Tower Toppler
by Interzon,
Free
Reviewed October 2003 by Martin Szarski
In Tower Toppler, the player has to help
a little green animal get to the top of a rotating tower.
This style of gameplay is a twist on the usual side-scroller
jump and run game because as you walk around the spiral stairs
around the tower, you only see a portion of the tower at
one time. The gameplay will be familiar to most people who
have had either an Atari or a DOS based computer since Tower
Toppler is a port of the Atari game “NEBULUS”,
which has been re-implemented a number of times on numerous
platforms.
The familiar gameplay doesn’t necessarily
mean easy to master. Only seeing one section of the tower
at a time adds challenges to the relatively mundane jump
'n' run genre. The main gameplay element of Tower Toppler
is the strategy and planning in the path taken. It is not
like most platform games, as fast hands wont help you here.
It is all about planning and timing. You have little chance
of outrunning a ball, however using tactics you could cause
the ball to fall off the tower all together, or just not
be there when you need to enter that particular door. This
is what makes the game fun: The anticipation of what might
be around the corner, and the strategy in avoiding it, and
the suspense of entering a door not knowing what is on the
other side. These simple gameplay elements combine to form
a fun game that will keep you coming back just to try and
get to that next door. Although the game doesn't actively
try to stop you getting to the top of the tower in its placement
of bouncing balls and enemies, one event that was definitely
triggered by the player was the release of lethal flying
objects at certain heights. Either outrunning or outplaying
these things adds another thing to think about.
The game uses the Zaurus D-Pad for its
controls, and this works well providing easy access to all
the game's functions. The player can move left, right, up,
and down using the direction buttons on the D-Pad, and can
fire using the Action button in the middle.
The graphics impressed me with their clarity,
but mostly with the frame rate. In the past I have been under
whelmed by the speed at which some Zaurus games run, but
this game while having simple graphics runs at full speed
and even has a nice water ripple effect at the bottom of
the screen. With 3d rendered objects, the graphics are of
a high quality, but personally I don't really like the look
of the green monster. That's just me though, and the graphics
are of an overall high quality.
While reviewing the game, I wasn't sure
if the game was supposed to have sound at all. The desktop
version has it I believe, but the Zaurus port page is pretty
light on information. I used 2 different versions of libSDL-mixer
and still couldn't coax any sound out of the Zaurus. The
game would definitely benefit from some sound. Even just
a colorful MIDI playing in the background would add to the
experience a lot. The game ran fine on my Zaurus SL-5500.
I know that libSDL runs fine on the SL-C7XX series so I'm
sure this game would work on those devices as well.
This game mixes simple gameplay elements
to create an overall challenging but fun game. The game
is easy to pickup but is challenging and will stay on my
Z indefinitely. Tower Toppler is a fun game to play when
you have a spare 5 or 10 minutes and if you like simple
but challenging games, this is one to try. Especially with
it being free, there is no excuse not to have this little
on your Z.
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