| Manufacturer: | Namco |
| Genre: | Maze |
| Board: | Namco Galaga |
| Year: | 1982 |
I have a confession to make, I didn't play Dig Dug until I got it as part of the Namco Arcade Museum for the GameBoy Advance, back in 2003. When I first played it, I wrote it off as a Mr Do clone and didn't go back to it for years. I know, I know, as an arcade fanatic, I should be ashamed of myself, but we all make mistakes. I have since played it on Xbox Live Arcade and a Namco Plug 'n' Play TV system and realised that there was a lot more to the game than first meets the eye.
The basic gameplay is simple enough. As Dig Dug, you have to tunnel through 255 screens, killing the Pookas (the red blobs in scuba goggles) and Fygars (the fire breathing dragons) that dwell underground. There are two ways to kill these creatures: by tunneling under rocks and letting them drop on the monsters heads or by sticking them with a harpoon pump thing and inflating them until they pop. That all sounds simple enough, but Dig Dug has a number of unique gameplay tropes. First, Dig Dug can walk through partially inflated enemies. Since it takes a few seconds to make them pop, partially inflating them can buy you the time and distance to finish them off safely. Secondly, there are lots of different score attack mechanisms built into the game. First, rock kills score more than pump kills. Secondly, the depth at which an enemy is killed increases your score, hence the yellow, orange the red banding to the levels. Finally, the points you score from killing a Fygar depends on your position - facing them scores more than attacking from above or behind. All this means that if you are a highscore junky, Dig Dug can be a seriously competitive game.
In 1985 Namco released a sequel, predictably called Dig Dug II. Back them most sequels were simply more of the same, but Dig Dug II tried to be different, shifting perspective to a top-down view. Now when you dug down, large sections of the landscape collapsed into the sea. Sadly, it wasn't as much fun as the original.
MTW
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