PrinceWatercress plays Towering Inferno - The Longplay

Now for one last game on Game Mode 1. See you next time.

Part 1 | Part 2

Here's a fun little diddy from U.S. Games for the Atari 2600. In this game (which isn't related to the movie called The Towering Inferno from the 1970s, strangely), you're rescuing people from a building one floor at a time.

You'll need to use the fire button to fire the fire hose up or down to take out the flames and you'll need to get to the white square at the top, then get back to the bottom and get out. If you can do it in time, you'll be able to get to the next floor, and you'll have less and less time the further up you go.

The flames can give you a hard time. The big ones take more water to take out than the small ones, and you can only fire the water from the fire hose up or down. Also, the flames jiggle around with seemingly no rhyme or reason - it's very random! If you get burned, you'll be taken back to the bottom of the screen to start the floor over. Also, if a flame is inside a wall, you cannot put it out; it has to be out in the open to be extinguished. 

Also, the hostages act as a timer. If the hostage meter in the upper-left corner flashes white, you're about to lose a hostage. Getting four hostages off the floor is very tough, and you'll have to be super quick to do it. (Good luck not getting yourself inadvertently stuck in a wall on the way forward and back!) The more hostages you have when you leave a floor, the more bonus points (twenty-five points for each hostage) you'll get before heading to the next one. You'll get a repetitive beep when you're on the last hostage, but good luck getting to the bottom and getting far enough to the right to leave the floor in time if that happens. If you lose all the hostages, the game is over no matter how many firemen you have in reserve. Speaking of which, you also have four firemen that are replenished when you clear a floor, and if you lose them all, the game is over. Oh, and if you rescue the hostages and get hit by a flame in any way, you have to rescue the hostages again.

When you get past the ninth floor of a building, you'll fly off to a new building of a different color where the whole game starts over again at a slightly higher difficulty.

And that's just Game Mode 1!

In Game Mode 2, pressing the reset button lets you continue from the floor where you lost with the same score. This is cool if you want to see all of the possible building colors.

Game Mode 3 is a practice mode where you can repeat a floor in case you die. You don't keep your score, but you do get a chance to get better and better with later parts of the game.

Game Mode 4 is the regular two-player mode, and plays the same way as Game Mode 1.

Game Mode 5 is also a two-player mode, except players alternate between floors. If any player dies on a floor, they get sent back to Floor 1 of the current building.

Game Mode 6 is the same as Game Mode 5, but players can repeat any floor that they die on.

Game Mode 7 is a more forgiving version of Game Mode 4. If either player completes a floor, both players advance, making this mode a true alternating cooperative mode.