LodeRunner (Pocket PC 2002)
...If you missed the platform arcade mania in the 1980s or your parents were too
strict, now you can let loose. If you're too young for the 80's, LodeRunner game
at the peak of the electronic entertainment evolution.
The game is really simple and addictive - you help the bounty hunter collect all
the treasures, while avoiding (and preferably destroying) the evil guards who
are trained to kill.
This version of LodeRunner comes packed with 50 amazing and challenging levels.
Loyal LodeRunner fans will appreciate many new artifacts available in the game
now:
* Shovel - dig away in any direction!
* Puncher - these walls won't stop you!
* Step-ladder - get ready to climb!
Plus, there is a fully featured soundtrack for LodeRunner that will make your
gaming experience that much richer.
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Pocket PC games collection on CD. We gathered all the best Pocket PC games -strategy, puzzle, board, action and other genres, and placed it on one CD.You don't have to spend tons of money to buy tons of games, because all our challenging and addictive games tightly packed in one CD. All games on this CD are the full versions, already registered without any limitations or restrictions, so you won't need to wait for your registration key to arrive in order to start enjoying these games. [more...] |
Best
products by BallShooter Games
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| BlackOut | Bolts&Nuts | ThePacmans | BrickSlider | Chukchi Kerling | Fast Swapper | LodeRunner | Brain Gym |
Latest Reviews
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A must have for any arcade platformer
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by Alon Ainbindar
from Pocket PC Life
on Jul 24, 2004 -
Me and lode runner go way back to the old, nearly 14 years ago, apple era. It was one of the best games I had on that rig and when I got my first pc it was also one of my fonds. No wonder I was glad I got to review this great game. And it's great, and fun like the original.
The game is a pure platformer ? you have to collect all the treasures in each level to go on to the nextnone using ladders and polls. As you progress through the level you have to avoid the bad monks (or at least that what they look like) by using your special ability - creating gaps for the bad guys to fall in. Very simple, very challenging, very fun.
If there is one thing that always bothers me in an arcade game that plays on a pda - especially my ipaq 4150, is the fact you have to use the buttons and the pad, and to be honest, I don't think that the developers of the ipaq had arcade games in mind. However the guys at BallShooter had came up with a great way to control your runner, you can do it in the old fashion way meaning pad and buttons or the new way (which I prefer, heck, I think it's better then playing with the keyboard arrows!) ? You just use the stylus to pinpoint where you want to go and the runner will do the shortest trip to that location.
The game flow is great. The first 3 levels are tutorials which explain the basics of the game. From there you continue and as the levels get harder you start to use special tools that widen your abilities (vertical dig, horizontal dig, etc.). The game offer 50 levels and with the Christmas addition its 90 levels of increasing challenge.
My playing device is a new ipaq 4150 and as far as i am concern this game runs great and is very stable. I play it for a couple of hours every time and never encountered a bug or a hiccup.
The graphics are nice and the animations are fluid, you can even choose the background image from numerous options (I wish they will give us the option to use custom background). The sound effects and music are really cool and add points to the game. Another important feature is the ability to select which level to play - great when you get stuck in the same level and can't complete it.
The Xmas addition contains 40 new levels, with a new holiday look and some new backgrounds. Great when you finally became an addict. No game is perfect and what bothered me a little is the lack of buttons mapping function and the absence of a speed slider so you can control the speed of the game. Those two flaws are minor and almost insignificant, my main concern is the replay value - there is just one game mode, meaning, after you completed all the levels you probably won't play anymore. I wish in the next version there will be a timed game mode, tournament (maybe even multiplayer?), user made levels and more creative modes.
Conclusion
All in all this classic game is a must have to any arcade platformer lover, to those who feel nostalgic and
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Rock solid retro gameplay!
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by PDA Corps
from PDA Corps.
on Sep 22, 2003 -
What, no Wile E Coyote? OK, aside from a tenuously similar sounding name, Lode Runner from Ball Shooter Games bears very little resemblance to the slightly more familiar cartoon featuring everyone's favourite land-fettered cuckoo. Well, that and the endless running away... Because you do a lot of running in Lode Runner, hence the obvious 'Runner' connotations of the game's name. Running, climbing and a bit of tactical thinking. Sounds promising, if a little derivative. So, what's on offer? 
Available as a feature-restricted 4 level shareware version or the registered 20 level version that we are reviewing here, this is a PPC conversion of a fairly old arcade platform puzzler that probably enjoyed its best, if not most popular incarnation when released by Sierra for the PC, complete with a ridiculously simple and highly satisfying level designer. The objective of the game is simple; guide your character, a 'treasure hunter' according to the in-game help document, through the 20 increasingly hard platform & ladder levels, collecting all the gold gems in each level to enable progress to the next. To make your task a little harder, not only do the later levels become quite fiendish in their design but from level 2 onwards you have at least one relentless robe-clad rivals to repel, and that's a nifty bit of alliteration if I say so myself.
Each level is a single screen, so if you come to this game from playing a game with a similar concept like Toki Tori, where a level could span considerably more than the height and width of the screen, Lode Runner will seem quite primitive. The platforms and ladders themselves are as basic in appearance and functionality as you can get, reminding me of the graphic style, if not the frenetic action, of Chuckie Egg. (As a side note, it would be great if Ball Shooter could port that classic to the PPC). As well as platforms to run along and ladders to climb, there are also overhead traversing ropes that the player, and his enemies, can swing along, hand-over-hand style. Scattered around each level, usually in the least accessible places, are the staple reward of this type of platform game ? ambiguous gold blocks. Not only does collecting these gems increase your score, but all of them need to be collected to clear a level. This is the kind of non-rocket-science platform-game design that should require no further explanation! The only variation when collecting all the gems is that sometimes this enables a portal to appear, which the player has to walk into, and other times the next level just loads automatically when the last gem is collected. 
