Looks a bit too much like ‘80s pop icon Morten Harket for our liking

Infogrames drag yet another ‘classic’ kicking and screaming into the ‘90s. In these heady days of Zelda and Turok 2, Lode Runner 64 could well end up looking like your dad at the school disco…
Andy Ashwin

Hurrah! I loved Lode Runner on the Commodore 64.
Didn’t we all? (cough). That was way back in the early ‘80s, when games were games, women had beards and we all wore pastel shades.

I didn’t!
Then you must have looked really stupid. Anyhow, Lode Runner was one of the classics, right up there with Q-Bert and Boulderdash. Unfortunately, some of these great games have suffered during the painful transition to 3D and end up soiling the good name of the original.

Surely not. They wouldn’t dare ruin my favourite game.
Fortunately, Big Bang Software have been developing Lode Runner 64 under the watchful eye of the creator of the original, Doug Smith. It’s unlikely that he’d be involved if he thought that the end product would be damaging to the original. Unless he needed the money, of course.

So what is it like then?
It’s not just the old game with 3D bells and whistles, that’s for sure. The only real similarity is the feel of the thing when you’re playing it. It’s all done in pseudo-3D - you have no real freedom like you got with Zelda or Mario 64, but you can rotate your view at will.

Wow! That must be fantastic!
Quite.

How about the mad monks?
The story and characters are exactly the same as in the original – the mad Emperor Monk of Pandora has hijacked gold shipments from the Outer Sector. You, as Lode Runner, must make your way through a myriad of mazes scattered across strange worlds, recover the gold and eliminate the Emperor Monk once and for all. Or at least until the sequel.

Is it big enough for an expert gamer like myself?
Lode Runner 64 offers you five unique worlds, each with more than 20 challenging levels. The puzzles vary from one level to the next, with bizarre features such as ‘helix lifts’, ‘shuttle discs’, ‘ice slides’ and ‘plasma launchers’. Each item will need to be used correctly in order to collect enough gold to progress.

I’m all excited!
As a fan of the original you should be excited. However, some people are more likely to think that Lode Runner 64 is a ‘lode’ of rubbish. Those who haven’t played the original won’t benefit from the nostalgia factor like we do. You may well be better off downloading a shareware clone of the original, to see if you still think Lode Runner is ‘all that’.

*Plenty of taxing levels… well over 100
*Classic ‘old school’ puzzle fare
*Fans of the original will probably love it
*Graphics are a mite poor
*Was the original Lode Runner actually any good?