Game 425: Tower of Doom (1987)

        

Tower of Doom

United States

Mattel Electronics (developer); INTV Corporation (publisher)

Released in 1987 for Intellivision

Date Started: 12 July 2021
Date Ended: 12 July 2021
Total Hours: 4
Difficulty: User-defined
Final Rating: 21
Ranking at Time of Posting: 151/428 (35%)

     

As longtime readers know, I am color blind. Among the many disabilities one can have, I suppose I was blessed. But it can be annoying. First of all, no one understands it. When I tell people I'm color blind, they always want to test me by asking what color something is. "What color is my shirt?" Color blindness doesn't mean that everything looks monochrome or black and white (except for a very small percentage of people who have monochromacy), but sometimes I wish it did. That way, I could just say, "I don't know--the same color as everything else." It would be easier to explain.

    

Asking a color blind person the color of your shirt makes about as much sense as asking a blind person how many fingers you're holding up--not because he can't tell (not every "blind" person is 100% sightless), but because the answer doesn't prove anything. If I guess "blue" and get it right, it's just because that's a color I can see, or you just happened to wear an uncomplicated shirt. If a blind person gets it right with "three," that doesn't mean his vision isn't a major disability in everyday life. You've just identified one situation in which it doesn't apply. 

     

A typical shot from Tower of Doom. The upper-left shows the level map as I've revealed it so far. The lower-left has my inventory (spear, axe, food, two potions, bow, key). The lower-right has shields representing my max health. A serpent is coming for me in a room with a trap to my right and a magic ring slightly above me.

     

I'm a Strong Deutan, which means I primarily can't distinguish reds and greens, but it means more than that. It means that color in general has diminished importance for me. Even when I can distinguish two colors I don't necessarily internalize the distinction. Colors don't make an impression; they aren't part of how I visualize something in my imagination. Put something teal and something turquoise in front of me, and sure I'll be able to distinguish them. I might even be able to assign the right names. But make me close my eyes, take one away, and present the other one in isolation, and I probably won't be able to tell you which one it was. Color is not a part of my regular language or thought process. I cannot off the top of my head tell you what colors my state uses on its license plates, or the official colors of the university I teach for, or the hair or eye color of the people who work in the same hall as me. I don't perceive two "clashing" colors as not going together, or two complementary colors as synchronizing particularly well. I have to write symbols on the tags of my clothes to remember which of them "go."

    

I think in shades. Things are dark, medium, or light to me. I will sometimes use colors, but only in the bluntest way, like the way a southerner uses "Coke." If he says it, you can be sure he wants soda, but not necessarily what type. I will use "blue" for things that you call not only navy blue, azure, sapphire, and indigo, but also things you call purple, mauve, and violet. To me, pink, light gray, and cyan are all in the same color "family" because they're all light shades.

      

A poor choice of a potion has made me temporarily blind. Among my items in the lower-left (which don't include the question mark or the arrow), I can distinguish three colors. I just can't name them, and when they're not on the screen, I won't remember them.

       

My color blindness affects how I perceive and judge the world. Camouflage works extremely well on me. If you showed up at my house having just murdered someone, your shirt covered in blood, I might think you spilled a milk shake on yourself. The idea of separating laundry is absurd, because I can't distinguish or care about the difference. I throw away bread and cheese the moment it hits its expiration because I can't trust my senses to call attention to mold. If you color-code the rows in your Excel spreadsheets, even using colors that I can distinguish, instead of just putting a column with a data value in it, I think you're a child. How could you possibly prefer color to a hard-coded value? And when it comes to the visual arts, including film, paintings, and games, I'm immune to a lot of things that you would consider vast improvements. I could not functionally tell the difference between the original and special editions of Skyrim. Or maybe I could, but without really putting my mind to it, I wouldn't be able to articulate what those differences are. More important, I wouldn't care. Readers have told me numerous times about those Enchroma classes that are supposed to fix or ameliorate some kinds of color blindness. I'm sure I'll try them some day, and they'll probably improve my perception of the fall foliage, but they won't re-write nearly 50 years of language, perception, and habit. I appreciate that a lot of modern games have color correction for various forms of color-blindness, but even they don't get at the root issue. If some element of an interface requires an assessment of color, even if I can functionally tell the difference, my brain will refuse to register it as "important" unless I force myself to focus on it. A letter "P" is a much better indicator that I'm poisoned than a red dot.

