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"Hudson's Battle Lode Runner bears many similarities to their Bomber Man games."
Action puzzle game by Hudson, inspired by Broderbund's old game (I played it on C64, woot), using the graphical stylings of Hudson's Bomber Man series (see entry 571) for some super-cute, highly distinct little lode running fellows.
Lots of modes here, mainly single-player Puzzle mode, with I don't know how many tricky monster-infested levels in which you still have to get all the gold and get out before the monsters get you or you get trapped in a hole made by your own drilling acid. Fun! These are some tricky layouts, too.
Then you've got your Battle modes. One lets you play against CPU players (and these aren't too bright, I had all four jump in to a single hole of mine once, just for the heck of it), but really Battle is meant to happen against other players, and you can multitap up to five people in on the action. It's a little weird, since you essentially have to drop acid right underneath someone's feet to get them trapped, but Hudson has supplied some inventive and destructive powerups to shake things up a bit. There's also a variant where the players have to escape from monsters infesting the maze.
Anyway, it's super-cute, as solid puzzle-action as you can imagine, and multiplayer, though I haven't tried it with real people yet, should be pretty frantic. |
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| | | | Oh yeah, and there's an Edit mode where you can whip together your own custom levels, and even (I didn't try this) save them to system memory. Neat. |
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| | | Okay, I've now played this three-player, and unfortunately it was not very fun. It is possible, of course, that we were playing it wrong, but the problem seemed to be that it really isn't very fun to drill holes and wait for people to fall into them--because given the choice, you can just stand still. Of course, monsters will come along and give chase, but only in very slow and stupid fashion, and the multiplayer mazes are designed in a very open way that makes it easy to escape from the silly AI. There are lots of powerups you can get, but they don't make the levels much more fun (I can now drill two acid holes at once! Wow!).
Single-player, however, still seems pretty solid. |
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In Mednafen.
I'm pretty sure I played Lode Runner on C64 or something back in the day, briefly. I don't remember being able to stand on CPU characters' heads and have them push you up ladders! So, I guess that's kind of neat. Also how the shadows cast by the platforms update when you dig holes in the platforms, nifty effect there.
It's cute and all a slightly dingy way but the basic Lode Runner gameplay still doesn't quite get me. Maybe I'm phobic of being trapped in my own holes--I had to stop playing Mr. Driller games too. : PPP
In BLR there's a lot of slow re-traversals and manipulating the loopy AI. I'm not a patient puzzle player and kept spamming Mednafen's fast-forward. = P
The China stages seem a bit stereotype-y, but what do I know.
Oh yeah not thrilled by the invisible trap doors in the second set of stages! Although, according to Wikipedia, the original Lode Runner had trap doors too; the original also had standing on guards' heads--this is how you run over a guard who's fallen in a hole, after all--but Wikipedia doesn't mention guards in the original ever pushing the player upward to clear a gap in a ladder, as they did here. (Wikipedia DOES mention that in the original, some stages require you to use a FALLING guard as a stepping-stone! = o)
The original 1983 Lode Runner's gameplay was very similar to that of Universal's 1980 Space Panic, considered the first platform game. (Wikipedia adds that the games were originally called "climbing games"--both Space Panic and 1981's Donkey Kong--and Lode Runner, for that matter--start you at the bottom of the screen, with ladders leading up to platforms above. That label would also have included the 1980 game Crazy Climber (which ALSO had a giant ape ; ).)
The original Lode Runner was a huge hit on 8-bit computers--top seller in '83 in US, 300K sold by '84, and by '85, an equal number of sales in Japan! Japan really ran with it: Hudson Soft's NES version sold 3 million copies worldwide--2 million in Japan! And way more Lode Runner games have come out than I'd thought, particularly in Japan, where it had SIX arcade releases--by Irem and even shmup mavens Psikyo--and numerous console releases through about 2003, and even new handheld and mobile Lode Runner games through about 2006.
(The dungeon crawler series I mentioned that like Lode Runner made an even bigger hit in Japan than when it started in the US is Wizardry.)
Battle Lode Runner is 1993, and emphasizes multiplayer modes. A 1990 Pack-In-Video game, Lode Runner - Lost Labyrinth, is a more conventional-looking Lode Runner game. |
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