The game I chose for my report was Namco’s “Tower of Druaga”, a top-down action RPG where you take control of a knight and must fight through a set of 60 mazes to rescue a princess from the demon Druaga. The core mechanics barrows heavily from titles such as “PacMan” (originally utilizes the same console hardware) and has elements from “Mappy” as well. The reason I chose to play this game was first: Tower of Druaga was one of my first video games experience, as it was one of the titles you could select from the PlayStation One game: Namco Museum. My second reason was that I was rather fond of the series because I particular enjoyed the Japanese animated adaptation of it, while not entirely relevant to the original source material, it definitely provided a great incentive for a nostalgia trip.
The core game mechanics are intuitive as you continue
playing. Besides start/select you essentially are regulated to your standard
up-down-left-right controls AND your “sword” button. The initial enemies were
easily dispatched by just skewering them with your sword, but as the game
progressed more difficult enemies will appear. Such enemies will include those
that will fire projectiles with you, which will force you to turn your character
to actually utilize this shield. I found this mechanic interesting as it circumvents
the requirement for the player to actually use another button for input. In the
context of the original hardware I can imagine this mechanic must have actually
saved costs on the manufacturing side as it meant less maintenance for each
arcade unit, as shown below:
As someone who games a lot, I’ll confess I wasn’t particular
stimulated by the gameplay. With the overstimulation of electronic
entertainment of the past decade, my spoiled history of gaming has made me find
the whole game boring. I can appreciate its significance though, for its
limitation of its medium it was rather innovative in its capacity. Hence it was
an enriching experience nonetheless.
