This is sort of a follow up to my last feature on Deadly Towers. I stumbled upon this speed run video (78 mb, requires Xvid codec) of a guy beating said game in 18 minutes and 46 seconds on the site NES Videos (scroll down to Deadly Towers on that page). NES Videos is a cool archive of tool-assisted console game movies. What are tool-assisted game movies, you ask? Well, they are attempts to find the quickest possible way to complete a game, but they use emulator save states to achieve as perfect as possible a performance, and clever video editing to present a seamless viewing experience (making it appear that the entire run was done in one sitting). Ideally, I suppose the time-attack competitors that make these movies are looking for the theoretical “best” or “fastest” way to complete a given video game, sometimes with different constraints. They’re lots of fun to watch, so check out some more on the NES Videos site.

Anyway, as I mentioned before, all the dungeons that Ben Johnson mapped (presented in our last article) are completely superfluous to successful Deadly Towers completion. And as a great illustration of this fact, the player in the video doesn’t enter any one of them at all. This video makes it look like DT is way easier than it is. But give it a play yourself and get frustrated / mystified like the rest of us. 🙂

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