Arcade Game Series: Dig Dug

After Hue, this is next game picked by friends and I’m not really sure what happened. The number selection process was meant to enable me to get some quick and easy completions off of the list of which there were about twelve. Dig Dug was nowhere near the easy end of the spectrum but more on that later. It did, however, meet the quick completion criteria coming in at under 6 hours.

I got this game with the two other, slightly easier Arcade Game Series games at a discount as part of  package and I will try and get the others completed soon.

Dig Dug is an arcade classic as semi-dictated by the title of the game. The idea is that you are a man and you have to dig through some underground areas to kill some enemies using a pump and inflating them until they explode. Once you’ve killed all but one of the enemies, the last one will try to run away. Either kill or let him escape and you move on to the next level and repeat the process.

Simple right? Well, yes it is if one of the enemy types couldn’t breath fire at you which sometimes goes through walls and sometimes doesn’t. The enemies themselves can also turn into ‘ghosts’ and float through the walls to kill you. In the later levels they will all gank you at once making it nearly impossible to survive for more than a couple of seconds at a time unless you get lucky. I found that once you got to a certain point, the gameplay verged on unfair.

Musically, it’s fucking annoying, there’s no other word for it. Imagine you’re in an arcade surrounded by loads of other machines and kids all screaming at each other – the music will make very little difference. However, take that game out of the arcade and stick it in your living room and play the same music and it becomes almost unbearable to listen to. If you are going to adapt an arcade game for the home console, at least dial down the annoying high-pitched, beepy, non-stop music please.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 20 Achievements

I played the game for about five minutes and four levels before I was killed and then took a look at the achievement list. I was immediately scared that I wouldn’t complete the game at all due to two achievements, one for killing one hundred enemies in a single playthrough and one for digging out 1,000 squares in one game (although the achievement description doesn’t say that.)

However, the good thing about the achievements is that you can unlock them after putting the settings on ‘easy’ which is giving yourself five lives and setting the life rewards to the lowest setting which is one extra life after 20,000 points.

Anyway, on to the achievements and there are two gimmes for completing level 1 and 2. I did this on my first session which locked me in straight away.

In each level are four rocks which can be used to kill enemies and most of the achievements are associated with these rocks. 9 achievements can be earned by dropping two rocks in certain levels to get fruits to appear. Collect the fruits for achievements.

There are another three achievements for the rocks. You need to kill two enemies with one rock and four enemies with one rock. Two is relatively straight forward but four takes a bit of planning. You need to get four enemies to chase you, have a vertical tunnel up to a rock and then move out of the way and cross your fingers that none of them escape. The last one is for killing all enemies in a level with rocks. This is easier in the first level as there are four enemies and four rocks.

There are two easy miscellaneous ones – for killing all enemies without digging – in the first level just wait for them all to come to you – and another for killing an enemy on the surface. When the last enemy escapes, they always go to the surface to do it so you can just wait there for them to pop up and kill them.

The last three are the fuckers and the first one set me up for the last two. The first one involves having to dig out the entirety of the dirt in a level. This is hard for several reasons, the first being that you have to have two enemies alive that you need to avoid as if you kill all bar one, the last one will run away. It’s made harder still by the fact that the enemies get faster the longer you stay alive so they will always get you eventually. And harder still by the fact that digging out columns vertically or horizontally next to each other leaves a small wall of dirt on the map which also needs to be removed. Essentially it boils down to having to move horizontally and vertically through every square on the map.

The good thing about this is that it gave me a chance to develop my survival skills for the last two achievements which I’ve already mentioned at the start. Essentially, it boils down to practice. I will make another note on the controls here though; the analogue stick is overly sensitive and I found myself dying a lot because my dude would turn away from the enemy I was trying to kill. The D Pad removes this issue completely. Another tip which is essential once you start getting to enemies in the same starting locations is that you can approach a wall of dirt, partially dig through it and use your weapon to kill both enemies in the area without presenting yourself as a target. You will have to approach the fire breathing dudes from above or below so they don’t get with the fire though.

Centurion requires you to get to level 15 and clearing it without getting a game over on the assumption that no enemies escape. Good luck. Rambler, for digging through 1,000 spaces of dirt, I’m not sure about because Xbox was having achievement issues when I unlocked it so I don’t know when it popped. However, I got to level 9 when I unlocked it and got an extra life on level 6 for some ideas as to whether you are on track for this. I also nearly entirely cleared the first three levels of dirt on my successful run.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Dig Dug is a tough yet rewarding completion and I got a great deal of satisfaction from unlocking the harder achievements. The controls and cheapness of the game did fuck me off at times but despite this, I managed to get all of it done in less than six hours. Considering it retails at £3.19, that’s not bad value.