Boulderdash
In boulderdash you play a miner called Rockford and you are trying to make a fortune looking for diamonds in the mines. There are plenty of dangers along the way like falling boulders and unfriendly beasts not to mention that the mines themselves are like mazes. Find enough diamonds in one mine and you can proceed to the exit.
You start the game by selecting a mine in the area you are in, each area usually contains four mines which you can visit in any order. Then it’s off to the mine where you must find and collect a set number of diamonds before you can exit the level. Your path is blocked by a load of boulders that can fall once you dig away the dirt around them so you have to be carefull how to proceed. Don’t hang around either because you only have a limited supply of oxygen and if you take to long to finish the level you lose a life. Later on you encounter monsters that will follow you if you free them and you have to use the boulders to take them out. This becomes a neccesity on some levels where you have to destroy butterflies that will turn into diamonds. One handy thing to remember when digging is that even though usually you dig by simply walking into the dirt you can also press the firebutton and you can dig away the dirt in the area next to you thereby keeping you out of harms way.
Boulderdash is still quite fun to play to this day like many puzzle games simply because they depend on level design and not fancy graphics. Some of the levels can be difficult because it’s easy to get stuck when you are surrounded by boulders or when one of them falls on top of you. The trick is to use the time you have and not run around as fast as you can. Any of the versions here offer the same gameplay and graphics but the NES version stands out because it has fairly different graphics, you look a lot cuter and you can select the mines on an overhead map. Gameplaywise there aren’t any noticable differences so I suggest you try the nes version if you haven’t played the game before.
Overal rating: 7.5/10
This game was released for several different systems here are some notes:
| BBC Micro | Released in 1984. Game has been tested but not completed with BeebEm v2.0. Run the game by typing run “boulderdash” from the commandline. |
| C64 | Released in 1984. Game has been tested but not completed with CCS64 v2.0 win. Of the original versions this has the most colorfull graphics, the controls respond with a bit of lag compared to the others though. |
| Colecovision | Released in 1984. Game has been tested but not completed with Virtual Colecovision 2.11a. Game has been tested but not completed with KOLEKO v1.31. The game is included in the KOLOKE emulator but the seperate rom is also available. |
| DOS | Released in 1984. Game has been tested but not completed on a DOS PC. This version is weird, it actually runs faster on my pentium 1 than on my pentium 4 and I could not take a screenshot without locking up my computer. It’s the worst looking version though with its CGA graphics. |
| NES | Released in 1990. Game has been tested but not completed with FCE ultra v0.98.12. Released 6 years after the original with new graphics but still the same gameplay which is not a bad thing. |
| ZX Spectrum | Released in 1984. Game has been tested but not completed with emuZwin v2.5. |
| Others | This version is not available. Apple released in 1984. |
| Date added | Dec-18-2004 15:14 |
| Name | Boulderdash |
| Developer | First star software |
| Publisher | Micro fun |
| First released | 1984 |
| Genre | Puzzle |
