Firstly, apologies for not doing this last week when it was due. I had an exam on Monday and obviously had to do last-minute panic revision. This one is quite short, due to the combined effects of laziness and the exam season, although this week I haven’t actually got one tomorrow.
I got offered joint authorship of this feature on the basis that “I haven’t bought a new game in ages” and “most of the games I play are pretty old”. Not old enough in some cases, it seems. I’ve found myself having to look up when certain games were released to see if they fitted in our rough 10-years-or-older guideline. And a few of my favourite games have turned out to be only 7 or 8 years old. Thankfully, though, there are many great games which cause no problems of this kind, and it is one of these true classics I’ve been looking at this week.
Lode Runner is a platform game, perhaps the platform game, originally published in 1983 by Brøderbund for the Apple II. Certainly it’s the original and best as far as I’m concerned. You control a stick figure. You can move left and right, you can dig into the platforms left and right. You can climb ladders, swing on ropes and fall. That’s it. Crucially, there is no jumping action. This makes the game extremely difficult at times when the enemies trap you. The whole level is shown at once; there is no screen scrolling involved.
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