Tower of Mediocrity is a tower defense game with ncurses and SDL backends.

Note

You should play this music while reading, which is played in the game.

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Click to watch whole the map played

You are in Mediocrity Central and the chatter says that some group is going to invade the Mediocrity Treasury, you job is to define while they crawling through the oddly built and hardly straight passageways through the city.

The following screenshot is of SDL backend, the bad guys are smiling devilishly, and the towers are bold-underline-strikeout icons for font styles as in word processors, WTF?

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The bad guys have three ranks:

a: Aver
Simple marauder, carries 25 MediBucks on him steals 12 MediBucks
c: Caver
A veritable raider, carries 40 MediBucks steals 22 MediBucks
o: Oaver
Sergeant of the *vers. Carries 55 MediBucks steals 30 MediBucks

Your defense is by buying defense towers, hence the game genre, there are also three types:

X: Xowers
Base towers cost 300 MediBucks and do one damage
Y: Yowers
Upgrade 1 towers cost 200 extra MediBucks and do three damage
Z: Zowers
Upgrade 2 towers cost 200 extra MediBucks, do five damage, and shoot significantly slower

Initially, you get 300 MediBuck as fund, which just enough to buy one Xower, that you should place on the longest straight route that the bad guys would go.

The game is not hard to play, quite easy, maybe that’s because it only has three maps. Once you get to know the maps, you know where to put the towers, when to upgrade, and don’t save money because of no carry-over, spend everything.

The background music, Toreador Song from opera Carmen (1875) by Damrosch Orchestra in 1903, was odd when the game just started, but after a few moments, it is quite fitting, especially the noises in the recording. The Toreador Song actually only stars at 1:07. I am sure some where there is a remastered version of this recording, but those noises represent history, without them, a piece precious would be missing.

Tower of Mediocrity was first release on 2009-04-01 (v0.9) by Christopher Nelson, written in C++ with ncurses/SDL under the GPLv3, currently 1.0.1 (2009-07-24).