Today’s game is an early CGA game originally made for IBM in 1984 by D.P. Leabo and A.V. Strietzel. It was included on software sampler disks that came with many IBM PCs. You play as Freddy who has to rescue all the road runners before the maintenance bots gone rogue harm them. It’s a little bit like Lode Runner, but has a number features that make it different. I saw LGR playing it on a video where he was unboxing a NOS IBM PC and thought it looked interesting.
Being an early IBM PC game, the only graphics supported are CGA, primarily as the other standards hadn’t arisen yet. It runs on the slowest of IBM machines, so there is no scrolling and each room is the size of a screen. Performance on an old 4.77Mhz machine should be quite reasonable with perhaps a little graphical flicker. The game timing works independently of the CPU, so faster machines can play with out issue. Artistically the graphics are quite well drawn for CGA, although you will notice everything is generally a combination of two colours in stripes. This was for use with composite monitors that were capable of showing 16 colours. I can’t show what it would have looked like because dosbox doesn’t display this particular program in its composite emulation mode. PC speaker sound is used for similar reasons, there just wasn’t anything else at the time. The short snippets of music and sound effects are surprisingly quite charming, and suite the game quite well.
The game play has some common ground with Lode Runner, you have to collect the road runners rather than gold and the levels consist mostly of platforms and ladders. There is a time limit for each screen, and you can burn holes in some floors in much the same way, but the enemies (maintenance robots) don’t fall in, they stop and wait for the floor to reappear. On the other hand there are some significant differences. The robots are much less aggressive in their pursuit, and move significantly slower. The levels are larger than a single screen and you use doors to travel. White doors teleport you to the other white door on the screen and are an excellent way of avoiding being caught. Magenta doors travel to other screens within the level, once you collect all the road runners on a screen a second magenta door appears. You only finish a level once all the screens are cleared of road runners and the power-ups that freeze the robots.
When it came to the game controls I was quite lost at first, as there is basically no documentation with the game telling you how to play. I managed to work out basic movement fairly quickly, as they are just the arrow keys, but it took some time to find out how to jump and make holes in the floor. This left me puzzled as there were road runners I couldn’t reach without using these features. You jump by pressing the space bar and left or right, which will jump over a one tile gap. Pressing space bar on its own will dig a hole in the floor in front of Freddy, as long as it’s a floor where that is possible. Once I learned the controls they worked quite well, just the lack of documentation made it hard. The other main issue is that Freddy basically only moves in whole tile increments. If you release the key whilst he is half way between tiles he will keep going until completely on the next tile. This only really caught me out at the edges of platforms as I’d overshoot and fall off the edge.
The level design is generally fairly good, there aren’t many areas where you can get trapped by a single bot. Although if you set the difficulty level to normal or hard there are more bots chasing you which is significantly harder. The bots behave differently to the bad guys in Lode Runner in a way which makes it harder. They spread out and cover a larger area of the screen. Where the Lode Runner bad guys can be bunched together with some clever movement, effectively making them easier to avoid. Luckily you have a couple of tools in avoiding the bots, such as digging holes, using doors (when you can reach them), and the dots that freeze the bots.
I’d say Freddy’s Rescue Roundup is a bit of a hidden gem despite IBM making it public domain and the fact it was distributed with IBM PCs. Most of the usual places I look for DOS games didn’t have it, but it can still be found on some abandonware sites . It could be because of its age, it’s not as well remembered, either way it’s certainly interesting and still quite fun to play. If you happen to own an old PC with CGA and possibly a composite monitor this is worth giving a go.
sparcie 
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