Tales of the Arabian Nights

Controls:

⬅️➡️⬆️⬇️ Move
🅾️ [Z] Jump / Fire
❎ [X] Skip speech / continue
⬅️on title screen to select the starting stage and check time/score

Story

Guide Imrahil the Kalendar Prince through the perils of many Arabian nights. On certain nights, he must gather golden jugs, engraved with letters, in the correct order to spell out 'ARABIAN' (the platform stages).
At other times, he rides on rafts and flying carpets through Arabia, casting bolts of lightning at his foes. His quest for the princess Anitra is long and difficult - many dangers lurk in the Arabian night!

Remake:

The original game for Commodore 64 "Tales of the Arabian Nights"
(c)1984 Interceptor Micros. Written by Ian Gray.

Differences with original:

• The original game was notoriously difficult and brutal, based on score, you started from the first level and had to redo everything after game-over. This remake lets you visit immediately all stages and -rather than a high score, which is still saved- the aim should be finishing each stage in the shortest time;
• The raft/carpet stages in this remake are not based on time/distance, you have to shoot and hit with lightning bolts the enemies (see the counter "ZAPPED" on top right);
• You gain a new life every 3000 points;
• The deadly genies in this remake will face in the direction they're about to fire their bolt so you can plan your moves (this was particularly needed due to the minimal screen space available in pico8, no time to react otherwise);
• in the last two stages you can actually see Anitra, the young princess to rescue from the Sultan;
• in the original you could fall down from an height of 4 characters, here you can fall from 21 pixels (twice the height of your hero's sprite for reference) you can immediately test this in the first stage, the ship;
• about the "ARABIAN" jugs sequence, in the original you could pick any of the "A" jugs, while in this game there is in fact a visual difference among the "A" jugs: the first one to take is facing left, second center and the third facing right as in the picture below:

Speech:

The original game featured Speech synthesis (SAM). I chose this game basically to try the awesome speech lib Speako8 by @bikibird
The challenging part is the lib and a few speech strings on their own already take ~35% of compressed characters 😮 still worth it.

Note: speech quality on web browser is lower and crackling, it is suggested to download the executable for your operating system.

Music:

The music theme is from Scheherazade, Op. 35 (Festival at Baghdad/The Sea/Shipwreck) by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
Then arranged by Chris Cox in 1984 for the Commodore 64 version
In this game re-arranged as faithfully as possible for Pico 8 by @Heracleum (it took me more than a week 😓)

Credits:

Thanks to:

• again to @bikibird for creating Speako8
• @thisismypassword for creating Shrinko8
• @packbat for precious hints on how to optimise and pack more notes in sfx for a 3-minute long music;
• feedback: @pancelor, @thisismypassword
• you for playing the game!