Castle Adventure

In my younger years [1] I played a computer game called Golden Wombat. As it turns out, Golden Wombat was a renamed and illegal distribution of a game called Castle Adventure.[2] The graphics are simple white ASCII characters on a black background. You're never told why you're in this castle nor why you're trying to escape—you just have to figure out how. Along the way you pick up treasures and confront a variety of monsters.[3]

You can download the original game for free here (scroll to the bottom). But keep a few things in mind. First, this game was written for DOS, so you'll need a DOS emulator if you're using a different operating system.[4] Second, this game was published in 1984, when computers were much slower. Thus I recommend you use a DOS emulator which will allow you to slow down the processing speed, such as DOSBox.[5] Otherwise the monsters will kill you almost before you've even noticed that they're attacking you.

I won't help you beat the game, since that should be pretty simple.[6] But I will give you this map:

 (click for larger version) [7]

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Notes:

[1] Apparently I was still impressionable then. It's because of this game that to this day I struggle to spell the word corridor correctly (the game spells it cooridor, which I'm always inclined to do).

[2] What actually makes it illegal is that Castle Adventure was distributed for free as Shareware. The company Keypunch Software copied it and sold it for profit, which they had no legal right to do. So there should be no guilt whatsoever for downloading Castle Adventure or Golden Wombat.

[3] In fact, for some reason if you save the game and then load it again at a later time, extra monsters pop up. Not only that, but they're no longer demons, ogres, snakes, bats, and spiders—they're 8s, 9s, 11s, and 15s. Go figure.

[4] An emulator is just a program which allows you to run software designed for one system on a system it wasn't originally designed for. There are also emulators which allow you to play Nintendo games on your PC or to run Windows on a Mac.

[5] You can download it for free, here. It is available for many different operating systems, including Windows for PCs and Unix for Macs. Once you've installed DOSBox (and downloaded Castle Adventure), run the program. Type mount C C:/ followed by the directory you downloaded the game to. For example, I downloaded the game to my desktop. So I typed mount C C:/Users/Matt/Desktop/CastleAdventure. Then you type dir which will show you the files in the CastleAdventure folder. Then you type castle.exe to run the game. (Unfortunately you have to go through this entire ritual every time you play.) At this point you can hit ctrl + F11 to slow down the emulation and ctrl + F12 to speed it up.

[6] If you must, cheat though, start here.

[7] The red-to-blue lines indicate stairs. The red end is down, the blue end is up. Put another way, red:blue::down:up (this isn't true for colored objects, like a red bed, though).

Image attribution:  

Castle Adventure screenshot is available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CastleAdventure1.png.