Icy Tower Review;
Review of an oldie game called 'Icy Tower', released back in 2001!
The basics:
Released back in 22nd of December, 2001. Icy Tower was introduced into a growing and maturing internet. At the time, probably on it's initial version; 1.0, was shown to be a free arcade PC video game that were distributed on plentiful sites and probably CD-Roms for that matter, but one of the sites in particular (mentioned by the creator himself, Johan Peitz on his blog through an archive right here) is 'download.com'.
Nonetheless, it's a simple game really, you have basic controls that anyone could master well enough by less than an hour or so; left and right to move, spacebar to jumb and if you are extensively prepared and have a controller for the PC, you could use it too. The point objective of this game; or lack thereof, is to climb a tower that seems to stretch to infinity or even beyond theoretically. Alongside the floors, no matter how high you were. There's also combos to perform if you were to skip couple of floors instead going one by one seqeuntially.
Besides that, upon each floor you climb by every hundred floors as milestones; you'll unlock those floors and are able to change the display of your starting initial floor per session (Only changes the visuals, it does not fundamentally put you high as you'd think. Purpose to that is probably a flex of your climbing skills). With that out of the way, let's address other essential part that you should know, gameplay-wise:
As you start your session, you'll notice a gauge and a clock to the left; Gauge is filled immediately when you climb more than one floor, and henceforth gauge quickly loses it's charge as time passes, activating the combo; giving you enough time to react accordingly and climb or that is, gain more floors, which in turn gives you additional time and combo afterwards. Doing that consistently and if we're speaking ideally, you could theoretically climb forever and never run out of combo as you perfectly gain floors more than at least two or avoid descending downwards. Now let's address the clock in particular. The clock has a special function which isn't typical of any games that do harbor such time-related doodads; It acts as a timer not affecting towards you, but to the foreground itself. The basics of this clock in question works like this; As you reach the fifth floor, having started from the ground, the hand moves slowly in slow and steady speed and as it passes it's first revolution, it rings and affects the descent of said floors you are standing by; encouraging you to climb higher and faster if you must. It becomes faster after about four revolutions, which by then it goes nuts and won't affect the gameplay at that point; having reached maximum possible speed of floors you can achieve if you avoid the doom below the visible horizon.
Having been said, if by any means you failed to climb more than at least two floors when possible or have went lower than where you started, you'll finish your combo sequence. And the combos you could earn by achieving such combos go in order as such: Good, Sweet, Great, Wow!, Super, Amazing, Fantastic, Extreme, Splendid and No way! (The latter requires you to be over more than at least 200 floors or even above and if you're good at catching up with the floors, you'd probably land it there). And an important factor to consider is that you should by any means, end your combo sequence if by any way you are suseptible to falling downwards beyond the display. As that'll give you score at the end of such combos.
And the last UI part we should probably mention is the score; it's an arcade game after all. You should get the best score whenever possible or even beat your or someone's high-score. You gain 10 points from climbing, and more if you do combos. Earning combos is essential part of the gameplay, as you learn to maneuver around and gain combo; you may eventually stumble and fall back or otherwise; better than nothing, since you could lose it all by simply falling down. Additionally, as you get a game over screen, waiting long enough would give you an indication that your character has fallen to the ground floor by sound of a soft thud and a shaking screen, no matter how far you went. But hey, it's not the end of the world if you do fall; besides, it comes back all new and fresh like it never happened, all due to the magic of video games.
Speaking of characters, and depending on the version; you have number of selection of characters to choose from. Precisely from 1.0 to 1.4 at least, you have Harold the Homeboy; a figure who likes to eat cheese, climb towers and overall a cool dude. And Disco Dave, go figure, a character from disco-centric era, but also a cool dude too. As 1.5.1 adds two extra characters to the selection: Jungle Jane: A caveman and Wild Wendy: a cowgirl. Granted, those characters were added at the end of mentioned version. But that's not all, as you have the ability to customize!
