Lode Runner is one of those games that should probably be more well known than it is. Not to say the game isn’t already pretty well-known, but, you know, in my opinion there should be a chicken in every pot and a Lode Runner in every household.
This oldschool favorite (I played it on the Commodore 64) worked as follows: You, as an adventurous young stick figure, climb up ladders and monkey-bar your way across polls to collect little cubes on the ground, while trying to avoid a bunch of other stick figures who for some reason are out to get you. Also, I guess they’re robots are something.
Fortunately for you, you have a shovel, and you can dig holes into the ground behind you, which your enemies will fall into. This is relatively humane when you do it from higher platforms, but if you do it while on ground level they’ll wind up buried alive.
…fortunately for them, they respawn. Hmm. I suddenly wonder about the ethics of killing someone in a world where you respawn a minute later. There should be a video game philosophy class somewhere.
Anyways, this whole deceptively simple premise is the fuel behind a remarkably addictive puzzle game with probably about a hundred levels, plus a level editor, which was a pretty radical idea at the time. I remember my dad loved this game and got really far. To level 64 or something, which was unheard of for Baby Pike, who plinked around at level nine.
This game spawned a sequel that I also played, called Lode Runner’s Rescue, which had exactly one thing in common with the original game and that one thing was the name “Lode Runner” in the title. Still, for having nothing whatsoever to do with the original, that game was also pretty dang fun. Too bad I can’t find anything about it on Google, so you’ll just have to trust me on this.
Lode Runner is still around– I’ve seen clones of it in the Ubuntu repositories and remakes pop up on various platforms every so often. (Heehee, platforms. I see what I did there.)
But the best praise for it? Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov called it his favorite puzzle game. You can’t get much more legit than that.
Hey Pike,
My dad loves this game too 🙂 Sierra came out with a couple of updated versions in the 90’s that had better graphics, more varied game-play and some pretty solid create-your-own level engines. You should check ’em out.
Anacortes/San Juan/Whidby are all great areas. My sister and bro-in-law were stationed on Whidby in the Navy. They moved back here to Montana – hey – we’re neighbors! But yeah, Seattle and the north islands are great. Up north gets quite a bit less rain as well – just in case you want to escape the gloooooom. I happen to enjoy said gloomy weather.
On the nose front – I use Flonase (Fluticasone Proprionate) – it lets me breathe, smell stuff, and generally be functional. Wonderful stuff.
dang it… posted in wrong thread >.<
I’m okay with The Killers ‘Human’ being stuck in my head. I’m rather fond of it 🙂
Now try James at War’s ‘Blame Halo 3’ 🙂