Tower Toppler

In this game you have to help a cute little green animal switch off some kind of "evil" mechanism. The "power off switch" is hidden somewhere in high towers. On your way to the target you need to avoid a lot of strange robots that guard the tower.

That sounds all like a normal jump and run game. What makes this game different is that you walk arond the tower which is revolving on the screen, so that you only see the 180° that are currently visible.

The game is a reimplementation of the old game known as Tower Toppler or Nebulus. It was available for PC, Atari, C64. The author was J.M.Phillips and was published by Hewson software. I have seen the PC version on quite a few abandonware sites. But it is only a DOS version and uses ugly graphics.

Here are a few shots of some of the available original versions

Because I really enjoyed this game when it was published I reprogrammed it some years ago using PASCAL. I painted all the necessary graphics on my own (or used POVRAY) and finally got a program that behaves nearly identical if compared with the original.

Some time ago I decided to port this version to LINUX and C using SDL for the graphic and sound output. And here is the result.

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My rating on happypenguin (please rate me there, excpecially, if you like the game):

Downloads

Screenshots

Contact

Documentation

News
19.07.2007	Version 1.1.3 of toppler is now available. The changes include A new mission David1 New translations: Czech, Rumanian, Basque Include the background music within the distribution Thanks to the translators and Davd for his mission. Also thanks to Volker for making crosscompilation possible by providing a simple environment (http://www.profv.de/mingw_cross_env) and by fixing all kinds of things in my build environment that were missing for crosscompilation. I can now generate the Windows binaries and installer completely on Linux without any hassle.
15.2.2006	Oops, the last release has 2 problems: The program was not compilable without SDL-Mixer installed There was a problem in the makefiles that made it stop with an error when trying to install Both problems are hotfixed in a file called toppler-1.1.2a. This is still the same release it just fixes the 2 problems. Only people downloading the source are affected.
13.2.2006	After a long break release 1.1.2 is ready for download. Changes include: Another build system update (by Volker Grabsch). Background music (by Angel Keha). Because the mp3 file is twice as large as the whole game I don't include it in the normal distribution. But you must download it separately. Just put it into the directory with the toppler data files and backround music should play Two new loactisations: Portugese and Swedish. Localisations are not available for the windows binary, sorry. Removed one rare possibility where the green guy could get stuck between tower elements
21.12.2004	Jason has provided a binary for the release 1.1.1. Download from the usual place
20.12.2004	There has been a bug in the windows version after all. So there is now also a 1.1.1 release of the windows binary.
18.12.2004	A small update to Toppler (1.1.1): Last release didn't really add the promised new mission to the source package. The new release also contains updates to the German and French translations and a completely new Finnish translation (Thanks go to Basse and Bill). As the windows version doesn't use translations there is no need to update this package. You can still download the version 1.1.0 and get the right package. There is now also an OSX version of the 1.1.0 release available. Please download it from here
13.12.2004	Finally there is a new version (1.1.0) of Tower Toppler. There are not many new features. A few smaller bugs have been squashed (the toppler could get caught, when an elevator came down and it was too near to it, one meny point wasn't saved) The game features now joystick support For leveldesigner it might be nice to know that they can now create elevators thas pass doors Finally the windows problem with the strange .dll should be fixed The version number change is because I merged the development and the "stable" version so beware there might be bugs that I have just not seen
21.5.2004	Jason Kingan jasonk-NOSPAM-at-toast442.org has provided a new OSX binary
8.2.2004	The latest version 1.0.6 supports translations for all unicode languages. The only thing is to add missing characters to the font. By now the font should contain all the letters that are required by western languages. If you need some more mail me, I'll add them. Additionaly you now get 5000 Points for each life you have left when you finish the last tower.
25.1.2004	Bugfix release 1.0.5. This fixes 2 small bugs that made the french Translation somewhat less usable.
23.1.2004	Frank Wehrsenger has provided rpm's for Suse. I've uploaded them in the download section.
18.1.2004	First version for 2004: this one once again improves the sprites of the green dude. Now they are smoothed and alpha blended at the edge. This version also adds internationalisation. Currently French and German are supported. Please report errors, typos and wrong layout of texts in these languages as it's possible we've overlooked a few of them.
10.10.2003	There it is another bugfix patch. It fixes a problem with hardware surfaces that lead to wrong colors on some hardware surfaces and a bug in the menu system that made a wong background appear in the timeout screen. It also adds a menu entry to skip the bonus levels.
9.6.2003	Yet another small update. This time it contains better graphics for the green dude. Also a fix for a bug that crashed the game in no sound mode in the bonus game was made. Btw. I'm sorry but I can no longer provide RPMs, I've switched to Gentoo and no longer have rpm on my disc. If someone is interested in creating packages he/she can contact me.
16.4.2003	This is not really new, but in fact quite old. Somebody has published a security problem for Tower Toppler. We had contact a while ago and found out that he used an old version of the game. The buffer overflow has been removed, without me knowing about, since version 0.99.0 published February this year. So there's no need to worry if you are up to date.

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Other version of the software can be found on the Sourceforge project page.

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Contact

If you find bugs, if you have more levels, suggestions for improvements or if you want to help improve this game don't hesitate to use our mailing list

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Thank yous

Thank you goes to all the people out there who sent me bug reports and praise. But ecspecially to

• Pasi Kallinen for tons of improvements. He coded the menu system, the demos and provided many other features for the game,
• Bastian Salmela for his very nice graphics,
• Clarence Ball for his missions,
• Andreas Wagner for the web page design.

Credits

	The Bonus level graphics and the submarine are modelled and rendered using blender
	Most of the robots and thingies on the tower were rendered using POV-Ray
	The game itself uses the SDL Library to display the graphics and play sounds. (You also need the SDL_Mixer library for the sound output)
	Sourceforge provides the discspace for this webpage.