The player character is controlled with the directional control pad and/or the stylus. What you will find, in practice, is that a combination of the two methods is quite useful, in fact top marks to Ball Shooter for incorporating both types of control in this way. If you tap the stylus anywhere on the screen that is reachable by your character, the path-finding AI (similar to that used by the enemies when tracking the player) will be used by the player character to take the shortest route to the point selected. For example, on the first level, you can click the final gem half way up the right side of the screen and the player character, without further player input, will make its way around the screen, automatically collecting the other gems he walks over until he reaches the final one. Taking control with the directional pad is useful for the majority of the time, when the situation is constantly changing, such as when a couple of robed enemies are running all over the place trying to catch you.
When pursued by one or more of the anonymous robed enemies, the player has two options ? run away or dig a hole to temporarily trap them. Hole digging is simple; click a button or tap the platform at the desired location with the stylus. You can only dig at the next adjacent platform 'block' to the left or right of your character's current position. The Help document states that you can dig through a 'wall' but they actually mean 'floor.' Digging is instantaneous, the hole magically appearing for no apparent reason as soon as you click/tap the desired location. In other versions of the game this is visually represented by some graphical effect, for example a kind of green plasma ray on the PC version that seemed to 'melt' the platform at the desired location. Beware that enemies can climb out of holes after a short period of time, unlike the player. If you fall in one of your own holes you will need to reset the level and not be so clumsy next time! Either that, or you can wait until the hole fills itself in and you die. The key, then, is timing. If an enemy falls in a hole some time after it was dug, there is a good chance that the hole will fill in and eliminate the enemy before he can pull himself out of it. However, any enemy removed in this way will re-spawn, usually at the least opportune moment. Digging holes not only traps enemies but can be used to create a temporary route to an inaccessible area below the platform that the player is on. Be warned, it is possible to drop your character through a hole into an area from which he cannot then escape. The only option then is to reset the level. Sometimes the platform cannot be dug through, usually in palces where you wish it could be! These unbreakable platforms are shown as grey bricks ? the normal 'diggable' platforms are red brick.
Graphically, the game is prehistoric. There is a nod to varying processor speeds with the option to have the background set to 'graffiti,' 'grey tile' or 'high contrast' (which euphemistically means 'black,' and there is nothing here that looks younger than 10 years old. After having a quick look at graffiti and grey tile backdrops, I stuck with ?high contrast? black because it makes the tiny character sprites much easier to see. Platforms and ladders are represented with strictly functional graphics and consequently the screens have a real 'building blocks' look to them. The character sprites are very small, not badly animated, but the enemies are all clones in identical purple robes. There is hardly any other animation in the game. The level-end portal, a swirling Stargate affair in the PC version is a static green blob and, as previously mentioned, hole-digging is a decidedly non-animated event. The occasional graphic glitch, such as when player or NPC moves onto or off a ladder can almost be forgiven as you have to concentrate quite hard to notice it. However, this could have been rectified and reminded me of the sort of colour clash that used to occur on the ZX Spectrum! When the player dies, there is no animation, but the player sprite is replaced with a floating coffin icon that looks as if it was screen-grabbed from Castlevania on the Gameboy.
There is no background music and the sound effects are sparse and forgettable. I only noticed four different sounds; a jingling 'coins' sound when a gold gem is collected, a munching noise when an enemy is squished in a hole, a level start 'fanfare' and the sound of breaking glass when the player dies. I'm not sure whether these sounds have been sampled from another version of the game or just lifted from some library of sound files. Although unimaginative, they kind of fit in with the total 'yesterday' feel of the presentation.
The retro gameplay is rock-solid. Although several elements have been removed, such as the extra weapons/tools found in later levels in the PC version, the considerable challenge remains, and tactics that I remembered worked pretty much the same. There is a temptation to skip a particularly frustrating level instead of mastering it, by using the level select option, but this will ruin your fun so just use the level select as it was intended ? when re-starting a game (there is no save-game feature implemented). If you die on a level you lose one of your 3 lives but the gems that you have already collected are not returned to the screen, so you are not forced to repeat the same steps over and over.
A feature that is largely irrelevant is the score, because no hi-score table is included. This would add replay incentive and increase the longevity of the game. The one thing that I would really like to see is a level editor and the ability to save user-created levels. A couple of fan sites distributing these third party levels would be all that was needed to turn this game into a PPC retro cult classic.
Hot:
- Retro platform fun
- Considerable challenge
- Should run smoothly on anything
- Never overly frustrating
Not:
- Very dated
- Unimaginative graphics & sound
- Only 20 levels
- Desperately needs level editor
Final Comments
My final thoughts are that Ball Shooter have given us Lode Runner without making the mistake of jazzing it up with unnecessary visual enhancements or complicating it with extra features. For some, the appearance of Lode Runner will be too retro and they will pass it by in favour of a more visually impressive game. Even though I also have Toki Tori installed on my PPC, I do keep finding myself coming back to Lode Runner for the occasional five-minute fix.by: DumJT - 20th June 2003
Download Details
- File Information
- 52 sec download @ 300Kb/s
- 1.9MB Installed
- Updated 7/08/2007
- Features
Color application- Minimum Requirements
- PocketPC or H/PC. Processors: ARM or MIPS or SH3 or X-Scale
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