Submission #7605: nymx's C64 Royal Rescue in 02:09.90

The kingdom is in a royal mess. It's almost time for your wedding, but the princess is nowhere to be found. Word has it that she has been kidnapped by a fire-breathing dragon and taken to its lair-the dreaded Dark Castle.

Hmm, sounds like the king is behind this one. But you have no choice; you must fulfill your destiny and prove yourself worthy of his daughter's hand. So, off you ride on yet another perilous adventure.

In Royal Rescue. you search the Dark Castle for the princess and attempt to rescue her from the fiery dragon. The castle is a labyrinth of rooms connected by halls, doorways, and stairs. Each room is filled with treasures, keys, and the keepers of the castle-the deadly Pink Marshmallows. So get ready. If you're not quick and quick-witted, you'll soon find yourself well done!

The article for this game can be found on page 50 of Issue 79 (January 1990): https://archive.org/details/1990-01-computegazette/page/n51/mode/2up

Because of my choice to TAS Astro-Panic!, in April of 2021, I decided to see if Compute's Gazette had any other interesting and TAS worthy games. Well, in the November 1989 issue, Compute's Gazette started highlighting specific articles and/or games publications with a special status called "Editor's Choice". As you can imagine, these were higher quality than normal submissions for an issue. I ran across "Royal Rescue"...a game that brings back great memories and one of the better publications in the series. It's also a plat-former, which was rare for subscription holders to witness...with a definite ending and screens to explore. One of the reasons I selected this game, is that it had a few spots that were very hard for a human to execute. In fact, there is one spot that I believe is TAS only, where waiting is required by human effort.

Previous Compute's Gazette submissions include:

This game was a fun little effort that mostly was straight forward. Rushing through this too quickly almost hurt me on some opportunities. Thankfully, the experiences I've had from other games allowed me to test ideas out with satisfaction. Even though this game has simple execution, there are some creative ways to cut time. I never thought about these techniques in my youth, but thankfully...I have them now and they paid off. Below, the "Room By Room Description" will outline some of those ideas used to help out.

To have a little more fun with this effort, I decided to create a map. I created this to make sure that I wasn't missing something obvious. The starting point, is just Northwest of the center of the map.

Room 1: Starting point. Nothing special...just in need of a key, to escape this room.

Room 2: Grab key and return

Room 1: Use the key to open the door.

Room 2: With the key, we now have access to the bottom of the room.

Room 3: Routing through one path, to find more keys.

Room 4: The first room with time saving strategies. Here, deaths are used to keep from having to escape the room and circle back around to grab each one. By dying, you are returned back to your original entry point...without loosing current inventory. After all keys are collected, an escape is made quickly to the left.

Room 3: Now that we have some keys, we are able to progress through this room's locked door.

Room 5: This room might be TAS only, in terms of not having to stop. The trick to dodging the Marshmallows, is to enter this room on the left side of the ladder, from Room 3. This trick works because each room has a timer and a static starting point for the enemies. This barely works by one frame, but a Human could possible perform this...if they don't hesitate a single frame.

Room 6: Nothing noteworthy, except we are using another key.

Room 7: Here is a very tough jumping situation. Personally, I am not able to easily perform this jump consistenly; however, practice can certainly show ease of effort. The only run, on YouTube, wasn't able to do it easily either. So, this is the perfect job for a TAS. :)

Room 8: As with all other rooms, this room also has a static pattern for how the Marshmallows start off. For a human, I see that an approaching enemy makes a direction choice nerve racking, due to the uncertainty of avoidance. The climbing pattern is doable by humans though.

Room 9: The teaser room! Here, we see the Princess and her captor.

Room 10: Even though this room has an interesting layout and items for collection, there is no reason to be distracted by anything here. Just get up the ladder and exit to the right. (Yellow bells are extra lives, as if we need them.)

Room 11: This room is a little more daunting, but nothing to worry about. Continue on towards the right.

Room 12: We now are faced with the most severe avoidance of the entire run. Since we cannot open this room's door, we must get past these enemies in order to search for another key. A necessary strategy, is jumping...because the moving floors will subtract from forward movement.

Room 13: Timing is everything, in order to get through this room quickly. Because there are remaining lives, we can collect the key at the cost of dying, saving precious time to escape this room quickly.

Room 12: This is much quicker this time, and our jumping patterns is used to avoid the Marshmallows and place our hero exactly on top of the ladder to prevent delay.

Room 2: A familiar room, from the beginning of our trek. Only this time, we are able to get to a part of the room that we weren't able to before.

Room 1: Our starting point, which we are now able to traverse a pathway that was not previously accessible.

Room 9: The End! We found a way into the dragon's lair. Ending input early, by jump efficiently on each platform to allow our hero to coast to the end.

As usual, I always like to extend an opportunity to DrD2k9 to see if any frames could be found. Well...this time, no improvements could be found. Thank you for you confirmation and interest in trying.

slamo: Claiming for judging.

slamo: DrD2k9 did a review of this, so this overall looks good to go. The disk was distributed in a magazine and is easily accessible, so this seems like a good way to handle it. It's fascinating to me that these games were meant to be typed in manually from a magazine. Accepting!

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