Explore winding corridors! Collect magical treasures! Battle vile monsters! Escape perilous traps! You are about to face the greatest challenge any mortal has ever known -- the Tower of Doom. Surviving the Tower of Doom requires quick reflexes and quicker wits. You must learn for yourself how to use many of the items you will find. You must decide when to fight a monster, and when to trade treasure for your life. You must maintain your strength, increase your stamina, and develop your diplomatic skills.
Tower of Doom was originally set to be the third AD&D title on the Intellivision with the working title "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Tower of Mystery". The game was only half complete when Mattel Electronics folded in 1984. INTV Corp resumed work on the game in 1986. Not wanting to pay for a renewed D&D license, the game was released under the new name, "Tower of Doom".
Objectives
- Uses hardest difficulty
- Uses a suboptimal character
- Heavy luck manipulation
- Genre: RPG
Resources
5526 Frame (92.22-second) Improvement
This TAS uses a different starting seed from my previous submission so the result is a new adventure, completely reworked from scratch. The large improvement comes from 17 less rooms being entered, and a new strategy to better manipulate luck by throwing weapons (explained later).
Difficulty Selection
Grail Quest was selected as the instructions manual claims it's the hardest adventure. I tend to believe this as you'll very rarely come across any good magical artifacts. Wizard Hunt and The Catacombs also have 32 levels but only Grail Quest allows the player to instantly win if they find the Holy Grail on Level 32.
Character Selection
The Waif was selected as he is the hardest to play as. The Waif starts out with six health, strength, stamina, and diplomacy units. His only starting item is the boot which is practically useless. Compare these stats with the other characters and you'll see why the Waif is clearly the weakest. Even the instructions manual admits it.
If we wanted to go strictly for the fastest time, we would select the Novice as he starts out with two throwable items and a Bottle of Haste, which gives a 2x speed boost for one level... but that wouldn't be as much of a challenge!
RNG
The curious thing about adventures which the manual claims are "different each time" is that while each level is random, they are not procedurally generated. This means the maze geometries and what enemies, items, and traps will appear in each room for levels 1-32 were set in stone the frame I confirmed the Waif character.
However, the exact locations of enemies, items, and traps within each room are not set in stone and can be manipulated by entering the room on different frames or by throwing items. These types of manipulation are done extensively in the run. Note that object locations in the first room of a level cannot be manipulated.
In this mode, item colors are randomized with their order being preserved as explained here. There was a -5 color shift factor in this TAS, meaning the weakest items are brown and the strongest are orange.
Traps also have some random properties worth pointing out:
- Transporter - touching this on different frames will change the location you teleport to. If there is one of these in a level, it is essentially used as instant access to the stairs
- Confusion Orb - will reroute all disc inputs to random directions for a random amount of time. Touching one of these was unavoidable on Levels 16 and 17 and you will notice some finicky movement proceed each of of those instances, but not nearly as much as you would expect to see during real-time play due to careful manipulations.
Weapons, Attacking, and Inventorying
Hand-to-hand combat in this game is slow so we opt for long-range attacks only with whatever we happen to find along the way. The weapon used ended up being the 3rd most resilient (orange) bow and arrow. The amount of damage an enemy takes from a weapon hit such as this is randomly-determined by the frame. Attacks are therefore meticulously timed to max out their damage.
Now, weapons can also be used to manipulate luck. Generally, firing two weapon shots will advance RNG by one pattern. The weapon can be fired at a wall, at an enemy, really anywhere. This strat reduces the amount of frames we had to waste waiting for exit stairs to spawn in a convenient location.
Weapons will also downgrade to a lower color via RNG, which I heavily biased against. If the weapon downgrades past the lowest color in this TAS, lavender, we will lose the weapon and have to spend time equipping another weapon. I only allow a downgrade to occur in extraordinary circumstances...
It is fastest to equip an item from the second slot in your pack, so why did I take the extra time to equip the orange bow instead of the green spear on level 3? A green item is only allowed to downgrade once, while an orange one can downgrade five times before disappearing. If you look at Levels 11, 17, and 31 you will notice these are levels where I intentionally downgraded the color of the bow. This was because it was absolutely necessary I fire the weapon on one of these "bad downgrade" frames in order to get a really good luck pattern that would save a considerable number of frames each. Choosing the higher weapon level therefore proved to be faster than selecting the closer weapon in the inventory.
Improvements?
Since all 32 general level layouts are determined from character select, I did not bother experimenting with any start frames later than this one. I definitely suspect even faster starting seeds exist and would be the best means of making an improvement.
Suggested Publication Notes
Explore winding corridors! Collect magical treasures! Battle vile monsters! Escape perilous traps! You are about to face the greatest challenge any mortal has ever known -- the Tower of Doom. Surviving the Tower of Doom requires quick reflexes and quicker wits. You must learn for yourself how to use many of the items you will find. You must decide when to fight a monster, and when to trade treasure for your life. You must maintain your strength, increase your stamina, and develop your diplomatic skills.
Winslinator selects the hardest character/adventure combination, playing as the Waif to beat the 32 levels of "Grail Quest" 1 minute and 32.22 seconds (5526 frames) faster than his previous movie.
slamo: Claiming for judging.
slamo: Nice improvement! I'm going to add the branch name "Grail Quest", since it's a separate game mode and we want to differentiate it from any potential future runs of other game modes. Accepting as an improvement to the previous movie.
despoa: Processing...