       

Sorry--long screed. I was motivated to write all of this by Tower of Doom, the last RPG (only one of two, by my definitions) for the Intellivision. It's a good game, almost a roguelike for a second-generation console, but for me its fatal flaw is that everything is color-coded. You have to learn for each game which potions are safe to drink and which magic items are safe to use. You will perceive the colors (web sites tell me) as gray, cyan, orange, brown, pink, lavender, green, and magenta. If you give me those eight colors and ask me to assign those words to them, I'd probably get at least five right. But show me any one of those colors, and make me choose the right name, and I'll probably have at least five possibilities. This makes it extremely hard to keep notes on what does what.

      

In melee combat with a skeleton.

     

Tower of Doom began as Mattel's third Dungeons & Dragons game, but Video Game Crash of 1983 caused the company to sell its entire electronics division to a former vice president, who started INTV Corporation. The Dungeons & Dragons license agreement did not survive the dissolution. Development continued at INTV without the D&D stamp, but ironically the authors managed to produce a game much closer to Dungeons & Dragons (while, admittedly, still not being very close) than the two previous efforts. TSR would later allow Capcom to produce an arcade game called Dungeons & Dragons: Tower of Doom (1993).

    

The game might have started as a D&D licensed product, but someone had clearly played Rogue or Hack. Tower of Doom is a quasi-roguelike. Some players might even dispute the "quasi." I include it because Tower has far simpler inventory, combat, and command systems than full roguelikes. It's also not turn-based, and it has an action component to combat. But there's clearly a roguelike ancestry. It features (usually) randomly-generated dungeon levels that are slowly revealed as you explore, color-coded gear, hunger and food, and permadeath. There isn't even any saving, which is somewhat absurd for the size of some of the dungeons.

   

As you start a new game, you get to choose from 14 length and difficulty settings. The easiest scenario is "Novice," which has only six fixed levels and does not randomize the assignment of colors to items. The only objective is to exit the sixth floor with as much treasure and experience as you can amass. The hardest are "Wizard Hunt" and "Grail Quest," which are always 32 random levels with a fixed objective--to kill a wizard and find the Holy Grail respectively. In between are "Tower," "Catacombs," "Fortress," and "The Challenge," which are between 6 and 32 levels.

      

Selecting the difficulty level at the beginning of the game. I know it's a minor thing, but finding the Grail isn't what the "Grail Quest" was about!

      

In addition to the dungeon difficulty, you also have a difficulty based on your character "class," which like NetHack is really just a starting set of attributes (strength, stamina, diplomacy, max hit points) and equipment. Classes are novice, warrior, archer, knight, trader, barbarian, waif, friar, warlord, and warlock. The hardest class is the waif, who starts with the lowest attributes (6 each) and the lowest max hit point "shields" (1.5) and is the only class to start without a weapon. The warlord starts with the highest max HP (5.5 shields) but only 9s in his attributes. Warriors and traders start with the highest strength (13) but only moderate max HP.

     

Gameplay looks the same for everyone. You're dropped in Level 1 of the dungeon of your choice, and you begin running around fighting monsters and collecting treasure. The control scheme is unintuitive but relatively easy to master. The little panel in the lower right has three rows. The second and third rows are your inventory (8 items max); the top one is action icons that include checking your stats, switching your active weapon, opening a door, and going downstairs (the latter two only appear when at doors and stairs). Whether using an item or activating an action, you hit one button to get into the panel, another to activate an icon, and a third to drop an item.

     

There are a bunch of things to find in the dungeon:

   

• Weapons. There are 11 types of weapons in the game including both melee (dagger, hammer, small sword, mace), missile (bow, wand, dart), and those that serve as both (spear, axe). Missile weapons have limited uses, as indicated by color. Colors are supposed to tell you the power level of melee weapons, too.

• Treasures, including bracelets, piles of coins, gems, and necklaces. These simply add to your treasure score, though you can also use them to bribe monsters (more below).

• Magic items, including books, cloaks, potions, rings, and scrolls. These have a variety of effects as determined by color. Most are positive, including boosting attributes, improving defense, increasing speed, making you immune to traps, healing, and temporarily increasing maximum health. But a lot are negative, including sapping levels, freezing, slowing you down, and making enemies invisible to you. This is naturally where I had the most trouble.

         

When you use an item, you get a little message indicating what it did.

