The MAZZTer
Death Star
Joined: 25 Sep 2003
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 Posted: May 06, 2008 02:39 Post subject: |
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*ahem*
THE IMPERIAL FORTRESS - A TOWER OF DOOM FANFIC AND REVIEW
by me
CHAPTER 1 - THE BRIEFING OPERATOR FROM HELL
Kyle Katarn walked into the briefing room apprehensively. Rebel Command had urgently contacted him with a mission... something about a missing astromech droid. It didn't seem worth his time, but they claimed they would triple his usual fee. He knew then they were keeping something about this mission from him.
Strangely enough, there was an astromech droid giving the briefing. Kyle couldn't understand it, but fortunately is was projecting subtitles. "Huh,"
Kyle thought, looking at the white and blue droid, "it must be the famous R2-D2. I figured if Command would panic over the loss of any astromech it would be him."
The briefing went like this: "Our friend, R2D2, has been captured..."
"Wait," Kyle interjected, "aren't YOU Artoo?"
"No."
"You look just like him."
"Well I'm not. Please save your questions until the end of the briefing. Our friend, R2D2, has been captured by Empire forces..."
"You mean 'Imperial'."
"What?"
"You should have said 'Imperial forces'."
"Look, if you're going to correct everything I say, we'll be here all day. Allow me to finish first at least. Our friend, R2D2, has been captured by Empire forces while on a routine training mission.
"The empire believes he is carrying secret information and may torture him if we don't rescue him quickly."
"Torture... a droid?" Kyle thought to himself. "Well, I guess the Hutts have been known to do that from time to time, but usually only for fun, not for information."
The droid continued: "R2 is being held in an underground base beneath the Tower of DOOM."
Kyle was incredulous. "... beg your pardon?"
The droid, starting to become irritated, ignored him. "Once you release him from his cell he will be able to access the base computer and find a way out."
Kyle was becoming worried. "I don't suppose we could formulate a plan BEFORE dropping me into an Imperial den of wolves...?"
"The only way to get to your ship will be from the top of the tower. Once you're both there we'll come and pick you up."
"'We'?"
"Well, while you were interrupting me, I just happened to notice that your ship was improperly parked in the landing bay, and my ethical protocols were forced to have air traffic impound it and assign it to one of our officers. I am sure we will have this whole mess straightened out by the end of the mission."
"Lucky me."
"The tower is sure to be guarded, so watch your step. Any questions?"
"Yes. How the f-"
"Good. You are dismissed."
"But..."
"DISMISSED." The R2 unit quickly left the room via an astromech maintenance elevator in the corner.
CHAPTER 2 - THE JOURNEY TO THE TOWER OF DOOM
Kyle dropped down the air vent and into an empty, bright room. He wasn't quite sure how he had gotten there but his mission was clear: Rescue R2-D2... and... umm... well not so much. However he was sure if he progressed through the complex he would eventually achieve all of his goals.
Kyle looked around to get his bearings. There was a set of stairs leading down into the lower levels of the complex, and a door on the side with a force field window. He tried the door and found it locked with a blue key required.
On another wall was a map of a maze with some red walls, indicating blocked passages, Kyle assumed. To the left of that was a helpful directional sign: "To the Tower of DOOM". Drat. He had hoped the briefing droid had just had its head on backwards.
A few high, thin tunnels were in the wall with the sign, but none of them went far. In a flash of inspiration and understanding he got the idea that the map on the wall might correspond to these tunnels. All he had to do was figure out how to open the walls.
Oh wait... right... R2 first.
Since the only way available was down the stairs (he had foolishly not provided a way to crawl up into the vents again in case he ended up in a dead end) Kyle descended, blaster in hand, ready for whatever could lurk...
It was a dead end.
Kyle did a double take and gave the offending wall the evil eye, to no avail. Walking back up the stairs, he noticed a window in the wall he had failed to give notice before. It was an odd window, being set too high in the wall to be of any practical use. He went to climb up onto the ledge but found his arms were not strong enough to pull him up unless he could jump high enough to get his feet onto it. "Gotta work on those muscles," Kyle thought to himself.
Finally he succeeded in getting up onto the ledge. He didn't immediately drop to the other side as he wanted to be sure he wasn't just going to be stuck in a worse place. The room was filled with crates, and he noticed a door on the wall.
A door which should have opened up into the dead end he had bumped into.
He jumped back down and ran back to the dead end and looked at the wall which should have contained the door.
It was blank.
He checked his PDA map. It said there was no door there.
He touched the wall... the hidden door slid open immediately.
"I have GOT to get this thing FIXED. I'll see if the LACDS patch does any good when I get back to Rebel HQ." Kyle thought, whacking the PDA with his hand a few times to no avail.
