look great still, with nice clear sprites and cleanly defined details, but there are a lot of blind leaps (often right into hazards) as a result of the limited viewing area.

It doesn't break the game, but it does turn it into a veritable gauntlet of death. Once I got used to it I made headway and eventually persevered in beating it, but you will earn that ending. Rare seemed to follow this trend with their early Game Boy games, too - Wizards and Warriors on the Game Boy also switched up a major game mechanic as it cracked the difficulty up to near inhuman levels. The Amazing Spider-Man also managed to be ruthless. Of course, when playing anything by Rare as kids, we quickly learned to not expect easy games.

The controls are quite improved in the shift, though you have to be careful about things like momentum - the physics here all very intuitive, but they do diverge from the normal platforming style. You have "weight," so you'll go slipping down steep inclines that you'll struggle to climb back up, and you go sliding quite far when moving at fast speeds. I appreciated this, though only after dying about five million times getting a feel for the nuances.

Finally, the soundtrack in Rare game's always bears mention - David Wise is damn good at what he does, and he doesn't let us down here.

I thought Sneaky Snakes was a great game, but the kiddie image it projects is really misleading. If you cut your teeth on 8-bit platformers, you'll enjoy this a lot. If you can't play a game that doesn't give you checkpoints every two seconds, you'll probably want to pass.

*Recorded using the DMG shader in Retroarch.
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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