Dark Tower is an action platformer made for Arcade machines and released by The Game Room in 1992. It was developed by Kyle Hodgetts and exclusively released in Australia.
Overview[]
You control a man armed with a club to beat some monsters and rescue a lady at the top of a Tower. You can jump and attack them with your club and after knocking them enough, and they can hit other enemies in the same line you knocked in. If you get in contact with an enemy, it will punch you into the opposite direction, making you lose a life. The game has 5 types of enemies, the first one can only move around the stage, the second one can roll into you, the third one can breath fire that kills you, and the fourth one can fly like a bat. You can strike all of your enemies in a single blow, you gain bonus points and bonus items. If you take too long in a level, the game will ask you to Hurry Up multiple times before killing the player. After every 9 rounds, the 10th one will be a boss fight against a bigger monster that jumps on each platform, breaking it and falling directly down if there's no more on that row. It does this while spewing tiny enemies at you. To kill it, you need to hit it several times until it dies. Every boss round after features two of the monsters instead of one.
Gallery[]
Trivia[]
Despite the game being original on its own, some things inside of the games data are not. They include:
- The gameplay is almost identical to some single-screen platformers, such as Bubble Bobble and Snow Bros. Knocking enemies with a weapon is known in Taito's Don Doko Don, which shares the same gameplay features mentioned before.
- The game seems to never end because after beating the Stage 30, the game sends you back to the first stage with no differences at all. Making it impossible to save the lady on the title screen.
- Some monsters were stolen from various Arcade games, such as Black Tiger, Ghosts'n Goblins, and Snow Bros. One of the game's fonts is the same as Ghosts'n Goblins.
- Due to some sloppy programming, the enemies don't always show sprites for their "airborne" state, specifically the fire breathing one. If a fire breathing enemy burns you, but another enemy comes in contact with you, it will still punch you. Even though you are technically dead.
- On the boss stages, the boss can hop into the stage walls, which messes with game and breaks a piece of the wall. You can do this by hopping into a wall with a broken platform above it.
- Music and sound effects, are from Technōs Japan's Double Dragon. Dark Tower runs on the same hardware as the original game.
- The Game Room also released another two games using the same hardware: Dangerous Dungeons and Thunder Strike, both sold as conversion kits for Double Dragon. Both were also made by Kyle Hodgetts. East Coast Coin Co. handled sales of these games in Melbourne.