Game that I'll never get to see again / thread topic. It was a PC game I used to play at a friend's... it's so foggy in my head. There were snow levels.. a cave? Keys? *sigh* I remember I used to play it around the time Wolfenstein 3-D was big.
Shot in the dark (first thing what came to my mind when I read "snow levels"):
James Pond 2: Codename RoboCod? Need more info though, was it a 2D side-scroller, isometric view or something else? Was it an action game, platformer or maybe an adventure game?
Your screenshot of Diamonds reminded me of a game though I played as a kid which I can't remember its name.
It was a
Breakout clone with some unique gameplay features I haven't seen in any other Breakout clone since. I played it on MS-DOS around 1992-1994 (game might be older though, but it had mouse support). The paddle had a somewhat unusual form, very thick and with pink rounded edges on the left and right side. Here is a crude Paint sketch:
If the ball touched those outer pink edges, the ball would be lost. Just like if you missed the ball, I think the "out" at the bottom (below the paddle) had the same color (pink) as the edges of the paddle.
There wasn't only a paddle at the bottom, but a paddle at each side of the screen (top, bottom, left and right). All four paddles would move at the same time when you used the mouse (only x-axis movement of the mouse was necessary, the bottom/top paddles moved left/right while the left/right paddles would move top/down with the same mouse movement). But at the beginning of a game the top, left and right paddle would be covered by a several pixel wide layer, which bounced back the ball so you didn't have to use those 3 paddles. But as the game went on, that layer got thinner and thinner and eventually disappeared so there would be an "out area" around the whole screen and you had to use all four paddles to keep the ball in the game. The layer around the screen would disappear pixel by pixel and pixel row by pixel row. Like a giant time meter going around the screen several times.
All bricks on the screen had the same shape and size and where rectangular. Each brick had a solid color (no gradients or pattern etc.). I remember that the solid bricks you couldn't destroy were gray.
All power-ups which would drop occasionally from bricks were also rectangular and each had the same shape/size. Each power-up had an unique color and was identified by a letter on the power-up (no symbols or random power-ups). I remember very well that the power-up for a sticky paddle had the letter "K" because as a kid I called it "Kleber" (German for glue). I can't remember the letters for the other power-ups though. Power-ups I remember are extra ball (possibly labeled with an "E"?), larger paddle, smaller paddle and shooting bricks with left click (not sure about that one).
The ball was very small and only a few pixels large (I guess 2x2 or 2x1). It was not round and it got skewed a lot when it moved slowly across the entire screen from left to right.
Levels I remember are a smiley face (with an indestructible outline, only the hair, eyes and mouth were destructible, very hard level) and a level which looked like one of the Scandinavian flags I think. I also think there was a level which looked like a hospital (white building with a Red Cross on it), I'm not sure about that one though.
Because of the Scandinavian flag level and the letter "K" for the sticky paddle power-up I guess the game was from Sweden, Norway or Denmark because "sticky" begins with an "K" in each language (klibbig, klebrig, klæbrig). The main menu was in English though (maybe even German, but definitely not Swedish, Norwegian or Danish).
That's all I remember, would love to play that game again but I can't find it anymore (googling "breakout clone" doesn't yield any useful results).