Customization in Icy Tower is not all that complex and if anything, it's far simple than to those games that exist today. Remember when I mentioned floors that you'd unlock? That's one customization you can do, and that's it for the foreground elements unfortunately. But regarding the characters, there's a dedicated template ready-made for to be copied and modified by at your will; giving you the liberty to do anything with it. Within the template folder, you have a simplified outline of Harold the Homeboy encased in boundaries that it encompasses in. Hell, you can do this in MS-Paint, due to it's shockingly simple nature of it. And needless to say, the audio is also simple, but also optional but what you could do with it is: having you to acquire eight or less audio segments (Short ones) regarding sound effects and music; speaking of which, you can use a MIDI file to play any of your favorite tunes you might've downloaded long ago or recently, be it Sailor Moon, Seinfeld or some kind of junk you discovered on some rural section of the internet. With that in mind, you have the bare essentials of custom character if have you committed to it. The end result is going to be a satisfactory or mere disappointment if your work is not well crafted or translated into it, considering it's limitations and all.
For those more advanced peeps out there, you can use a more capable tool that grants you the access to the palette if you have a version older than 1.4. Within the palette, comes 255 colors that you could change on your will; mind you that there's some colors specialized for it but that can be changed too, right? What's the harm on changing everything to red and black just for the sake of being edgy, eh? No? Well, it is worth a shot, give some wacky colors and change some that'll affect everything else. For example, the walls in the gameplay can be green. Background could be bright yellow and floors pink. Now if that sounds ugly, it sure does. But that's just a suggestion. There's much more than you realize when we get over to the technical side of things, which does give you the creative freedom to change everything after this.
Observe the demonstration that I've shown here; here on left is the copy of template from the right image next to it, the difference being the palette has been changed to my own liking. Now imagine how'd it look like if you had something in your mind that you would like to see by modifying the character's palette. Through power of GraphicsGale or other software akin to it's certain abilities like with changing the color from said palette, you can achieve the result like you see on the left.
Anyways, where were we?
Ah, yes, what happened to Icy Tower!
Games like Icy Tower had a relatively long lifespan, taking into regard with (Facebook) flash game and mobile game ports. And since it's inception, it was well regarded and was once a popular game to be installed and played almost everywhere when access to entertainment everywhere was not exactly feasible unless you had an underpowered handheld of sorts. It might've been released months after the well known event that occurred in September but I digress. It was reasonably popular almost everywhere, mostly in Europe and probably America and other countries; and got itself a community of it's own that the creator spend their time with. Much of it is evident by the text files that came with the game, the poem, those self-made creations that came with it that included pop culture figures and actors at that time.
Nevermind that this was back in early 2000s when most users on the internet had modems, and flash was still at it's slow rise. Social Media weren't mainstream and were more of a niche websites that had a certain purpose than what it is today. When internet grew more mature, mobile phones and social media had just gotten popular and since then became an unfortunate part of our lives as we know it.
And there came Facebook; where Icy Tower had it's own flash variant resided there, or a demo if it were outside of it. The difference being regarding the flash version is lack of customization you'd have on PC, and instead you have clothes, towers and other such things. There, you instead were treated with floors falling instead and crumbling, as well as downscrolling included unlike PC; descending down was feasible but still risky if you weren't careful or able to climb back up. The overall ambience is very typical of a Facebook game you'd see anywhere else where it resides.
The mobile game port or rather mobile port in general are different, due to being touchscreen-only and running on completely different hardware than you were on a computer; as there were versions of the game like Icy Tower 2 (Which is in-period mobile game you'd see back in the day) and classic, which had the barebones features in lieu of PC. Nevertheless, the games, while simple, were still popular until it was slowly forgotten in lieu of other 'indie' games coming to spotlight (Granted, indie wasn't applied until somewhere around mid to late 2010s).
By then, Icy Tower was simply a game of the past, obscured by more popular and more unique titles that aren't related to it mutually.
It's a shame that you can't no longer casually find a game something like Icy Tower, whenever it'd be arcade, shooter, labyrinth or whatever else comes into mind and enjoy. And when you do, it's an unfinished demo or a canned project despite the potential it holds. The game development became too nuanced for something so simple, that you'd need a high-end card to play something that barely uses anything to play. Then again, considering how games were developed back then, it's miraculous how we developed and eventually lost in touch with what we should've stayed by too for good sake: simplicity.
Technological characteristics:
Icy Tower was developed with Allegro components and DirectX features. A simple game as it is described by the creator himself.
