Hyper Lode Runner

"Classic puzzler updated but branching out to puzzling controls"

After several years of bumping around early-generation personal computers, Lode Runner moved to a portable console with Hyper Lode Runner(HLR.) The object hadn't changed much--get all the gold and get to the top. There were some cosmetic changes, gold heaps replacing chests, and the lovable old stick figures replaced with people more convincing despite being half the size of their helmets, but I was amused to note the color scheme was still green and black, just as it was on my old Apple green screen monitor so many years ago. The puzzles were similarly challenging as well, on par with Championship Lode Runner, with fifty levels as well, but my knowledge of puzzles there didn't help me too much in HLR despite the similar rules.

HLR contains fifty levels where you walk around on structures containing bricks, cement, ladders, rope, gold, false bricks and even some squares where ladders pop after you get all the gold. Your main weapon is a blaster which can dig holes in brick on either side that regenerate after five seconds. Magically, you can fall through these holes, but the bad guys chasing you can't, although they reappear at the top if sucked into one as it closes. You also can't dig over gold or over false bricks, which you fall through as if they were thin air. Fortunately you travel about twice as fast, even when falling, as your opponents, and there are only three of them. You can even trap one of them in an area without gold, isolating the puzzles; frequently you'll need to time digs in various spots and even dig one brick several times along the way to reach the gold chests buried low.

At first I was confused about why it was called 'hyper.' The first fifteen levels had their moments for challenge, but they were in fact smaller than from the Apple: 20x16 versus 28x16 of icons for playing areas, and in fact you can only see a small chunk of this(15x10) during active play. I was willing to chalk the initial reduced challenge up to my considerable field knowledge when I stumbled on level sixteen, which had a door and a key. From there on, the levels more than doubled in complexity, because you also needed all the gold from the side areas you could access, which also had a built-in timer. Take too long in any one trip there and the door closes for good. Some simple and relatively straightforward ideas, when combined with actual puzzles, helped justify the game title and make for some brain racking. For instance, some of the time you could only enter the door once, so you'd have to complete the side area, or other times you'd need to complete the side area first or last. Other times you'd require several trips but would have to dig to get there, get out, and dig again. And too often you'd try to get over-expedient and pick up one gold chest too many in a trip and get frozen out, whether to pack off part of a side room easily or to have to face it fewer times.

Unfortunately the controls are far more confusing than the game name or the need to balance two separate rooms in a level. HLR features many nice options but they're implemented so badly that it's easier to remember mucking about than it is to reflect on some of the tougher puzzles solved. Often the game's energy seems mis-spent; for instance, it remembers your high score, inflatable through constantly replaying and not even completing a level, but not the last level you played before you died. Let's say you got to level 46. You'd go to the game-over screen, but to get back there you'd have to start the game, hold down the A button for several seconds, then type in a six-long password; there, you can go backwards from A to Z, but not from 1 to 50.

Now you can, and will learn to, alleviate some of this by, if you are careful, activating the best feature: resetting a level when you are doomed or trapped, but this presents another problem. The select button restarts a level you're playing, while pushing it and the start button kicks you to the game-over screen. Given how close they are together it's likely to happen, and in more ways than one: the start key and then select allows you to pause the game and see the whole screen, but if you use it to take a break and come back and push the wrong button, as I did, then, that is progress cruelly lost. And as a final insult, say you put in the password for level 40 but just want to poke around good old 30 for a bit for a minute--or you slip and select the wrong level. Well, you'll have to put the password in again if you change your mind. You can imagine that this all feels more like paperwork drudgery than busting through a security clearance.

So the simple task of restarting a game takes serious effort, but in fact the controls add a degree of challenge beyond the big thoughts HLR connives from you. Some combinations of moves are obliging and practical: hold the pad diagonally, and it they give priority to vertical movement and can help you move quickly that way. You can also hold one direction and press the A or B button to dig serially and waste no time. But the game isn't very receptive to horizontal movement, and often when you're on a ladder you'll try to push off to fall, and your guy will sit there. In certain timed puzzles, this is not funny. Then there's a problem of re-entering a side room so that you can't move horizontally from the door, or how the game only pauses the first time you enter or exit. With all these flaws, the game feels hypocritical; it makes some oversights that might get a pass if its higher-level challenges weren't so strict themselves regarding your required play.

