Tower of Doom Intellivision Review - The No Swear Gamer Ep 663 

Keep it up i love your reviews im deff picking this game up :)

oh wow, I haven't thought about Gateway to Apshai in ages - now I want to play Tower of Doom AND that game again :)

Apshai was a groundbreaking game!

@Mitchell Azevedo So something IS wrong with the version on the Flashback! I thought something was weird about it when I tried to play it. I was so confused when it didn't seem to work properly. Thank you so much for confirming this, as it has bugged me for ages!

@@drunkendelver1966 You can just download the game and play it on an emulator. It plays perfectly!

Well props to you sir! One of my favourites then and still….What were the features John removed?

@@HryciuR One was a visual element - in the descending stairs scene between dungeon levels. I had developed a method to seemingly expand the color palette by flashing between two different colors on every frame refresh - the brain blends the two colors into a third. For example, alternately flashing green and red will be perceived as yellow. After reviewing all possible combinations of colors, I selected pairs that would make a series of darkening greys as the stairs descended into darkness. It appears that John just picked separate non-flashing colors and went with that. The second was a true innovation for the time. Knowing that completing the game at its most challenging level would probably take several hours, I wanted to have a "Save/Restore Game" feature so that one could turn off the box and come back the next day. How to do this when there is no non-volatile memory? I had code that would combine the generation key, current character stats, and the item in hand, combine with a checksum and create a "Save Code" that the player could write down. Thus the player became the non-volatile memory. When starting the game, an option was present to enter the save code. When verified, the dungeon would be recreated, and the character restored with his current stats and weapon (or whatever was saved in his hand). Of course, you would lose everything else in your bag, but that was the price of save/restore.

@@danielmd4104 Save would have been an innovative feature for sure. The visual element on the steps sounded really clever! Even without those, it was my favourite game on the system and still felt like a “next gen” game…at the time on par with NES games. Thanks for providing many great INTV memories with friends back then. Cheers!

@@HryciuR Thanks for the kind words

I think intv focused mainly on the states only, so their games may not have reached Europe unless somebody imported them.

I had it back in the days living in Europe (Sweden). We didnt import it as far as I know.