Game 355: Championship Lode Runner

Hello. Have we met?

Just what I needed - another 50 levels of Lode Runner - the quintessentially classic puzzle platformer that I praised for its solid mechanics and inventive challenges but also criticized for being far too long. Essentially a retail level compilation disk, compiled from the best user-made submissions to Broderbund, Championship Lode Runner offers no new enemies, nor obstacles, traps, or treasures, and even removes the original game's level editor. What you get instead is difficulty - this one wastes no time with simple levels, presuming that only Lode Runner experts will bother.

In this first level, the guards are easily trapped in the space below, letting you grab the treasures suspended in the air from the rope above uninhibited, but then retrieving the two crates at the bottom is a problem. You can either blast one of the walls adjacent to the ladder and make a mad dash for them and return, which requires frame-perfect movement and timing and absolutely can't tolerate any guard interference, or you can manipulate them into falling down the middle and getting the crates for you, which requires precise manipulation of the AI which I still don't understand well enough to perform reliably.

Instead of a level, select you have the option to save and load games in progress, but even loading your game is punitive! Loading a file permanently removes one of your lives, and does this every time you load it. It didn't take long at all to realize I'd never beat Championship Lode Runner fairly, but the game even blocks emulator save states by booting you back to the main menu when it detects discrepancies between your disk and memory.

Well, crap. At least it can't detect WOZ backups! I think.

 

Forget my 30 minute rule - I'm saving and making a backup of the disk image every time I beat a level, to get around the penalty for loading. Especially when the levels are like this.

Cute design, but there's nowhere to dig and nowhere to run!

What becomes clear from even just the first two levels is that this level pack demands AI manipulation to get anywhere. It demands understanding things such as that standing on one part of the ladder will make the guards climb the monkey bars over to the right and drop down on you, but moving just one pixel down will make them swing to the left instead and isolate themselves from the pack, giving you some breathing room, letting you figure out a way to get all of them bunched up in a corner where they'll stay out of your way, and when you poke your head out will chase you single-file instead of surrounding you from all sides. I don't think you are expected to actually learn the AI routine in such granular detail that you can deduce the proper methods, but rather that through trial and error will uncover the specific tricks in each stage and learn where to go and when so that the guards get herded where you need them.

Now this leads me with another tricky problem - assuming I can power through and beat the game, how do I go about blogging it? Certainly not by describing every single level and its solutions in exhaustive detail - that wouldn't be fun for anyone. For the original game I gave updates roughly twice a week and showed off about 30 out of the 150 levels, giving some of them nothing more than a captioned screenshot and some others detailed accounts of their novel challenges and solutions. Even that approach felt like a chore, and stats tell me that most of my readership only bothered to read the first post and none of the subsequent updates. And progress through this game is likely to be much slower, at least in terms of how many levels I can beat per day.

As of right now, I'm on level 7, and I've been playing for roughly three hours, most of my progress made today. Some levels have definitely been more difficult than others, but five out of the six I've beaten required strange AI manipulation techniques as I've described. I'm open to suggestions on how frequently to update on my progress and/or in how much detail - updates on my progress in the original Lode Runner looked like this, for comparison. Part of me wants to just give my next and final update when I've beaten the damned thing, but that could easily take a week or two.