But that's the execution. They got the thinking part right, which is what most people who have the temperament to play Lode Runner prefer. The levels would just be fantastic on a computer, or with the control less shaky. Puzzles are rarely repeated, and in fact my second time through I found many which looked the same in fact had alternate solutions. Often I'd be working at getting one buried chest the same way I got a similar one behind two walls a few levels back, only to find a very different approach was required. The very best puzzles tend to require counting a few seconds before digging certain holes, or digging one hole two or three times in the process. Many chests are easy to get, but the challenge is leaving alive. Other chests require the cooperation of bad guys. You have to learn when they fall or how you can make them run away from you, and sometimes a level becomes much easier if you can sucker one of them into getting a gold chest, digging a hole for him, and taking what he coughed up. Other times a bad guy will be trapped conveniently for you, and you need to figure out how to make him stay there, because he will regenerate in a place that will block level completion. Then there are fun ones where you have to run over to jump on a bad guy to get somewhere you couldn't otherwise, and others with very few bricks to dig where you need to outsmart bad guys. Timing is important, with plenty of places possible to take a break and recoup for the next raid on gold.

Then, for the most part, the levels get tougher as you go along. There are a few shameless examples of recycling the tougher of the old puzzles and throwing them together in one level, which feels more like an endurance test, and some early side rooms force you to rely somewhat on chance as to when bad guys spill their gold, but near the end I found I had to calculate which parts to get first, and often I found I had to guess where the stairs up would appear(I guessed wrong.) Even the one that recycled CLR's level one found a way to make it tougher, and fortunately levels where you have to repeat an action are used sparingly.

Most games establish dramatic tension with mediocre dialog, bosses with more hit points, or stricter time limits, but HLR manages to create some monstrous challenges at the end. Although I do have to walk away feeling superior--they missed not one but two chances in the final level to catch a poor sucker who was ready to relax having gotten all the gold.

HLR won't charm anyone with its graphics given how everything including people turns out blocky, with little relation to the old Apple game that I will never forget, or even the ten-deep high score list with the font everyone thought was high-tech in the eighties. In fact the levels where they tried to design them to look like something(mostly initials, but there's also a butterfly) turn out on the easy side. And the detail they put into the game is hard to notice; I didn't catch how you flap your arms when falling until I stared very hard.

HLR's sound however becomes generally obnoxious over extended playing periods, and the worst part is that it is necessary in some side rooms. Basically the background tune speeds up to indicate that you need to get moving, and on the more involved ones it quite adds to the drama, especially when you're on the opposite side of the screen than the door, having done what you can, and are pretty sure you just have to run over there. The tune is a good substitute for a replacement timer from a gaming viewpoint and also gives a more subjective edge to the game than the concrete planning of digging what and when. But sadly despite being marginally better than the regular screen tune it can't be changed, and alternately muting and un-muting when you switch rooms is too much effort.

HLR overall is not a friendly game to people not at home in the puzzle genre, and puzzle fans may find it requires a bit too much exactness and sleight of hand. But despite its big-picture problem with controls, it offers many options and challenges of the sort that would seem impossible unless you knew the programmers couldn't be THAT mean. There's even a level editor if you think you can hang with the creators, but the fifty levels will keep you busy for a while and mostly on their own merit. I'm sure I would have had some good ideas, but my creative energy had been exhausted on something more socially relevant: a populist manifesto for solid controls in puzzlers, for gamers even less talented than I, and how HLR had forgotten its roots in that regard, saying to myself how vigorous action was necessary. I proved myself right by crashing out after solving the game early in the morning and forgetting every word of it.

For staunch Lode Runner fans, a replay will probably unveil some more succinct methods of solving puzzles; I found a few accidentally that way. So despite HLR maybe not being the best game to port to a console, I endorse it for its brutal multi-step challenges(dispatch bad guys, decide the order to pick up gold, figure how to dig for the toughest ones, and make sure you can get to the top) and the pleasure of solving them. But many people may find the lack of story and flair doesn't really let them concentrate on the puzzles, although despite losing interest quickly even before the bureaucratic password levels they should find the first few evoke some original thought.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 01/12/03, Updated 01/20/03