Hassle Castle

You are lost in the catacombs of Lladnar Castle, twenty levels down, with 100 energy and 12 spells. Climb the stairs and find the way out before the castle's demons and monsters finish you. Any move can bring a wandering monster. At a door you can listen, ask for help to learn the strength of whatever waits inside, go in or leave; the cells are your only source of energy, spells and gold. A fight costs you the monster's energy, and if it has more than you, you die. A spell may destroy it, and a failed spell can be cast again. Retreat and you drop a level, and the monster may chase you anyway. Walls drop rocks, stairs down lead away from the exit, a coward's retreat can open a trap door, and an elevator can lift you several levels at once. Hard by design: careful play escapes only a few times in a hundred.

The ColecoVision version draws every room as a perspective corridor with its doors, stairs and passages, and adds 13 large monster pictures for the original's 101 encounters, tinted in the colours the original printed their names in. The original's story is kept as The Legend (20 pages), joystick menus replace the letter keys, and "Lladnar's March" plays on the title. The original crashed with OUT OF MEMORY after 118 to 158 moves, because GOTOs left its subroutines without a RETURN; that is fixed here.

Controls: the joystick moves through the menus and the button chooses.

ColecoVision version credited in the source to Claude (an AI made by Anthropic) for Amy Studio, in Amy, the language by Amy Bienvenu, 2026: a faithful adaptation of the original program. From RUN magazine's Special Edition ReRUN Game Pak: original Commodore 64 BASIC program by Fred S. Randall. The author's postal address and phone number in the original listing are left out. This is a modern homebrew adaptation, not a commercial Coleco release.