Kyle walked into the crate room and noticed there was a conveyor belt on the far side, and another crate room beyond it. This obviously was some sort of cargo loading/unloading area. Still no sign of imperial forces.
"I don't like this." Kyle thought. "Maybe they knew I was coming and set up some sort of ambush."
Kyle jumped over to the far room and found some shield packs sitting out in the open.
"Huh... who would leave these here? They're not in a crate, and there's no open crates here... odd."
A short trip down the conveyor belt brought Kyle to a couple more crate areas, where he found some energy ammo, and... "Yikes! An interrogator droid! It must have gone rogue and escaped from its transport crate!" Kyle quickly subdued it and picked up some thermal detonators and power cells nearby.
Across the way was some shield units and another interrogator. Kyle found himself wondering why the Imperials were stacking crates differently in each room, but quickly refocused his mind on the mission at hand and went to the next set of rooms down the conveyor.
They only contained more crates and some shields and health... the health was welcome after the interrogators' needles. There were also some crates stacked quite unusually, which is saying something since all the crates were stacked more or less unusually. "Ah ha! It's a stairway to a broken vent cover!"
Before continuing, Kyle explored the room at the end of the conveyor... and found an Imperial officer! Quickly Kyle killed him and sifted through his pockets for a blue key... the key to the control room for the maze, no doubt, and his access to the Tower of DOOM!
There was a door on the far wall. Kyle left it alone... where there was one Imperial, there were usually many more. Before he went up the vent, Kyle thought that he should check out the Tower, and make sure his escape route would be clear. So he made his way back to the maze. On his way, he noted that the Imperials really had a bad taste in wall decor. When he got back, he opened the blue locked door.
He found some switches which appeared to manipulate the red walls in the maze, and also updated the display map on the wall. First he tried switching all the switches, however his way through the maze was still blocked. On closer inspection of the map, he realized the green lines which had appeared when he flipped the switches ALSO indicated walls in the way... a clever Imperial trick. Once Kyle realized that, he was able to manipulate the switches to allow him access to...
CHAPTER 3 - THE TOWER OF DOOM
Finally Kyle was out into the open air. He looked behind and above the tunnel but could not see the structure he came out of or the vent he had fallen through to get there. Odd. Perhaps a cloaking field was being used to hide the complex. Then he noticed the sky... a horrible dark blue and gray mass, unnatural looking. The Imperials had likely done this with pollution. "They will pay for this." Kyle thought to himself.
Around the back of the tower Kyle found a cleverly concealed cache of Dark Trooper weapons and a Shield Supercharge. He snatched it all up before realizing the Shield Supercharge wouldn't last long. He quickly went back to the elevator he had seen and ascended the tower, invincible and ready for any challenge at the top. "Time to kick butt and chew gum," Kyle thought, "and there's no gum in this level."
He stepped off the elevator at the top, wielding the Dark Trooper Cannon and preparing to meet his foe... but there was no-one there. Quite annoyed as his Shield Supercharge ran out, he finally left and returned to the underground complex.
CHAPTER 4 - IT'S A TRAP!
As Kyle made his way back to the broken vent entrance, he realized this was one of the more bizarre missions he had been on. Poor interior design, plus no imperial presence to speak of so far... but at least it wasn't like that "Coober" mission. He swore Rebel Command was just playing an April Fools joke on him with that one, but no-one would admit it.
Kyle jumped up into the vent and began sneaking through it. He became more confident, hoping he could avoid imperial confrontations using the vents.
He stumbled on a force field protecting a room, and noticed two commandos inside. He was unable to pass through the force field, but his blaster bolts were. The commandos were quickly incapacitated before they knew what was happening. Unfortunately Kyle couldn't get in there to see what they were guarding, so he turned back and looked for another route in the vent system.
He found a room with several imperials, a comm view screen, and a concussion rifle on the ground. As Kyle mulled over various tactics he could use to quickly subdue his enemies, he leaned out of an open vent... and fell to the floor.
He quickly took out the surprised Imperials (they had likely never seen such an amateur mistake by a professional mercenary and thus were unprepared for his quick recovery). He held his coveted new weapon in his hands.
A door on the far wall looked familiar. He opened it and found a square room with three similar doors, with no possible entry. He abandoned that path for now and took the other way out of the room, spiral stairs leading to a bridge over the room and out another exit.
The next room seemed more out of place than all the rooms before it, with a red touch plate in the middle and several suspicious-looking architectural features along the walls.
"Man, the Imperials are losing their touch." Kyle thought and grinned as he had an idea.
The touch plate depressed and an alarm sounded. Stormtroopers pounced out of the secret wall panels and descended on the touch plate. One shouted "Now we have you you mother-". The thermal detonator Kyle had planted on the touch plate before running away exploded.
