The game I played most this week: Towers Tricks

Half A Maze: Tower Tricks

Tower Tricks is based on an old Commodore 64 game called Nebulus. The original must’ve been pretty groundbreaking for its day, as it had a 3D quality to it that was pretty rare back then. The setup involves a cylindrical tower lined with dark tunnels. It’s basically a platform scroller wrapped around a pole. Surrounding the tower are elevators and platforms with obstacles, traps, and monsters. The player is an odd-looking, cartoonish man in a suit (complete with tophat and cane), and the goal of each level is to eventually find a glowing door behind which sits a ton of treasure.

The game setup is really a cleverly-designed maze, since you can only see part of the screen at a time. The whirling tower gives the game a nice feeling of fluidity and motion to it, something you don’t really get in platform scrollers, where the player’s character is usually very tiny and can sometimes get lost against the backdrop.

Tower Tricks is put together pretty well and provides a nice aside to the usual collection of platform scrollers that appear on just about every gaming platform. Although the controls are a little hard to get used to (your timing when jumping and dodging enemies had better be perfect, or you’ll fall to a lower platform or the ground below). I found the controls to be a bit less responsive than I’d like them to be, but that’s an issue that could be fixed with a software update.

Tower Tricks is a quirky, sleek, and likable title I can recommend to those who like arcade games with a bit of puzzle thrown in.

News - So it goes.

Shadow of Legend is being billed as the first MMORPG, or Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. Just to show you how out of touch I am, I’ve never played any kind of MMORPG on any platform. So I’ve missed out on Everquest and a whole slew of other games that I can’t even name at the moment. I’m not a big fan of playing tons of people at once; I prefer just playing against the machine. This is also why I’ve never been a fan of LAN parties and online gaming in general. 

Anyway, Shadow of Legend is a new game trying to bring the MMORPG concept to the Pocket PC, and I don’t think it will fly on the Pocket PC (it’s being released on multiple platforms). It appears to be based on Diablo, judging by the screenshots, and as a strict clone of that game it looks to have great potential. Looking at the game’s Web site, you get the sense that quite a bit of development effort has gone into constructing the game. After all, the Diablo game design and play style is ideally suited to the Pocket PC. (Anyone remember Ancient Evil, that RPG/Diablo game that was popular on the Palm a few years ago?  That was one of the few games I missed when I switched platforms.)  At this point, I don’t think Pocket PC gamers care all that much about a MMORPG. And while I admire the idea of a game being supported by a ton of platforms, the compromises necessary to make something like that work usually mean the end result is a bit limited.

Discuss...

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Allen Gall's The Week in Games  Copyright © 2007 by Thaddeus Computing Inc.