Castle of Doom is a Virtual Boy homebrew game created in 2011, and it was by VirtualChris and published by Aegis Games. The story is that Bob was invited by the King to stay at his castle, but Bob got the day wrong and was accidentally locked inside the castle. Now he has to traverse 16 levels to get out. Fun fact: if you go on the RetroAchievements page for Castle of Doom, you will notice how literally half of the comments on the main page are people calling the game kusoge.

This game is a very basic platformer in which you traverse through 16 unique rooms of Doom while avoiding bottomless pits (easily avoided) and bats (of which you only encounter up to two at any given time, so fairly easy to avoid). Hitting a bat warps you bcak to the start of a room All speeds are fixed, so jumping before falling down a pit is no faster than simply walking off the ledge. If there is one thing I can praise this game for, it's that the hitboxes are oddly accurate for homebrew. Bob is a spindly fella with a hitbox to match, so sidling close to enemies is easily achieved. The one problem Bob faces is this; when he touches walls, he immediately starts falling. Why? WHO KNOWS!!! So hugging a wall is not a good idea. You can stay close to one, but holding left or right (depending on the wall) will cause you to plummet to certain Doom. Jumping loses one frame per jump over walking, because Bob freezes in the air for a frame at the peak of his jump. For some reason. Also, walking behind a bat is very slow. To walk without dying without a bat the input sequence is R _ R R _, which is obviously slower than R R R R R, but it is unavoidable sometimes.

Despite all of this, there is a good technique to make the TAS faster: Walking inside platforms. Turns out at the veeeeery top of walls and platforms you can simply walk into them if you press the direction button on a certain frame. This does not work for every platform/wall, and it cannot make you walk straight through walls, but it is still useful. In some levels I clip into the floor so I can walk under certain bats and skip having to wait for them to get out of my way. Also, if I need to go down from a platform, I'll clip in to reduce falling time and land a bit sooner.

However, there are still points where waiting around is required, but as far as I can tell, they are unavoidable. I am still happy with the time achieved. The RetroAchievements page has a speedrun achievement for completing the game under five minutes, so 2 minutes 43 is crazy.

I should probably comment on the "ending". It seems VirtualChris never considered anyone would actually finish this game, so instead the DOOM ROOM loops infinitely. The room number increments by one every time, but I don't think that means the game has content I haven't explored. All the levels are done, I consider that the end. Not 15 levels once and 1 level 85 times (assuming the counter stops at 99)

Oh, and sorry about the squashed encode

Tags: Platform Suggested thumbnail: The bit in Level 8 where I squeeze between two bats

DrD2k9: Claiming for judging.

DrD2k9: Movie file replaced with a 64 frame improvement. Looks fine. Accepting.

Spikestuff: DOOM~!