Deadly Towers

It’s fair to say that 1986 was a great year for the NES. The console was just starting to break sales records thanks in part to a little game called the Legend of Zelda, which was the breakout action/adventure game of the 8-bit generation. It was safe to say that Nintendo had the public hooked and the people couldn’t get enough of the virtual crack they were pushing. However, as with anything in life, with the good comes the bad. Around the same time, Brøderbund software unleashed the proverbial yang to Zelda’s Yin in a little action/adventure game called Deadly Towers. While the game attempts to be in the same vein as its epic brethren, Deadly Towers turned out to be nothing more than a low rent Zelda clone that made any attempt to play it an exhausting, as well as frustrating exercise in futilility.
 

Deadly Towers attempts to draw you in with a convoluted story, which after seeing the game in action you’ll just want to outright ignore or just not care about, but I somehow feel compelled to let you in on it. You play Prince Meyer who, after seeing some face in a lake, sets out to defeat a wizard who threatens the world. The prince sets out to ring some bells at the top of seven towers in order to burn them down and gain entry into the wizard’s lair. That’s it, and that’s all you’ll get out of me too. The first thing you’ll notice when you fire this puppy up are the laughable visuals. Let’s make an example of the old cliché “don’t judge a book by its cover” shall we?

As you can see on the left, the box art portrays a badass warrior armed with an assortment of weapons. Pretty cool, wouldn’t you say? Now take a look at the character you’re actually playing below. Introducing Prince Meyer: ruler of freakin’ Lego Land. While it may not be marketable to portray this lame Precious Moments character adorned in moon boots on the front cover of a game, it’s just the first in a long line of disappointments that await you. 

Your snow-booted prince is left to scale the seven towers armed with the weakest sword in history, which he seems to just piss out through his non-effective armor. While wandering aimlessly throughout the game’s dungeons and towers, which color pallettes range from blue and green to darker hues of blue and green, you’ll find yourself frequently getting lost. The mazes don’t make any kind of sense whatsoever and are a shining example of level design at its worst. There are essentially three sections to Deadly Towers. One section is a cave where you’ll find entrances to all of the towers, a dungeon that’s easy as hell to find but IMPOSSIBLE to get out of, and an area that acts as a hub between the two. At the start of the game you start in the hub where you can choose to scale the towers with your plastic sword/helmet combo, all the while trying to stave away the hopelessness of actually making progress or you can venture into the dungeon where you’ll encounter almost every non-boss enemy in the game and last a little longer, but don’t think you’ll get back to the hub area easily. The real kicker is that while you collect coins to buy things, all of the shops to upgrade your equipment are located in the inescapable dungeon. Essentially, your helmeted troll doll is doomed from the get-go. It’s a damn good thing we live in an era of save states, because the hell is multiplied ten times if you play the cartridge version of this garbage. Cartridge? Garbage? That was almost a dope rhyme. Battery back up didn’t exist in the original game cart, so saving your game wasn’t possible. Instead, you’d receive a password to enter that will spawn you back into a couple miles of where you left off. Good going people.
 

If the level design is laughable, the art direction is pure, unadulterated hilarity. You’ll face such evil denizens such as bouncing balls of assorted colors, water puddles, things that look like slinkies made of multi-colored Cheetos, cavemen, and even diaper-clad demons that all wait in anticipation for your prince to piss swords in their direction. While water sports are all well and good, if you’re into that sort of thing, the busted battle system helps this game cross the line from mediocrity to homicide-inducing madness. First off, your character can barely attack. Sure, you can throw your plastic swords all you’d like; you’ll just have to wait the ten minutes it takes them to go off screen before you can throw another. In the meantime, you’re being bounced around by enemies and are pretty much dead by the time you’re ready to shoot again. About three-fourths of the enemies can move and attack faster than you can, and coupled with their erratic and seemingly random attack patterns, your knick-knack prince doesn’t have a chance in hell. It’s pretty bad when bats pose more of a threat than any of the demons, puddles, and cave men roaming mindlessly in their small square rooms. It might have helped if the prince could actually attack things at a decent pace. Second, everything takes more than five hits to kill, from the lowliest puddle to the mightiest spider, prepare to wear your thumbs out. Remember that part in Glory where the soldiers had to fight that battle uphill? This game is like that…all the time. Expect to die fast and die often if you have patience enough to play this more than ten minutes. If you do, you’re most likely a performance artist who smears himself or herself in feces right before disemboweling themselves in front of a crowd.

If there’s anything more ridiculous then your lethargic character taking on a bunch of enemies that move faster than he does, it’s how much of a puss he is. When you’re hit, you’ll get bounced back off of cliffs and even into other rooms where yofu’ll most likely get bounced around some more. Each room attempts to spawn you in the cheapest spot possible. Entering a room, getting hit before you have a chance to react, flying back into the previous room, and trying the whole process over with the same result is a normal occurrence. It has nothing to do with skill or talent; this game will take the cheapest jabs possible to ensure you’re pulling your hair out within ten minutes.

There are a bunch of items to pick up that should help you live longer, but the honest truth is that you won’t want to play the game long enough to get these items, nor do the few items you can purchase towards the beginning of the game seem to have any effect. Sure, you can also pick up items that’ll increase your max health, but see if they’re any help to you. Despite enemies dropping health on random occasions, you’ll never get back to full health, and that’s a guarantee. What’s worse is that the game has no depth perception at all, so if an enemy is up against a wall, items will appear in the wall and permanently out of your reach. Woohoo.

I can’t say enough about the game’s visuals other than they’re complete shit. They’re horrible even for a game released in the infancy of the NES. The game consists of about two colors, every room looks the same, every tower is a direct copy of the last one, and enemies are palette swapped into lamer looking enemies just waiting to be skull fucked by your toy sword cock. Diaper demons will later become black demons with even whiter diapers, and the spiders that take upwards of fourteen hits to kill will morph into flying rats. You heard me right…flying rats. If there’s anything lamer than fighting puddles of water and slinkies, it’s the bosses that rule over them. You’ll fight everything from a giant owl, to a centipede, to a winged gorilla. For the epic adventure this game strides to be, the bosses aren’t the least bit intimidating, as a matter of fact, they’re all smiling. Peter Jackson should have taken a queue from this game and replaced those trolls in Lord of the Rings with big smiling Muppets.

The sound isn’t too hot either. Everything, including your oh-so-manly character lets out an adorable squeak when they’re hit. The soundtrack consists of a handful of songs, the worst being the overly annoying boss music that repeats itself over and over again in ten-second loops. Things that you expect to hear sounds from, such as fireballs and other miscellaneous projectiles are thankfully silent. Given the rest of the sound design, it’s good to know there was at least a nugget of mercy given out by the developers.

Deadly Towers could have easily been written off as a really bland and ho-hum experience. Not wanting to be outdone by everyone else, it’s as if the developers went the extra mile to ensure that this game was as miserable for the player as they were making it. If the laughable visuals don’t deter you, the broken gameplay will make damn sure to get the job done. Deadly Towers is the most tangible form of misery that you could ever get your hands on. If you find yourself on the brink of suicide but don’t seem to have the guts to follow through, a couple hours with this game will definitely make sure you go through with it.

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