Some time last month, the news broke on the UK:Resistance forum that there was going to be a new Druaga game, and it was going to be called "The Nightmare Of Druaga."

"Pah," snorted one of the regulars. "The nightmare of Druaga started in 1984."

That pretty much sums up how most people in the west feel about Namco's 1984 legend-cum-liability, The Tower Of Druaga. There's a particular kind of obsessive gamer which is often compared to autistics. The difference is that when autistics feel overloaded with how awful and impenetrable the world is, they hurt themselves by biting, cutting, hitting themselves, et cetera. When gamers like me feel overloaded with the sheer waves of blah being produced in today's games market, we hurt ourselves by playing Tower of Druaga.

Where to start for the uninitiated? Do you remember back when the Game Boy, Megadrive, SNES etc were first kicking off, and it seemed like every sitcom running had to have an episode where one of the characters got a video game console (which would invariably be running with the wrong sound effects playing in the background and no cartridge plugged into the machine)? Remember how it would always be the same joke, something along the lines of "Yeah, you need to find the potion in the secret room on the twelfth floor by turning round eight times, but it won't work unless you have the magic buttplug from the ruins of Zard in world 2-5"? TOD is exactly like that. It's like all the worst stereotypes of gamer spoddiness distilled by an evil genius into a sophisticated form of brain torture. It's everything you were ever laughed at for in the playground over playing videogames.

The basic aim of the game is simple - recover the Blue Crystal Rod (which made an appearance in Soul Calibur), rescue Princess Ki and defeat Druaga, not necessarily in that order. This boils down to sixty puzzles, the solutions to which are not indicated or even hinted at in any way. On one level it might be as simple as to kill the monsters. On another to simply stand still for ten seconds. Another, kill the monsters in a certain order. In short, you have to figure out practically everything different you could ever do with a four directional joystick and a fire button (except on the floor where the solution is to press the 1 PLAYER START button).

Things are complicated by the fact that some puzzles are unnecessary while others are totally vital if you intend to see the end sequence. Without the Jet Boots from floor 2, Prince Gil will walk at half speed for the entire game. The hyper gauntlets from floor 26 (along with the rest of the top level armour from the game) will allow you to survive the final battles of the game with much greater ease, but without the gauntlets from floor 10 they will not appear and without the magic balance from floor 24 they will turn into the evil gauntlets and prevent you from drawing your sword for the rest of the game. Without the book from floor 28, all the doors in the game will turn invisible. Without the ruby mace from floor 57, the final boss will be invisible. Without the Blue Crystal Rod, invincible.

Then there are the things put in out of sheer sadism to make the game even more of a nightmare. The floor where the puzzle is that there is no puzzle. The floor where the chest is empty. The floor where solving the puzzle scores you a potion which turns out to be poison (you have no way of knowing this until you keel over some time later, and even then you might not put two and two together). The floor where there are two doors, and one's just painted on the wall. Assuming you manage to hack and puzzle your way through all of this, however, the last three areas will send you home with your human spirit in a matchbox. Floor 58 is where you meet the goddess Ishtar, only it's actually one of Druaga's four henchmen (the Succubus) in disguise, and she'll kill you outright if you approach her. Floor 59 is where Druaga lives, but he will only come out when his last three bodyguards are defeated and they're practically invincible. Try to leave the floor without defeating Druaga and you will be "ZAPPED" - sent back down the tower with all your good items stripped from you. (One Japanese writer suggested that every Druaga player should commemorate their "Baptism of first ZAP"; mine was commemorated with a prolonged session of alcoholism and self-harm. You can still see the scars - they're right there next to the scars of second and third zap.) Upon casting Druaga down the player is finally confronted with the final room where Ki and the real Goddess Ishtar are located. Of course Ishtar looks exactly like the Succubus that just killed you, so naturally you draw your sword and charge.

ZAP.

