Smith in 1983 while a student at the University of Washington. Named one of “The Greatest Games of All Time” by GameSpot, Lode Runner was created by Douglas E. Online Rankings:Ĝompete against other fans in global standings.Craft Mode: Create your own levels, characters, items, combine them and share with other fans.World Levels: An outstanding collection of user-created levels.Classic Mode: Play the original 150 levels in 3D!.Puzzle Mode: It’s all puzzles, all the time.NEW! Extra Mode: More levels featuring new enemies that have new movements!.NEW! Two Player Mode: Local Co-Op Multiplayer with up to 2 players, along with new levels! Controlled required.Adventure Mode: Infiltrate the evil Empire and bring back stolen gold!.The ingenious balance of puzzle and action gameplay from the original Lode Runner is alive in Lode Runner Legacy, along with many new features that offer a fresh experience to both new players and returning fans alike, including an updated Voxel visual style and powerful game editors. Players manipulate “Runner” to infiltrate the evil empire and recover stolen gold while avoiding enemies and minefields. Lode Runner Legacy is the latest edition in the classic Lode Runner series, a masterpiece of action puzzle gaming introduced in the U.S. Clueless Gaijin Gaming: Top o Nerae! Gunbuster Vol.About This Game Lode Runner, the Legendary Platformer Returns!.Ultravision: The Ultimate in Vaporware!.Adventure of the Week: Micro-Fun's Death in the Ca.Obscurities: Lucasarts Meets Hercules - Herc's Adv.Whither The Video Game Players Association?.Adventure of the Week: Sierra's The Colonel's Bequest.Retro Shop Talk: Roger Schrag on Arex (1983).Nothing Screams 'Videogames' Like a Mime!.Adventure of the Week: Spook House (1982).And if history is any indication, there'll be another one along soon enough. Verdict? I still like the original a lot, but I don't think I'm going to attempt to complete all of its 150 levels any time soon - the XBLA version is providing my Lode Runner fix for the moment. And the single player journey plays very much like the classic game - so much so that I just had to go back and play the original for comparison. None of the layouts are viewed quite as distantly as in the original game - they are generally more compact, though no less challenging. Best of all, the action fits on one screen, with no scrolling the camera zooms out for more complex levels, and zooms in to show off the 3-D character models when the size of the layout permits. The controls even work well - there's no 'animation lag' to mess up the tight timing required for many of the puzzle levels, and the imperfect XBox control pad copes acceptably with the four-direction movement.

But none of the changes break the fundamental gameplay, and the puzzle and multiplayer modes are worthy additions.

There are innovations and enhancements, with more enemy and brick variety than the original could manage. So I am pleased to tip my hat to Tozai Games' XBLA version, which is nicely rendered in modern 3-D but plays as it should, in 2-D. Remaking early games for modern systems can be a challenge - judging from some recent XBLA releases, it's easy to lose sight of what made them great in the first place. Still, the console games are recognizably Lode Runner: The console versions tend to feature larger, more appealing characters, but it's much easier to run into an enemy in an unexpected location. Most of the console versions suffer to some degree from the addition of scrolling - the tiny figures of the original game made it possible to see the entire level at once and plan effectively. I have played the game on the Wii Virtual Console, in its TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine incarnation as Battle Lode Runner, and on my mobile phone in a less-than-successful port, where the small screen made it too difficult to see what was going on outside the boundaries of the scrolling screen. The game was also a big hit in Japan on the NES and appeared on many consoles there, courtesy of Hudson Soft. Written by Dave Dies and marketed by Tom Mix Software's Novasoft budget division, it only had 32 levels, compared to the original game's 150, but it was a reasonable facsimile and I had a lot of fun with it. My first extended time with the game's concept was spent with an ersatz version for the TRS-80 Color Computer, called Gold Runner. I never actually played Lode Runner on the Apple II during its heyday, but it was a solid hit and I remember seeing it on computers at school on occasion.

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