     

• Traps, which can cause confusion, paralysis, hit point loss, hunger, and teleportation. They're always visible, but they often block the corridor and there's no way to disarm them.

• Keys, which are color-coded to traps and let you walk through them without penalty.

• Food, of which you need about 1 meal per level (if you explore exhaustively) to avoid losing health.

   

There are 13 monsters. In order of difficulty, they are giant rats, serpents, stirges, skeletons, stag beetles, axebeaks, giant scorpions, owlbears, wraiths, hydras, beholders, dragons, and wizards. As you can see, these all come from the Dungeons & Dragons bestiary, although they don't really have special powers; the higher-level ones just hit harder. They do have different speeds and vastly different experience point rewards, from 10 (rat) to 10,240 (wizard). The monsters are introduced at a rate of one per two levels unless you play "The Challenge," in which case they come at one new monster per level. So a player in a six-level dungeon never faces anything harder than a skeleton. One of the things that I like about the game is that the dungeon level adjusts the maximum level of monsters, not the minimum or average. You can still meet giant rats on Level 32, and in fact if you do, it's often more useful to avoid them (they're slow) rather than fight them, since no other enemy will appear on the same screen as long as they're around.

        

I don't remember any other CRPG to feature an axebeak. This would be a perfect corridor to use a missile weapon if I had one.

        

There are two modes to combat. You can shoot missile weapons down corridors, hoping to kill enemies before they reach you. This is tough in twisty corridors or with fast enemies. If the enemy reaches you, you're taken to a special combat screen where you exchange melee blows.  

      

Firing a spear at a skeleton, who is blocking the stairway down. I have a bunch of spears.

      

One oddity of the game is that enemies don't always rush to attack on the melee screen. If they hesitate, it means they're open to a bribe. You bribe enemies by dropping items from your backpack. You can stack multiple items for bigger bribes. You lose anything you drop whether the enemy accepts or not. If he accepts, he goes away and your diplomacy attribute increases, which makes it more likely that you can bribe future enemies. It's a cute idea, but I didn't find it very useful in practice. Enemies that go away can be immediately replaced by other enemies, for one thing.

       

This character has no weapon, so the best I can do is bribe the serpent with a pair of boots. Or flee.

    

Hit points regenerate on their own, but quite slowly, and in general it's not a viable strategy to wait around for them to improve on their own. You get a little help that way, but enemies can attack and undo your progress. You really need a potion.

   

Although you earn experience, levels, and max HP from fighting, and a variety of benefits from finding items, hunger is always nipping your heels, and I generally found it was best to go down as soon as I found the stairs. Once down, you cannot go back up. Surviving is otherwise a matter of knowing when to fight, when to fight only with missile weapons, and when to flee. Dragons are best fought with missile weapons, as they're powerful but slow. Wizards, beholders, and hydra are best avoided entirely.

      

Right before I turned around and went back the way I came in.

    

There are lots of tricks you'd learn only from experience. I read most of them on the StrategyWiki article for the game. For instance, traps only work against you if no sound is currently playing, so you can avoid them by forcing the game to play a sound. One easy way is to "use" a treasure, which converts it to points and plays a chime for a couple of seconds, long enough to run through the trap. Stairs are never behind doors. You should try potions on full stomachs because food eliminates some of their effects. Mortars and pestles are more likely to be cursed than other magic items.

      

I started off on the "Catacombs" dungeon with 12 levels and a warlord character. I was just learning the ropes with this one. I made it to Level 4 before a skeleton killed me because I had accidentally used up my spear and didn't have a backup weapon. During this process, I took save states to facilitate screen shots but only reloaded if I died because I was fiddling with a screenshot. Later, I figured out how to pause the game (although it darkens the screen) when I wanted to take a shot.

      

My "novice" character heads for the nearest bar.

And his pathetic, but legitimate, score.

      

I moved on to a "novice" adventure with a "novice" character. It was no trouble at all. The enemies were easy. It took me less than five minutes per level, and I was out of the dungeon in less than half an hour. I took save states every level or so, but I didn't need to reload once.

   

I then decided to try the hardest possibility: the Grail Quest (32 levels) with the waif. I didn't get more than a couple of corridors into it. The waif starts with no weapon, so you can't fight any monsters. But the only way out of the starting area was through a paralysis trap, and monsters kept attacking me while I was stuck in the trap. I'm sure with a different random configuration, the waif is survivable, but a lot depends on how quickly you can find a weapon.