"That was too easy. Now to get to m... Now to get to that astromech droid."
He continued along the passage and found a multi-pillared room with Imperial Officers and a Reeyee. "They were interrogating a prisoner, I guess. No wait, he had thermal detonators... I wonder what was happening... I really need to stop shooting first and asking questions later, now this is gonna bug me all day." Kyle grabbed a yellow key from one of the officers... and noticed a familiar door at the other side of the room and opened it to find the square room... and realized he had no more possible routes.
Something seemed strange to him so he checked his map... and realized one of the locked doors was only openable from the other side, in the cargo area! Oh if only he had opened it when he...
<<
CHAPTER 4 - IT'S A TRAP!
As Kyle made his way back to the broken vent entrance, he realized this was one of the more bizarre missions he had been on. Poor interior design, plus no imperial presence to speak of so far... but at least it wasn't like that "Coober" mission. He swore Rebel Command was just playing an April Fools joke on him with that one, but no-one would admit it.
Kyle went to jump into the vent, but hesitated... the arrangement of the crates was too perfect, it had to be an imperial trap! Instead he went to the locked door and opened it... and found only a square room with three identical, unopenable doors. Finally he decided to suck it up and delved into the unknown vent system.
>>
A door on the far wall looked familiar. He opened it and found the square room from before, and sighed with relief as he had found a route back to the cargo area quicker than he had hoped.
>>
He continued along the passage and found a multi-pillared room with Imperial Officers and a Reeyee. "They were interrogating a prisoner, I guess. No wait, he had thermal detonators... I wonder what was happening... I really need to stop shooting first and asking questions later, now this is gonna bug me all day." Kyle grabbed a yellow key from one of the officers... and noticed a familiar door at the other side of the room and opened it to find the square room... with now only one door remaining closed.
CHAPTER 5 - SEWAGE OR TRASH, AND DOES IT REALLY MATTER?
Having not entirely explored the vent system, Kyle decided to give it another look. The last passage led him to the strangest trash compactor he had ever seen. Going around a ledge he found a control room with a number of switches... he noticed they would blink red every so often, and so flipped the switches at the precise moment when the light for each turned red. For some reason making lights red seemed to anger the Imperials, and increased Kyle's paychecks.
Kyle found the noise from the trash... or sewage, he was never sure which... mixers had stopped, and they themselves had stopped. Kyle then got a brilliant (or stupid, depending how you look at it) idea, and jumped across the stopped mixer tops. There were three platforms he could reach, and he went to the right-most one.
He found a tunnel which led to an observation room overlooking a room with three odd aliens. Kyle attempted to communicate with the aliens but they did not answer. He stepped closer but suddenly a smasher dropped from the ceiling, crushing one of the aliens! Kyle stared on horrified, as one of the others shouted "Oh my God, they killed Kenny! YOU B******!" Kyle quickly ran from the room before he could find out what kind of unnatural abilities these aliens possessed.
He quickly made his way across the mixers and to another platform to the right, this time it was a closed vent, with thermal detonators next to it. Kyle looked back and forth at the two items before putting them together. BOOM!
Crawling through the vents, Kyle noticed a locked vent panel in the vent wall... further on he found a room, with four switches and three cages. Cages with Kell Dragons in them.
They were quite angry and hungry. You would be too, if you were locked in a small cage with no exit from the room except a small vent... how had they even gotten in there anyway? Kyle was now faced with a difficult decision. But then he remembered what his mentor used to say. "When you have a difficult decision, take ALL the options at once!" Of course he was talking about shopping for better weapons and armor, but Kyle was sure it applied here. He pulled all four switches and dived for the vent hole with three hungry Kells after him.
Kyle made his way back and noticed the vent panel had opened.. inside was a very large very empty room with a door on the far wall that opened as Kyle approached. It was actually four doors, each behind the other, surely designed for maximum security... except somewhere management had clearly gotten involved and stipulated the door had to be easy to use and so it had to open whenever someone stood in front of it. A shame.
It was clearing some sort of security center. A lone stormtrooper was sleeping on a console... Kyle made sure he never woke up.
There were a number of weird lights and maps and switches everywhere, and the only thing that made any sense to Kyle was a big "ACCESS DENIED" on a wall. Kyle began pressing random buttons and switches until he heard a chime, and he noticed the sign changed to "ACCESS OK". "Great!" he said, "Now what the HELL did I just get access to?"
CHAPTER 6 - YOU ALWAYS FIND THINGS IN THE LAST PLACE YOU LOOK
After running around for a few more hours Kyle found that the force field in the vent system was deactivated. Jumping down, he opened the main door to the room and found the square room again. He turned his attention back to the room. Opening the guardroom door with his fancy yellow key, he then flipped a switch and opened the door to the next room, which he assumed would be full of another different interior design. He was correct.
