By Brad Cook

You have no time to wonder who you are or why you’re here. All you know is that you must collect all the gold, avoid or trap the robots, and head for the escape ladder that leads to the next level. Grabbing the loot and evading your enemies isn’t that simple, however, because each level is a maze of ladders and floors, and some of the gold can only be obtained through strategic digging. You can lure the robots into holes and bury them, although their replacements will soon appear. One touch by a robot, or one fatal move into a hole, and you’ll have to start all over again.

Begin your underground adventure with 50 levels of strategic action at standard difficulty before moving to the 60 levels found between the expert and master modes. In puzzle mode’s 20 levels, robots won’t besiege you, but the gold is fiendishly difficult to recover, putting your strategic thinking skills to the test.

If you’d rather try an altogether different sort of challenge, check out gold rush mode, in which you race through 5,000 or 10,000 yards of floors and ladders, grabbing as much gold as you can and avoiding robots along the way to your final destination. Just don’t fall behind or drop off the bottom of the screen. There’s also an endless option, if you don’t want a finish line.

This latest incarnation of Lode Runner builds on a long history stretching back to 1983 and its initial release on the Apple II, as well as other home computers of that era. It has attracted legions of fans along the way, including Tetris creator Alexei Pajitnov, who has said of it: “I consider it a real puzzle game. That was my favorite for many, many years. It’s such a good combination of dynamic stuff, the finger-work, and real planning and puzzle-solving … I can’t imagine any other game with such inventive and unusual design.”

Tips and Tricks

  • Holes can also serve as escape routes. Dig one and fall through it to get away; you can still fall through even as it starts to fill up. You can fall from any height and not die. Robots never fall through holes, even if there’s no floor beneath them.
  • If a robot is too close to you, you won’t be able to dig a hole beneath its feet, so your only hope is to retreat. Luckily, you move faster than they do.
  • To trap a robot in a hole, you must time your dig so that the robot falls in just as the hole is starting to fill again. It will become trapped and die, but watch out for its replacement, which will materialize at the top of the level.
  • Proper timing of your hole digging becomes crucial in later levels, especially the ones with higher difficulty settings. You may need to wait a few seconds before making another hole, so that you have time to escape through it.
  • The robots are programmed to head straight for you via the most direct route, so use that to your advantage. For example, if you’re on one side of the level and they’re on the other, they will shadow your movements, so lure them toward an area of the screen that will trap them, such as a well.
  • You only have a few seconds to run across a robot’s head after it falls in a hole. After that, they’ll begin to emerge and could make contact as you pass by.
  • If you find yourself overwhelmed by a level, you might want to reduce the game speed in the Options menu. You can also change your method of moving and digging — the default method, where you can touch the bottom left or bottom right of the click wheel to dig, sometimes makes it too easy to start shoveling when you don’t want to.
  • Press Select any time you need to bring up the map viewer and take a look at the entire level.
  • In gold rush mode, you’ll find different types of gold, each with a different point value. Collect gold of the same type in succession to increase its value. When you trap robots in holes, they’ll drop gold with the highest point value.
  • Stumped? You’ll find the answers to all of the levels, except the gold rush ones, in the Tutorials section. In gold rush mode, the floors and ladders are randomly generated.
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Lode Runner gameplay area.

Can You Dig It? Let’s give that nasty robot on your heels something to fall into.

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System Requirements

  • Mac OS X version 10.3.9 or Windows 2000
  • iPod nano (3rd and 4th generation only), iPod classic, or iPod (5th generation only). Not playable on your computer, other iPod models, iPod touch or iPhone. Please check which iPod model you have.
  • iTunes 7.5 or higher required to download (games cannot be played in iTunes)
 
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