       

My waif is stuck in a paralysis trap while an enemy lurks nearby.

      

For my third try, I did Grail Quest again, this time with a knight. I made it to Level 15 legitimately before I died at the claws of an owlbear after I drank a potion that froze me in place. I thought it was the same color as one I'd previously drunk that healed me, but . . . [gestures to the first four paragraphs]. I wanted to experience the end of the adventure, so I reloaded a save state. I had to do this probably six more times before I found the Grail on Level 32. (Wizards were responsible for half of those deaths, including once where I tried to kill one with a wand but missed and the wand bounced back at me; wands are almost too dangerous to use.) Using the Grail automatically ends the game.

   

A grail win, but with some cheating.

     

Traps were a constant problem for me, and again my color blindness played a major role. If you have a key that's the same color as the trap, you're supposed to be able to hold it in your hand and walk right through. Being a strong deutan doesn't prevent me from looking at the color of a key and matching it to the color of a trap and getting it right most of the time. The issue is more that my mind refuses to attach any importance to color, so I kept forgetting to make the comparison. I never found a key to avoid the most annoying trap, the "confusion" one, which causes you to blunder in random directions for a few seconds. As often as not, you wander back into the trap and get caught in a perpetual loop.

   

If you meet the objective of the scenario, the game shows your character exiting the front door of the Tower of Doom and running away. You then get a final screen showing your scores. Maximum experience and wealth are 650,000, so I had a long way to go.

   

Tower of Doom is a pretty solid second-generation console game, one of only a couple that I would call an RPG unequivocally. It won't rate terribly high on my GIMLET, but my GIMLET is meant primarily for computer RPGs, and as I've often pointed out, I look for different experiences with console RPGs. This is the sort of game that you want to play when you come home from work, dog tired, and collapse on the couch.

     

On the GIMLET, it earns:

   

• 0 points for the game world. I wouldn't have minded if the manual had at least tried with some kind of framing story. I suppose the lack of one is another way in which it's similar to roguelikes.

• 3 points for character creation and development. Your choices make a big difference in the first few levels. In addition to traditional experience and leveling (and increases in max hit points), the game has several attributes with multiple ways to increase.

• 0 points for no NPCs.

• 2 points for encounters and foes. There aren't any non-combat encounters, but I'll give a point for traps, which pose a unique challenge. Monsters are D&D standards without the D&D special abilities.

        

Dragons are tough, but they can't breathe fire.

       

• 2 points for magic and combat. There's no magic except what you get from items, and combat is pretty basic, one of the reasons I hesitate to call it a full roguelike. The bribe system is almost worth another point, but I can't imagine that anyone seriously uses it.

• 3 points for equipment. You have to figure out what to prize and what to avoid by color, which adds a fun challenge for players that don't have my particular problem. There's a lot of stuff to find and use.

        

A potion significantly increases my max health (temporarily) just in time to get attacked by a bat.

      

• 1 point for an economy that mostly just contributes to your final score, though see my comment about the bribery system above.

• 2 points for a main quest for each scenario.

• 3 points for graphics, sound, and interface. The graphics are clear and functional if a bit ugly, and there's a nice set of sound effects. I have to criticize it a bit on the input system. It strikes me that it would have been a trivial matter to reconfigure the inventory/command pane a bit to make better use of the number keys on the Intellivision controller, which aren't used at all. That said, I didn't find the existing controls hard to master.

• 5 points for gameplay. It's hard to complain about too many things here when the game has so many choices for length and difficulty. There's a lot of replayability with different scenarios and classes. I don't know how contemporary players handled 32 levels without the ability to save or pause, but that wasn't a problem I experienced.

     

That gives us a final score of 21, which puts it at the top of the list of the four RPGs and "RPGs" released for second-generation consoles. The problem, of course, is its release date. By 1987, the NES had already been available outside of Japan for two years. (So had the SEGA Master System, but it didn't have any RPGs yet.) Tower of Doom would have been a great 1984 game, its intended year of release before the crash. In 1987, I can't find evidence that anyone took any note of it. I'm not even sure that there was any magazine left to cover it. 

       

"For color TV viewing only." That was a nice warning to include.

     

I want to thank my Patreon contributor (P. S.) for suggesting the game, and commenter Kearuda for insisting on helping me get the game running in MAME despite my open and repeated contempt for his favorite emulator. I'll never play all the other console RPG offerings, but at least I can say I was comprehensive on the second generation.