It was also full of droids in cells... why the Imperials were collecting droids, Kyle didn't have a clue, and he didn't care. He freed them all, including R2, but oddly R2, the mousebot, and the Tatooine bot were the only ones who cared about leaving their cells. Kyle decided to leave them all but R2 behind. Oh and not the mousebot or Tatooine bot either... Kyle punched them and stole their batteries.
R2 fiddled with a control panel and got sucked away through an astromech tube to who knew where. Kyle was concerned for a bit but then realized the droid would probably turn up eventually.
CHAPTER 7 - THE FINAL CONFRONTATION. OF ALL TIME. ON TOP OF THE TOWER OF DOOM
Having explored (almost) every nook of the facility and having killed everything killable in its confines (so he thinks), Kyle returns to the Tower for pickup, glad he scoped it out before. Because there's nothing there, so he can rest easy.
When he reaches the top, however, a Dark Trooper is there to greet him. "I thought I already warned you, I don't have any gum!" Kyle yells, and the Dark Trooper is quickly disposed of with a few good Assault Cannon missiles and plasma shots.
He then waited for the Crow... and waited... and waited... and while he was waiting he realized he never figured out where R2 had gone. "Oh no," Kyle thought out loud with a sad realization, "I'm not gonna be paid, am I?"
THE END
Final Rating: 2.5/5. Some nice mechanics and puzzles, but it could have used more design planning, more sensical level layout, and more enemies (at least in easy) as well as a more unified texture set.
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Pumpkinetics
Ree-Yees
Joined: 16 Oct 2007
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| Posted: May 07, 2008 06:53 Post subject: |
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Alright, this is my full commentary on the level "Tower of Doom (Classic)". This is all my viewpoint, it doesn't include the opinions of Dirk Destiny (Hereafter referred to as DiDe) in any way. He'll add his own notes if he feels like it. This is also a repost from the .zip thread. If you've seen that thread, you've seen this post.
ORIGINS
When the Tower of Doom first came into conception, I was 6 years old, and I had only just learned about DF editing (although I had already played a few custom levels without realising how they had been made)
Now, when I refer to this level as a collaboration, I mean "I thought of something that would be cool, and DiDe stuck it in."
The first version of this level simply included the tower. The maze was then included, although that was entirely DiDe's idea. Then the rooms with the vestigial conveyor belt and obligatory boxes. After that was my "Let's rescue R2D2! Nobody's ever done that before!" idea, which led to the western "superbox" end. The final element was when I suddenly came up with the idea for a "main access computer". And so it was added.
WHERE THE CONCEPTS CAME FROM
A lot of the better ideas are DiDe's doing. I came up with a few, but I was more big picture. I wasn't the kind for brilliant puzzles at age 6. I doubt I'd come up with something like the red door/green door maze even now. I'm not sure who thought up the Sandcrawler-ish sucking bit, but it was before DT1, at least. The hidden troopers bit was obviously somewhat flawed in conception, but I like the idea enough that it may be used in Kalmar, though in a slightly different format. The sewer spinners and South park scene were DiDe's ideas; South park was big at the time, and we both usually play by map, so the spinner puzzle wasn't particularly difficult for us. In the "main access computer", Dide did the flashing wall lights, and I did the "Access locked", "DTP" and "flashing switch that doesn't indicate whether it's been pressed or not, and thus is indistinguishable from its 3 inoperable counterparts" BMs, with MS paint.
The Briefing was DiDe's but the textcrawl was all me. The original by DiDe simply said "an (our real names (yes, I'm paranoid)) level." 7 year old (by that point I was 7) me thought I could do better, so I made a BMP of my briefing. I thought it was good. To this day I still have no idea what a "contant mistake" is.
REDISCOVERY
The last real work on Tower of Doom was sometime in 1999. Eventually I got bored of DF, and stopped playing levels altogether.
Then last year I started again. So Dirk Destiny brought around a flash drive with the old level. I'd forgotten the finer details, but I remembered that I thought it was good when I was 7.
I'm never trusting previous me again. Ever.
We decided it was best left secret, played for laughs only. I gave it a persona rating of 2 out of 5 (That was what I'm expecting here, too)
But recently I started something, and this particular something prompted me and DiDe to post Tower of Doom Classic.
See, I thought the basic premise was okay (rescue R2D2 from an imposing imperial facility built around a large stone tower) and that a decent level could be built out of it. With the right mindset, and the right Gmid.
So, as a form of practice before fully committing to Kalmar, I am working on Tower of Doom - Special edition. And when I say Special edition, I mean rebuilt from the ground up. Same story - different base. Very different.
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