Description
You play a small green guy who needs to blow up eight towers, because their presence is somehow poisoning the water of planets which could potentially be ideal colonies. Unfortunately you need to get to the top of these towers to blow them up.
You make your way up to the top of the tower via walkways around the outside of the towers. You need to jump over, kick, and run from various enemies in your journey to the top. Most vertical movement is achieved by jumping onto moving ledges at the right moment.
The game was considered revolutionary in its time for its graphic technique. As the main character walked around the outside of the tower, the character was fixed in the middle of the screen while the tower itself rotated. This gave it a pseudo-3D effect.
Towers are linked together via a voyage through the sea in your trusty MK.7 submarine. This plays out as a side-scrolling collect-'em-up in which bonus points can be obtained.
Alternate Titles
- "Nebulus" -- European title
- "Kyorochan Land" -- Famicom title
- "Castelian" -- GB/NES title
Part of the Following Groups
User Reviews
There are no reviews for the Atari 7800 release of this game. You can use the links below to write your own review or read reviews for the other platforms of this game.
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Trivia
Canceled ports
John Romero actually did the Apple IIe port of
Tower Toppler but
Epyx canceled the port along with all their other game ports when they were strapped for cash because they were pouring all their money into Atari Lynx launch title development. The Apple IIe version was in 16-color double-res and used page-flipping. Romero showed it off at the 1989 AppleFest in Kansas City.
The game was also ported to the Atari XE Game System, but never released. Copies of the cartridge surfaced in the late 90s, and it turned out that the XE version ran in black and white on PAL systems, except on poor display systems, where the black and white patterns turned into colours due to cross-talk on low-bandwidth colour signals. On any NTSC system the game would run in full color, looking pretty close to the 7800 version. Since the prototype uses the
Tower Toppler name it probably was intended for US release, so the developers would be expecting the game to display in color and not black and white.
Graphics
For some reason, the title screen is in 16 colors only in the EGA version. The Tandy/PCjr version uses the 4 color CGA title screen, however all other screens (including the game itself) are in 16 colors.
Japanese version
In Japan, where the game was released as
Kyorochan Land, the green colored frog was replaced by Kyorochan, a parrot-like cartoon bird who serves as the mascot of Moringa & Co., a confectionery company.
Remake
A remake of this game has been written to work on modern hardware/OS. See the related sites section for a download link.
Information also contributed by
Lev Epshteyn, John Romero, and Игги Друге.
