Rainbow Islands: Towering Adventure is a tough sell. It’s a remake of a Taito “classic” that I haven’t played. Apparently the original was something of a spiritual sibling of Bubble Bobble. You can see the resemblance: Towering Adventure follows an upward action similar to Ice Climbers, an inverse of Bubble Bobble’s descent into a pink-and-blue pastel pit of peril. Instead of little blue and green dragons who jump incredibly slowly and shoot bubbles along a horizontal axis, Towering Adventure features two vanilla white dudes who jump incredibly slowly and shoot rainbows along a horizontal axis. This is where the familial resemblance ends.
This remake is a mess. After telling the game to start, you’re instantly thrown into a Kafkaesque hell of user-experience design. The game occurs within a 4:3 sliver of your expensive hi-definition television screen. Bounding this playable area are two bars. The bar on the right delivers information such as your current altitude and vertical location in a mini-map of the level. On the left lives the UI equivalent of Tetsuo: a massive bubble on top, with icons representing... something, your “Rainbow Jump” “level,” three bars for your speed, “rate,” and “range,” and probably something else I’m forgetting. Oh, right: the time you’ve got left to complete the stage.
Yes, this is a game that replaces the health bar with a countdown. You’ve got four minutes to reach the end of the stage. Collecting gems from downed enemies extends the timer. Getting hit, by anything, reduces the timer by 30 seconds. There are these massive robots following you up the tower. See, there’s an evil jetpack-toting scientist who doesn’t believe in rainbow magic and the comet who lives on top of the tower. He wants to kill the little white boy you control for the crime of childhood wonderment. But if the timer runs out, it’s not like the robot catches up to you or anything.
No, you just die. Like Mario circa 1983. So maybe this is just a direct carry-over of the mechanics from the original game, where something incongruous like that made sense to people. But they couldn’t have made it so that, if the timer runs out, the giant robot catches up to you and eats you?
You’ve got two buttons at your disposal: A and B. One of those jumps, and the other shoots a rainbow. If you jump, shoot a rainbow, and then move in the direction you just shot, you can kind of piggyback onto it. You don’t actually want to try to platform on the level geometry: the jumping is so slow, the hit detection so poor, and the collision map so not actually matched to the graphical assets that, most of the time, you’ll end up flopping slowly down to a platform you left three seconds ago. This is especially true for one of the game’s distinct pleasures: trying to beat a level in under a minute by speed-jumping onto your own rainbows in rapid succession. There’s even an achievement for that, which is how I figured out how to actually have fun here. It turns the game into something more like a shmup--progressing rapidly upward without running into a robot or a robotic bug.
To be fair, the rainbow is a superior projectile to the bubble. When enemies drop gems in Bubble Bobble, it’s a pain to scurry over and retrieve them. The rainbows, on the other hand, can be disintegrated into little stars by jumping up into them or pressing down when standing atop them. This stardust will collect power-ups and time gems when it hits them; it also kills the bad guys. The enemies in Towering Adventure drop a lot of power-ups that charge your rate, range, and speed bars. These depreciate over time, meaning you’ve got to constantly collect them in order to remain potent. This is especially important toward the end of each level, because the only way to hurt a boss robot is to cause stardust to fall on its weak point. If your range is too low, it’s really difficult to hurt them.
Causing stardust damage is somewhat superior to direct rainbow attacks against common enemies, because the former method drops larger time gems and a number of diamonds that correspond to the color of the enemy defeated. Collecting the full spectrum of diamonds summons a comet, which flies around the screen eliminating all threats. This is especially useful at the end of the level, where (if timed correctly) the comet can almost instantly destroy a boss. Of course, you don’t have to kill the boss. You can simply platform your way to the top of a level to complete it. This will rob you of a valuable power-up and time gem reward, but until you’ve played for awhile it’s somewhat unlikely that you’ll beat two levels in a row anyway. Killing every boss also unlocks the “good ending” of the game, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Tangential complaints aside, Rainbow Islands: Towering Adventure is a game fundamentally at odds with itself. You’ll only get hurt if you ascend the tower too quickly, but ascending the tower quickly is the sole pleasure derived from the experience. The timer is always ticking, but it’s not realistically going to empty unless you get hit. Even an unskilled player can easily complete the game by taking her time. At that point it becomes an exercise in agonizingly slow, careful climbing with little to offer in terms of reward, mastery, or positive feedback.
Perhaps the greatest offense is the inclusion of XBL avatars for challenge and time trial modes, while forcing the player to take control of a poorly-modeled white male for the game proper. This boy has no personality or story, and we have no investment in his well-being separate from our desire to keep the game going.
Who is this game for? It’s difficult to tell. Retro gamers will no doubt prefer to play the original Rainbow Islands. Those new to the game probably won’t care for how archaic the primary mechanics have become. We could say it’s a kid’s game because of its short length and ease of play, but I’m fairly certain that even the youngest of children would find this thing clunky and uninspired. The twelve-year olds currently handing me my ass in Modern Warfare 2 would probably laugh at that last sentence. This game is a curiosity purchase--something for achievement grubbers, the idle rich, and Rainbow Islands fans with a naive trust in the Taito of their youth. Is it possible that this game is camp? Might it be reclaimed as an allegory for the upward struggle toward the recognition of equal rights for gay males?
In the face of the current glut of quality original content and massively-reworked ports available on XBLA, Towering Adventure is hard to recommend. It's available now for 800 Microsoft points.
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Playthrough: Seven out of ten story levels completed; challenge and time trial modes played for at least an hour each. Multiplayer not attempted.
Disclosure: A digital copy of the complete game was provided for review by Taito Corporation.
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