Game:

Tunnels of Doom (1982)

Duration: 2:23:41

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5

Playthrough of the TI 99/4a game Tunnels of Doom using MAME 0.226. I played using fast-forward through most of the game to speed things up, but no savestates or cheats were used.

Tunnels of Doom is a party-based roguelike dungeon crawler. You lead a party of 1-4 characters through a randomly generated dungeon of 1-10 levels, fighting monsters and grabbing treasure, trying to rescue the king and his rainbow orb before time runs out. For when it was made and the hardware it runs on, it's very impressive!

After some failed attempts with a 1-player Hero party, I decided to attempt a run using 4-person squad. I think that's an easier route: While the Hero class is super-strong, a lone hero is often outnumbered 3-to-1, while a squad of 4 faces 6-against-4 odds at the worst.

I used three fighters and a rogue. No wizard meant no ability to use scrolls, but that seemed like an acceptable loss: Although there are some really good scrolls (Haste, Fireball), there are many that are useless (ESP, Find Traps) or bad (Memory Eraser, Mad Scribble). We still have full access to potions, lanterns, touchstones, wands. The rogue still seemed to trigger more chest traps and take more vault damage than a hero; maybe that's because he was under-leveled relative to a solo hero.

Ranged weapons are very effective. You can hit anyone from anywhere, without having to spend turns moving into position. They do good damage, too - crossbow does as much damage as sword. The warball & chain (available at a reasonable price somewhere on level 4) is tied for best damage with the King Sword (a rare drop on late dungeon levels). The big catch is that the warball & chain is useable just once per battle.

Fountains are important, and frustrating. Their effect is random. I'm not sure whether it's a pure random walk, or if it's affected by in-game factors (Luck stat? dungeon level?) It *feels* like their odds are tilted in your favor, most of the time. The fountains don't actually seem to increase or decrease experience (maybe not luck either?), but they do change damage and HP.

This run has some good play (mostly-optimal vault minigames, efficient dungeon running) but also some blunders like trying to flee out 2 exits at once. I ran out of crossbow ammo for some characters at a bad time (far from the level-8 shop, but too far from the level-4 to want to take time to run back). At one point I thought the run was surely doomed, but then managed to get some healing before losing too much time. Skipped exploring a lot of level 9, ran from some nasty level 10 monsters I knew didn't have the king or orb, and managed to pull off a win! After recovering the two prizes you still have to get back out of the dungeon (with boosted wandering monster rate), but once you ascend a floor or two you can coast to victory.

Secret incantations:
mame64 ti99_4 tundoom -ioport peb -ioport:peb:slot2 32kmem -ioport:peb:slot3 speech -ioport:peb:slot6 tirs232 -ioport:peb:slot8 hfdc -flop1 "C:\emu\TI\TIDisk\Tunnels of Doom.TIDisk" -record tod5.inp -window