Regarding the revisions and changes, it's fairly obvious that game has seen it's couple of changes, both internally and externally:
v1.0 was the initial release, as we know it. No information regarding v1.1 version. v1.2 features a fancy new thing called replays and customization. v1.3 unintentionallyfeatures a so-called 'ghost floor'; A bug, and was fixed in the next release. v1.3.1 fixes the ghost floor bug. v1.4 has a major overhaul in regards to visuals. As for v1.5.1, audio has been updated.
There is something to be noted: The information on these are quite sparse due to obscurity of this game is facing after it's heyday. I had to check an archive of wikipedia article about it due to lackluster, narrow and bare information and negligence. While it's necessary to keep up with the standards, I wish someone else has kept such information in check and kept it to somewhere else where it could be safely stored without much woe. Since the forums themselves are long gone and nobody else had anything else to do with it. Ergo, the exact details of each version that it provides is hard to tell just by looking at it, besides the small additions and all.
Moving along, the game from v1.0 to v1.3.1; Graphically, it remained the same. Sticking to 8-bit palette consisting of 256 colors. As for sound itself; by it's insides, they're .ogg audio. v1.0 to v1.1 had audio that were in 11kHz (Presumably 11025 Hertz), before upping up to 44kHz (44100 Hertz) in a proceeding version.
The data.dat and sfx13(*_11; *_22; *_44 respectively if you're using 1.1 version or perhaps the initial (no garuantee that'll work anyways)).dat has seen couple of changes, obviously. But that's the least concern of us. Rather, it's how to access them that's the tricky part. Having spent my time years prior back about few years ago, I've gathered a morsel amount of information on accessing such files, with a specialized tool and third-party tools irrelevant to the game and said software itself.
This 'specialized tool' I mentioned is another Allegro-based application; which specializies in accessing .dat files made via tools long ago with Allegro libraries. It's a neat yet awkward and clunky software that requires some practice before getting used to it's quirks. Having been said, you should put a password before you access such files I said prior. Although, not all versions have it, as I'll tell you next:
Both v1.0 and v1.1 do not require a password to access the contents; It's the v1.2 when it requires a password. Furthermore, passwords aren't consistent with each versions, so bear that in mind. The passwords here are written verbatim and have proven to work properly, if it doesn't work, I hold no duties besides admitting the fault of my research.
v1.2's password is: wazup
v1.3 and v1.3.1's password is: gostflor
v1.4's password is: CHEESE
v1.5.1 is strange as it has two passwords, alongside v1.4's password which has been kept in this version from it's precessor. Regarding the second, it's reserved only for pre-existing characters and loading screen locked by different password: (c) Free Lunch Design
With that, you have access to everything... Well, except code itself, which I don't truly believe is accessible at all. Unless the source code is released as open-source, there's nothing much else you could do about it besides exporting the graphics and audio.
Or someone makes a decompiler or recreates an entire game with the original resources when possible; but that's highly unlikely anyways.
There are several tools I believe I've only heard of that came from the forum itself, again gone long after. Some of them help you cheat, change something or even check the speed of replays and whatnot, but that's all anecdotal considering what that archived Wikipedia article had to say prior to it's truncation.
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Nevertheless, there's nothing much you could do with it besides modifying graphics, characters, an entire audio that is contained within and all.
Personal review:
The game itself is very enjoyable, and likewise; you could do so much before you ran out of ideas to do with it. I've managed to reach somewhere around floor 500. And it wasn't easy either, and as for the combo; probably above 150 but no less than 180 or so. Regardless, plot is not too convoluted and holds a solid standing even long after it has fallen to the ground where it initally started from, pun intended or not. I believe this game deserves a second chance or better yet, some kind of reasurgence among the crowd, without anything getting in the way; but that's another can of worms regarding how things work around here these days. The graphics, depending on versions are beautiful and yet simple, it's still echoing the 90's at that period, Harold with his oversized trousers, shirt and a beanie and a hip-hop beat to fill the void; along with his friends, Disco Dave, Jungle Jane, Wild Wendy and Homer Simpson. You can do so much before you ran out of things to do afterall, it's an old-school game, entertaining, and perhaps deserving to be recognized that it's one of the games that were popular two decade ago.
Overall, in short; Icy Tower, is fun and an addicting game with it's charm. Nothing too spectacular or bad, it's perfect as it is. I still play Icy Tower sometimes when I have nothing else to do.