Is Deadly Towers Really That Bad?

In the continued quest to find the least playable game of all time, I subject myself to Deadly Towers during the time of year when the industry releases almost all of it's top quality titles. I am obviously insane.

If Google searches are to be believed, then Deadly Towers is the closest thing to an internet wide consensus of “teh worst game evar.” In the old days, before Seanbaby figured out how to transform dick jokes into money (hint: you need baking soda), he reviewed DT as the #1 worst NES game. One of the game’s producers sent Seanbaby the following email, which was subsequently added to the review:

“I produced the game and it wasn't THAT bad for the times...some of the others are WAY worse. Nice to see it again, though.

Alan Weiss – Producer”

I’m not so sure about that, Alan Weiss. I’m not so sure about that, at all. I went into Deadly Towers with a positive mindset. I was going to beat it. I mean, people hate Simon’s Quest, and I like that game, so who knows right? “I will beat Deadly Towers,” I declared. I was lying. The following is the synopsis of my first two screens of DT:

Screen 1: Prince Myer teleports in front of what I’m assuming is a tower. There are scary faces on the tower, so you know it is deadly. Teleporting; kind of unconventional in a fantasy game, but whatever. Color palate is bland, but we’re talking early NES game here so I can deal. I press the pad. “8 way directional walk. It can’t be that bad if it has 8 way walk,” I thought at the time (another lie). I press the B button. Myer shoots a sword, provocatively. Images speak louder than words here, but the myths are true: Myer ejaculates swords. I enter a door.

Screen 2: Wow there’s lots of enemies. I try to move in and fight; I’m instantly overrun and die. This happens a few more times, with a little strategizing, I’m able to clear the bats and the weird...puddle monsters, and I turn my focus to the blue sphere. The blue sphere absorbs somewhere between 30 and 40 swords before dying. I walk to the right, fireballs rise up much faster than I can move and knock me off the tower. Death.

I was ready to quit. It was November, there was a myriad of new triple A releases for me to be enjoying. I remember thinking, “Animal Crossing comes out at midnight. Maybe I should just play that instead.” But I didn’t want to let Deadly Towers turn me into a liar. “I will defeat these towers!” I yelled. I trudged on. I trudged all the way through the first dungeon before swearing never to play Deadly Towers again. What went wrong? How could I have fallen so far from my original ambitions? I mean literally, I fell off the tower dozens of times. Was it my shortcomings as gamer that prevented me from thoroughly enjoying this game?

The only thing that Deadly Towers does correctly is 8 way movement. Every other gameplay element is fucked up in some way. But the problems don’t end there. These fucked up gameplay elements weave together, perfectly creating a sinister web of horrible gameplay situations that I never imagined possible.

Case 1: Myer’s sword. Which he shoots our of his crotch. Weird and counterintuitive to begin with, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that they were going for lolz. The problem with the sword shooting mechanic is that Myer can only shoot a single sword at a time. He has to wait for the first sword to hit its target before he can shoot another one. If Myer misses, he’s a sitting duck, since the sword travels very slowly across the entire screen and can’t be cancelled. If this were not bad enough, many basic enemies require dozens of hits to kill. The Wikipedia for DT points out that even the instruction manual warns gamers that
Myer’s sword sucks:

"SHORT SWORD -- You start the game with this sword. It is so weak, you feel lonely (you have no confidence in this sword)."

This shows that the team realized, at least on some level, aware of how difficult combat was. They either didn’t see, or didn’t care, how awkward and un-fun it was.

Case 2: Waves of fireballs. They swarm certain areas from bottom to top. They don’t move so quickly that Myer can’t dodge them, but he can’t destroy them with his sword effectively because they take so many hits that the next wave would be onscreen before he could kill a single fireball. Myer can’t just dodge the fire waves though, because of another problem. Areas often have way too many enemies on screen compared to how much ground Myer has available to stand on. The safest thing is for Myer to clear out the enemies before he can goes near the path where the fire comes up, but when enemies can take dozens of hits to kill, he can only shoot a single slow moving sword at a time, and he has to stand and shoot them from across the screen, gameplay grows tedious. The fire wave paths often are also often in areas where Myer can be knocked off the ledge of the tower, which is an instant game over. Myer is knocked backwards when he’s hit, so whenever I tried to make a run through it past the fire without killing at least most of the onscreen enemies, Myer would be overwhelmed, pushed back, and then thrown to his death.

Case 3: Invisible doors. These wouldn’t be so bad, by themselves. Perhaps they could’ve concealed desirable morsels. This was not the case. I never actually found an invisible door, per say; it found me. I was knocked back by an enemy and found myself transported into a maze-like labyrinth. I assumed I must have stumbled upon the game’s first dungeon. This was not the case. The truth about the secret doors in DT is that they lead into mazes which serve only to trap the player and distract him from actually progressing in the game. They are not tiny mazes, either; although thankfully they’re just extensive grids. However, the mazes are filled with deadly scorpions and other monsters; it is difficult to navigate through without taking some serious damage. To make matters worse, the only way to heal, early on, is through items dropped by enemies, but the drop rates are incredibly low. In bizarre twist of fate, this all works out for the better because the easiest way out of the mazes is to simply die and be transported back to the entrance of the Tower.

Deadly Towers is the poster child for bad design. I don’t think I’ve ever played anything that executed so many gameplay elements so perfectly wrong. It’s almost poetic. It’s almost worth playing. You’ll appreciate your other games more. Alan Weiss claims that there are worse NES games, and I think he means that there are games like Bible Adventures, that had very little thought put into them. But the saving grace of a game like Bible Adventures is that it’s so simple it’s not really that bad. There’s only so many things that could’ve gone wrong with it in the first place. Plus you get to play as Moses. Deadly Towers isn’t bad for a lack of trying, it’s bad because they tried a little too hard. The team implemented all sorts of unprecedented elements. The complicated mechanisms just don’t function together. I get the impression that it was playtested by designers who knew where everything was, who knew the maps. It will be difficult, perhaps impossible, to ever find a game whose core architecture is as fucked as DT’s. It very well may be the worst game ever made.