Version 1.0: Lode Runner

I've been playing the April 2009 Lode Runner game on XBox Live Arcade lately, and it inspired me to go back and take a quick look at Doug Smith's original game for the Apple II, published by Broderbund Software in 1983:

It's a classic 1980's game design, with minimal sound and simple graphics -- bricks, ladders, ropes, and animated stick figures.  The rules are straightforward -- pick up all the gold; avoid enemies and/or dig holes to trap them (and force them to cough up any gold they have picked up along the way); escape using the ladder that appears when all the gold has been collected.  The enemy's chasing behavior is simple -- they first try to match the player's vertical level by climbing or falling, then they run towards the player on the horizontal; knowledge of their approach can be cleverly used against them.

Lode Runner was one of the first games to combine action and puzzle elements successfully, and it's still a fantastic game, even in its original form.  The design is elegant and perfectly suited to the 8-bit hardware generation -- by keeping the animated graphics small and the AI simple, there was plenty of horsepower available to run the game smoothly and cleanly.  The many spin-offs and sequels that followed have generally kept the basic formula intact, and for good reason.  In this screenshot, two Bungeling soldiers are closing in, a third is materializing about halfway up the screen, and I have idiotically created a hole immediately to my right, into which I am about to fall and die when it closes up:

 

I never actually played Lode Runner on the Apple II during its heyday, but it was a solid hit and I remember seeing it on computers at school on occasion.  My first extended time with the game's concept was spent with an ersatz version for the TRS-80 Color Computer, called Gold Runner.  Written by Dave Dies and marketed by Tom Mix Software's Novasoft budget division, it only had 32 levels, compared to the original game's 150, but it was a reasonable facsimile and I had a lot of fun with it.

The game was also a big hit in Japan on the NES and appeared on many consoles there, courtesy of Hudson Soft.  I have played the game on the Wii Virtual Console, in its TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine incarnation as Battle Lode Runner, and on my mobile phone in a less-than-successful port, where the small screen made it too difficult to see what was going on outside the boundaries of the scrolling screen.  Most of the console versions suffer to some degree from the addition of scrolling -- the tiny figures of the original game made it possible to see the entire level at once and plan effectively.  The console versions tend to feature larger, more appealing characters, but it's much easier to run into an enemy in an unexpected location.

Still, the console games are recognizably Lode Runner:

Remaking early games for modern systems can be a challenge -- judging from some recent XBLA releases, it's easy to lose sight of what made them great in the first place.  So I am pleased to tip my hat to Tozai Games' XBLA version, which is nicely rendered in modern 3-D but plays as it should, in 2-D.  There are innovations and enhancements, with more enemy and brick variety than the original could manage.  But none of the changes break the fundamental gameplay, and the puzzle and multiplayer modes are worthy additions.

The controls even work well -- there's no "animation lag" to mess up the tight timing required for many of the puzzle levels, and the imperfect XBox control pad copes acceptably with the four-direction movement.  Best of all, the action fits on one screen, with no scrolling; the camera zooms out for more complex levels, and zooms in to show off the 3-D character models when the size of the layout permits.  None of the layouts are viewed quite as distantly as in the original game -- they are generally more compact, though no less challenging.  And the single player journey plays very much like the classic game -- so much so that I just had to go back and play the original for comparison. 

Verdict?  I still like the original a lot, but I don't think I'm going to attempt to complete all of its 150 levels any time soon -- the XBLA version is providing my Lode Runner fix for the moment.  And if history is any indication, there'll be another one along soon enough.

'Splosion Man Rocks

Having spent much of my recent gaming time in the cerebral realms of the adventure game, I took a break last night and spent a challenging hour with TwistedPixel's downloadable XBLA platformer, 'Splosion Man.  It's a thoroughly modern game from an audiovisual and physics standpoint, but it's a fresh concept that would have worked just as well in the 8-bit era, if only someone had thought of it.  So it's a neo-retro game, without any obvious retro inspiration.


'Splosion Man stars a crazed, hyperkinetic humanoid... uh... explosion, I guess.  He's certainly exploSIVE.  And overflowing with personality -- like a gonzo version of the Max Fleischer-animated Popeye, 'Splosion Man mutters, giggles, yells, jogs, airplanes, and ghoul-walks through the game, and he's obviously having a great time.  And unlike most classic platformer characters, he doesn't confine his self-expression to the idle animation when the player isn't moving him around -- he's always making noise or keeping himself busy, but never at the expense of control.  He seems to be on a mission to escape from some sort of secret lab, while blowing up as many scientists and as much equipment as possible.  Presumably he is the product of some unearthly tampering with nature, so his gleeful havoc is justified.

I'm enjoying this game just as much as he is, but I think my age is starting to show now that I'm a little bit past the halfway point.  It's getting very challenging, demanding serious precision for timing and explosion (jump) placement.  There are lots of chain-reaction sections in the second group of levels, where if the first jump and the second jump aren't timed and placed exactly right, the third jump isn't going to work out and the fourth jump will remain a distant, elusive goal.  Figuring each level out requires observation and experimentation, like a puzzle game, but the real-time action aspect demands near-perfect execution.

