Tower of Babel / 2012-11-10 16:04:37

Tower of Babel is a computer game and designer for the Amiga, Atari ST, and Acorn Archimedes by Pete Cooke, developed by Rainbird Software, and released by Microprose Software in 1990. It is a puzzle played on three-dimensional tower-like grids viewed in vector graphics with filled polygons. Tower of Babel is a great puzzle, some being quite difficult to solve...

 

 

Story

The plot is loosely based on the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. During its construction, the Tower caught the attention of a passing Zantorian spaceship. The Zantorians descended and left three spider-like robots to help the Shinarians build the Tower. However, distrust broke out among the two species, and the Shinarians betrayed the robots, stealing their energy packs, their klondikes. Playing the robots, it is the player's job to find the energy packs to be able to get back home to Zantor.

The Zantorians robots are called Grabber, Pusher, and Zapper. Each of these robots has different abilities. Grabber can collect klondikes and operate various devices, Pusher can push things further away, and Zapper can destroy things. Each puzzle includes any combination of these robots, depending on the Tower's design. In each tower, the puzzle's goal is either to destroy a set number of objects, collect a set number of klondikes, or both. Towers with klondikes to collect need Grabber, but the other robots can sometimes be unnecessary or even a problem... 

 

Manual

Here are scans of the manual pages:

 

Realisation

Tower of Babel offer three kinds of user interfaces:

  • The first kind consists of button and maps of the towers to navigate among the various options, run the game, run the designer, and choose a tower to solve. It is a clean user interface althrough at times not-so-intuitive: in particular, you must click "outside" of the border of some requesters to cancel them.
  • The second kind is the in-game user interface. It is quite easy to use and answer quickly to each command, although the latency of the robots can be at times misleading. It includes also controls to view the tower for different viewpoints (north, south, east, west) as well as controls to program each robot independently and to run the programs one at a time or together. When pausing the game, menus appear to configure the user interface or go back to the main menus.
  •   .

 

Graphic Design

 

Musics and Sounds

 

Animations

 

 

Gameplay

Tower Puzzles

There are hundreds (?) of differently-configured 8x8x4 towers (four floors of 8x8 squares each).

 

Tower Designer

 

Solutions

Here are the solutions of the puzzles by groups of towers:

 

Conclusion

Tower of Babel is a great game, intriguing and unique. It will please puzzle-lovers but may confound causal players. The ability to create your own towers is wonderful to challenge friends; it is surprising that no Web site catalogs such home-made towers...

 

Marks

  • Music: good;
  • Sound: neutral;
  • Graphics: excellent;
  • Playability: excellent;
  • Lastability: a life-time!

 

Summary

  • Name: Tower of Babel;
  • Publisher: MicroPose;
  • Type: puzzle;
  • Date: 1990;
  • Hardware: Amiga OCS, 512Kb;
  • License: commercial;
  • Grade: 9/10.

 

Further Reading