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I was intrigued when I first saw Old Tower because it looked fantastic. It's touted as the first multi coloured Spectrum scroller, but there was something strangely familiar about it. After a bit of research I figured out why I got a sense of deja vu. It's actually a clone of a game I played a few years back on my smartphone called 'Tomb of the Mask' from back in 2016. I didn't look at the 'read me' file which came with the game, before this revelation, which tells you this game is inspired by that one. Doh!

Old Tower placed third at the 2018 ZX DEV with 12996 points. Retrosouls have published over ten ZX Spectrum titles Including: Alter Ego (2011), Dreamwalker: Alter Ego 2 (2014), Gravibots (2014) and Join (2011). Oleg Nikitin has worked on ZX Spectrum titles which include scene demos - Oxygene 7 (2019) and Regression (2019), a beat-'em-up game called Retro Kombat (2014), a text adventure game called Roofmania (2002) and a shoot-'em-up called Sea Dragon (2010). Ivan Seleznev worked with Denis Grachev on the ZX Spectrum game Tourmaline in 2016.

After the title screen you jump straight into the game without delay after pressing fire to start. No story time around here. There are numerous ways to control your characters, Kempston and Sinclair joysticks or keyboard. I used good old fashioned 'QAOP' and 'Space' because this is not the kind of game that has you rushing around the screen. If you get stuck and need to restart a stage you can press 'R'. Lives are shown as a bunch of hearts in the top left and your score is shown in the top right. The titular tower is shown in the middle third of the screen and scrolls up and down as you move back and forth through it.

The key concept of this game is once you start moving you do not stop unless you hit an object designed to block you. Stalactites block you if hit from the side, but kill you if hit directly on their spiky bit. White dotted squares transform into blocks after you pass over them. Diagonal mirror type blocks deflect you around corners. Double arrow blocks bounce you back where you came from. You need to collect all the spinning coins to complete the stage. Dots are collected for points and also give you a hint as to the route you should take through the stage to complete it. Blue blocks are the stage exits which flash once all coins have been collected.

There are obstacles which you must time correctly to get past - such as bats and lasers, whose turrets are also treated as block objects. On some stages there is a green alter ego of yourself which you can select by pressing the fire button.

On these stages both you and your alter ego must find the flashing tower exits. Your alter ego can also be used as a block object. There is no time limit to complete the stages, so you have plenty of time to devise the correct route through each stage

The stages are preset and not created randomly like the game this is based on. This is actually my personal preference. I'm not a fan of randomly generated stages. The graphics really are effective considering they are mostly of the tiny 8x8 default speccy character size. The towers backgrounds are of the dark blue on black variety and look quite nice, but even better are the multi-coloured blocks that make up each stage.

Your guys leave a white streak behind them when they move, which I think is a pretty cool effect too.

Audio consists of a decent title tune, a familiar instrumental track, Popcorn by Hot butter, in-game, for ten stages anyway before changing to something else less recognisable and some suitable spot effects which could be heard clearly without drowning out the tunes.

Nothing to indicate which stage you've reached.

Borrowed a fairly unique concept, acknowledged it and improved upon it. It's a fun game, addictive too. Overall, really impressive game for the ZX Spectrum. Great work guys!