If I stay stuck at some point where my reflexes just can't drag me any farther, I won't really regret it -- I've gotten my ten bucks' worth of entertainment out of this game already.  Fortunately, the designers have taken pity on me, and provided "The Way of the Coward," a feature which up to this point I hadn't taken advantage of.  If the player dies too many times in one level (lives are infinite, fortunately), this option becomes available, allowing the player to skip that level and gain access to the next one.  I got stuck on Level 2-9, and finally succumbed to temptation, reaching an amusingly fake Level "Completed" screen with the completion time maxed out for the record.  But I had found the cake on that level, so it wasn't completely wasted effort, and I did go on to complete Level 2-10 successfully after skipping ahead.  So, my confidence bolstered, I will likely go back and take another crack at finishing 2-9 properly.

Probably when I get stuck on Level 2-11 this weekend...

Exit

No, I'm not going anywhere. It's been a busy week and I haven't had time to blog much, but I have been squeezing in a few levels of Taito's XBox Live Arcade game, Exit.

Exit started life on the PSP in 2006 and was later ported to XBLA and (only in Japan, Wikipedia tells me) the Nintendo DS. But its origins lie farther back, in Taito's early-1980's arcade game Elevator Action, which also appeared on the NES and is available in that form on the Wii Virtual Console. Check it out there or on the Taito Legends collections on the PS2, it's a good design that's still fun to play today (even though it gets frustrating with cheap bullet hits and enemy attacks when you're trying to get in and out of doors on later levels.)

Exit is not a remake of Elevator Action -- it's more of a puzzle game, and hero Mr. ESC's action style resembles the Prince of Persia more than his ducking-and-shooting predecessor. But the roots are clear -- staircases operate just like the escalators in Elevator Action, accessed by landing platforms at the top and bottom, and there are elevators in many of the levels. And while Mr. ESC is an "escapologist" and rescue specialist, rather than a briefcase-liberating armed spy, there's a certain similarity in tone -- the jazzy background music and stylized visual design calls film noir and comic books to mind.

Of course, Exit is a much more sophisticated and varied game. Each group of levels (at least in the first 7 I have played so far) introduces new gameplay elements and challenges, and some levels demand paring the solution, once found, down to an optimal sequence of actions to achieve the maximum score. In the early going, Mr. ESC only has to save himself, but rescuees of different types complicate matters later on. The game's rules are sensible and consistent within the game world, but there's still room for "oh, I didn't realize I could do that!" moments -- like realizing you can crawl under a cloud of smoke, though you can't run or walk through it. The design philosophy is tough but fair -- I can usually play through a level in half an hour or less, depending on how much I beat my head against the wrong approach before noticing some detail that tips me off to the proper solution.

I really like this game, though I tend to play it intensely for a while, earn an achievement for completing a series of levels, then set it aside for a while. But it's a game I return to when I have just a little bit of time to play and am in the mood for a non-Tetris-like puzzle challenge.

There's a sequel, also on PSP and XBLA, named Exit 2, but I have a long way to go before I'm finished with the original -- I'm just approaching the one-third point (62 of 220 levels completed), and am nowhere near maxing out the score on every level.

(A side rant -- why do XBLA games have a 200 achievement point cap, generally, when they can take longer to play through than a full retail game? At this writing I have earned 15 points after approximately 25 hours of Exit play. I always feel like my gamerscore is negatively impacted by my gaming preferences. On the other hand, I have earned 50 achievement points while half-heartedly playing the Doritos-sponsored XBLA travesty, Dash of Destruction, so maybe I just need to focus on MEANINGFUL achievements and set points aside.)

XBLA Catch-up, Nintendo Monday

This weekend I had a moment to fire up the XBox 360 and catch up with what's new on XBox Live Arcade during the past several weeks.

Two games of interest to us in the, er, older demographic are the new HD remakes of Sega's 80's arcade hit Outrun and Broderbund's Apple II-era hit, Lode Runner.

Both are solid remakes -- they're very faithful to the gameplay mechanics of the originals, with graphics suitably updated. Outrun looks like the original might have had the Daytona USA technology been available at the time, and Lode Runner adds some nice dimensional visuals and a faster pace to what remains a classic 2-D game design. I played through the trial versions of each and ended up buying Outrun -- the remixes of the classic tracks were just too appealing to pass up, and the simple arcade racing gameplay is what I was in the mood for on Saturday. Lode Runner is also very nicely done, and I will probably buy the full version at some point.

Nintendo's Monday today was semi-disappointing -- Cocoto Platform Jumper is a WiiWare release of a minor 2004 PS2/Gamecube game, not of interest to me despite the rarity of platformers on WiiWare. But Koei's Nobunaga's Ambition is a classic strategy game, brought to the Virtual Console in its SNES incarnation, and I may be tempted to pick that one up when I have some time to put into it.

I did pick up Square-Enix's Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King on WiiWare over the weekend, I will share some impressions when I've had time to play it more.