Diamaze

Let us use our imagination for a while. You were playing poker. Against a Lord. Carruthers is his name. Ouch. He was cheating, but since your game skills are so incredibly keen, you managed to win. Poor middle-aged low-income Lord is completely tied, as he doesn’t have the means to pay you. Or so he says. Well, shed no tears my old friend, as Lord Carruthers has a diamond mine!  Actually, more than one, apparently.

The proposal is that you go into his diamond mine(s) and mine diamonds so he’s able to pay you. Makes sense, right? What you get is a lamp, which runs out of fuel after a while, meaning you’ll be risking a slow, dark, cold, probably bug and bat ridden death. Unless you make it out of the cave before the lamp runs out of its fuel. If that’s the case, you know, you’re pretty much fine. A bit richer, too. You also get a few dynamite sticks, just in case.

 

Don’t be fooled by the diamonds that I got.

The gameplay couldn’t be simpler: you, an X, go for the little diamonds on screen. Don’t let the fuel run out, and use your dynamite wisely so you can get as many as you can. You should also take into consideration that you only complete one game when you actually leave the cave; meaning you can leave your score on this pretty wall of fame. If you clean the whole screen, you get extra 5000$. Getting all the diamonds is actually quite a challenge, of that I can assure you.  Diamaze, from 1990, requires no fancy videocard, or anything of the sort. 

While it is a fun game if you’re looking for some brainless wandering and exploding squares with dynamite i’s, it has a couple of shortcomings: the sounds are most definitely annoying. One could argue that they’re the typical sounds for these sort of DOS games, but, well, they’re just annoying. You can turn them off, but every time you restart a cave, the sound comes back on. Also, the controls for such a simple game should be a bit more straightforward. You move with the arrows, but you use dynamite with LRUD keys (yes, that means left, right, up and down). As you can imagine, I’m not really looking for morphology oriented games, which means having for example WASD for planting the sticks would be ideal. There also doesn’t seem to be a way of changing controls.

Next time you play poker against someone, make sure they show the money beforehand.

Here’s a little gameplay video, so you get the jist of it: