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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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