The Classic PC Gaming Era (1977-1989) - Nebulus (also known as Tower Toppler, Castelian and Kyoro Chan Land)
You may know it by another name, but however you play it, enjoy this cool pseudo-3D game about ascending towers using a neat rotation mechanic.
RELEASE DATE: 1987
DEVELOPER / PUBLISHER: Hewson Consultants / US Gold
PLAYABILITY TODAY: Highly playable
BEST VERSIONS: Commodore 64, Atari ST, Amiga
The best ideas for action games are often the simplest ones, and the idea behind Nebulus (the original European title for a game known by many other) is incredibly easy to grasp: you’re a little green creature named Pogo who wants to get to the top of eight different towers so you can set off a bomb them sink them into the sea. It’s an obvious setup for a platform game, and at first blush, it doesn’t sound very distinctive from dozens of other games with similar premises.
Except Nebulus winds up feeling really different from other platformers because its tower rotates as Pogo walks around it, creating a surprisingly convincing three-dimensional effect that’s further enhanced by the presence of doors that Pogo can enter to get to other sections. This sense of depth, combined with smooth scrolling and some beautifully cartoonish graphics, makes Nebulus a game that still feels surprisingly modern despite being decades old.
Nebulus has very simple controls – you can walk left, you can walk right, you can jump, you can shoot bubbles or you can interact with objects. As you work your way up the tower, you have to avoid enemies (who can knock you down to lower levels) and try to reach the top within the oppressive time limit. For the most part, you simply ascend towers, but there are some side-scrolling interstitial levels where you pilot a submarine and collect fish.
Like most platformers, Nebulus is a trial-and-error game, and were it not for the time limit, the game would be challenging but not difficult. Unfortunately, one variety of enemy has the nasty habit of appearing on the side of the screen and knocking you down at the worst possible times, which means that it’s necessary to learn the layout and timing of the levels to be able to make it to the top before the timer expires. Once you do, Nebulus is a relatively simple game to finish within a half an hour or so, but since there are no continues or level selection screens and a limited number of lives, conquering the game requires skill and patience.
For whatever reason, Nebulus never managed to become a standard in the arcade-style gaming lexicon despite the fact that it was ported to just about every platform available at time, albeit under several different names. While the Commodore 64 version is the classic and the Atari ST and Amiga versions are quite good as well, Nebulus (under various other names) actually plays quite well on MS-DOS and was even later ported to Atari 7800 as Tower Toppler and to the Nintendo Entertainment System and Nintendo Gameboy as Castelian, complete with new side-scrolling levels to replace the underwater travel. There is also a more recent freeware remake called Tower Toppler which plays pretty closely to the original, but I’d argue lacks a lot of its charm.
As Our Series Continues…
In the coming weeks, we’ll talk about arcade action games, 3D games, flight simulators, sports games, gameroom games, puzzle games and so much more.
And while you’ll definitely see some titles from prominent North American publishers like Sierra On-Line, Infocom, Activision, Electronic Arts, Brøderbund, SSI, MicroProse, Lucasfilm Games, Epyx and Sir-Tech in the mix, you’ll also see references to games from the United Kingdom, Australia, France, Spain and Japan.
If you’ve missed the earlier entries in the series, which cover ASCII games, adventure games, wargames, strategy games and role-playing games, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.
Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 1. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!