Excerpt

On a strange arcade game:

Hole Land is a shooter, and apparently the only game made by the Spanish company Tecfri. Wikipedia tells us it was only released in Japan, possibly because it came out in 1984, and the arcade scene in the US was falling apart.

Consider for a moment the concept. Hole Land. Land of Holes. Certainly a theme that bears contemplation. It seems that you are an invader to this land, a gaily-colored robot that runs back and forth across the bottom of the screen, that shoots upward at a horde of adorably, and understandably, angry monsters of various sorts, in order to claim it away for things that aren't monsters, or holes.

On Galakong:

Another LUA-based game hack from 10yard! This one's a mashup of two perennial arcade favorites, Galaga and Donkey Kong. Each level has a chevron powerup somewhere in it. When Jumpman picks it up, he's joined by the spaceship from Galaga. The jump button is also the fire button! Further, the ship's shots are piercing, and can destroy more than one enemy with a single blast. You'd think it'd make the game much easier, but the difficulty of the game has been subtly increased to make up for it, plus controlling the ship as well as ol' Jumpy is a distraction, so it's still pretty challenging.

On Behind the Code's video on glitches in NES Strider:

There are a number of NES games that feel like they're held together with paperclips and chewing gum. Some of them are almost endearing for their glitchiness. When it comes to janky NES games, a few that I tend to think of are those made by Micronics (who implemented Ghosts N' Goblins, which has an awful frame rate) and Athena (where one boss has a death animation that causes it to flip through many of the sprites in the game).

A company that usually did a lot better with their internally-developed games was Capcom, makers of Mega Man, 1943, Bionic Commando, and all the Disney Afternoon games from the time, and all of which have slick 60 fps update rates and smooth animation. One game they made of which that is definitely not true, however, is NES Strider.

On Lode Runner:

Lode Runner was a game released in 1983 for the Apple II home computer, although ports for several other machines were soon developed and released. Created by the late Douglas E. Smith, it asked players to maneuver through 150 levels of caverns and structures, collecting all the gold (little boxes) on each level then ascending to the top of the screen.

150 levels sounds like a lot, and it really was, but amazingly the game keeps finding new ways to surprise with its small number of level parts and their implications. When player were done with those (or even if they weren't), Lode Runner included a level editor that player could use to make their own levels.

The ostensible subject of this post is a web recreation of Lode Runner that includes hundreds of levels to play and learn and enjoy. But the site largely speaks for itself in that regard, I think, so here's some musing on Lode Runner itself, and its history.

On Cavern Sweeper:

Cavern Sweeper is really good! It's a generalization of Minesweeper where the mines not only have different values, casting varying amounts of danger into the adjacent squares, but where, on harder difficulties, different kinds of mines can even have differently-shaped danger zones.

In the easiest version, all monsters have a diamond-shaped peril region around them with a value from one to three. The number in a space is the sum of all the danger spread into them. Harder versions also add slimes, which have the traditional square-shaped Minesweeper danger zone, ghosts with plus-shaped areas, and optionally serpents with X-shaped zonas de peligro.

To make up for the added uncertainty, you're granted two additional helps. First, as you mark spaces (you must select the proper kind of monster in the space for it to count), the numbers are subtracted from the nearby regions, decreasing the chaos around it, and any impossible situations are marked for you. And you're allowed two extra misses before you're actually in danger of losing the game.