Cut to the present. I finally finished TOD this year, and one would think that some respite was deserved - if only for having taken a mere 20 years to clock the bugger. Naturally someone up there still hates us, though, because last month saw the release of The Nightmare Of Druaga from Arika and Chun Soft. Yes, you heard right, Namco had nothing to do with this game. Good thing too - to date, all of Namco's attempts at fan service for the Druaga crowd have ranged from woeful to horrifying. First they gave us The Return Of Ishtar, which is still (as far as I'm aware) the only "Simultaneous two player ONLY" game to date. Play it alone and you have to work both joysticks yourself. Even by Namco's standards of off-the-wallness, that's the worst idea since Ewe Boll. Then we had The Dungeon of Druaga, the Game Boy's... what? Card game? RPG? Simulation? Does anyone know WHAT the hell that thing was, apart from worse than bum cancer? Finally we had The Quest Of Ki, a platform game featuring a heroine so mind-blowingly pathetic that the only way to make her duck under a lethal fireball was to cause her to walk into a wall, which would cause her to fall over clutching her head in agony. Bubbles had a more pro-active main character than The Quest Of Ki. If it became known that Namco were making a new Druaga, ominous thunder would have been heard in the skies.

This is all pretty much characteristic of Namco, though. They take a game that people are hopeless fanatics over, and then they see just how much they put up with. TOD is like their personal testing ground for their experiments to discover just how difficult and embarrassing you can make it to like a series before people give up and go home. Thankfully they seem to be bored with that game, though, because after 20 years of tooth-gnashing, Arika have finally come up with the goods for us poor, hungry tower-climbers.

The first thing to note about Nightmare of Druaga is that it's more a re-imagining of TOD than a sequel. That is to say, it's another Fushigi No Dungeon game with Druaga shoehorned into the box instead of Chun Soft's other cash cows Dragon Quest (Torneko no Daiboken) and Final Fantasy (Chocobo`s Mysterious Dungeon). If you've ever played a Fushigi No Dungeon game you'll know almost exactly what to expect. If not, they are monty haul dungeon crawls presented in pseudo-turn based action where the monsters take one step for every step you take. At some point the player must make the decision that it would be foolhardy to continue and head back to town in order to manage their inventory, store their treasure, sell their booty and pay for new weapons to be smithed. It's simple stuff, and everyone from the fans of the FND series right back to aficionados of Moria, Rogue, Hack and Larn will be right at home.

In this case, though, Chun Soft has gone the extra mile to make this look and feel like a new Druaga. Every floor features not one but two obscure puzzles to reward you with hidden chests. Combined with this gameplay element is some beautiful character artwork, new 3D designs, backplot for the characters and a complete orchestral rearrangement of all the original TOD's music which is quite frankly like having your ears gently stroked by nubile, velveteen sprites. Is it a new Tower of Druaga? No it's not; the rewards for playing it as a Druaga game rather than a FND game are helpful but by no means vital to finishing your quest. The game makes up for this as a Druaga experience, however, by being amply solid in the gameplay department - this is a tough game where you can easily find the tide turning against you in seconds due to an error of judgement, and if you die in the dungeon you lose EVERYTHING you were carrying. When you've spent days smithing the stats and attributes of your weapons and armour up, "Choked" is simply not the word to describe the emotions this can provoke.

What we have, then, in final analysis is a product that succeeds in every department in which it sets out to please. The gameplay is fun and addictive. The graphics are pretty, featuring a main character who is always wearing a precise visual representation of all the equipment he is wearing. The sound is beautiful, with those who pre-ordered the game receiving a 40 minute album of background music. Finally, not only is it a great piece of Druaga fan service but it's tough and anal enough to keep the kind of person who plugged away at the original until it was finished smiling happily. It's not another Tower of Druaga, but to be perfectly honest, who would want one?


[And if you do want another Tower of Druaga, simply press up up up up up up left left left left right right right before starting the game - there's a whole extra tower for you right there on the original cartridge. You nutter.]