One of my proudest gaming achievements happened incredibly recently, though it was in a very old game.

What’s the achievement, I hear you ask? Perhaps completing a game entirely, or defeating a particularly troublesome boss?

No, the achievement in question was simply completing the first stage of Atari’s 1988, Atari 7800-exclusive title, Tower Toppler.

Now, I had a lot of trouble when first playing Tower Toppler, and at least when I started, it wasn’t the game’s fault. Playing it via the Atari 2600+ console, the emulation wasn’t perfect, and it made seeing platforms or being able to tell what was or wasn’t actually sticking out of the side of the stage’s rotating tower was next to impossible. Even the game’s text on the title screen was a mess of pixels.

However, once I updated the firmware on the Atari 2600+, it all became much clearer. Even the Tower Toppler title on the opening screen was impressively three dimensional.

So, with the visibility hurdle out of the way, it’d be much easier, right? Wrong!

Though I could now see what I was doing, actually reaching the top of the very graphically impressive (considering the hardware, at least), rotating tower with my weird frog thing was still subject to me wrestling with unresponsive controls, a fire/jump setup that ignores the fact that the 7800 controller has two buttons, overly precise requirements for entering doorways, annoying enemies, frustrating (and often just plain unfair) level design and a tight time limit.

It’s a lot. So when you do finally conquer the tower, it really feels like you’ve achieved something. When you then enter a brief, weird side scrolling level in order to get to the next tower to topple, it still feels pretty exciting. Especially when you do this first time, you feel like A GAMING GOD.

And then you play the second tower, and you realise that no, the level design and unfair placement of invisible traps and irritating enemies wasn’t just a trial by fire for the first stage; this is the game.

I guess the fact that I persisted, and reached level 2 is, a testament to the game having at least some appeal, otherwise I would have just not repeatedly tried. There’s no denying that Tower Toppler could definitely have done with some smarter, fairer level design, however, and its extreme, brutal difficulty will definitely be a turn off for many players.

Also, do bear in mind that if you are intending on playing Tower Toppler on the Atari 2600+, you will need to go through the currently convoluted update process (and you’ll also need to have a forum account at Atari Age, for some reason!).