This game is fantastic. All too often it gets passed off as some third-rate maze-chase or Bomberman wannabe, and yet it has more depth and breadth to it than most maze-chases out there. It has far more variety and technique to it than the single-player mode of Bomberman, even!
The depth: You could play it as a bog-standard action game, chasing after enemies, trapping them in a hole, picking up the treasures and key, and leaving for the next stage. 1,000 points for each enemy buried. This straightforward, linear action is actually the least fun way to play it.
Once you realize that there's a 20,000-point bonus item if you pick up all treasures without burying a single monster, the game opens itself up to you. It becomes a frantic chase -- that is, monsters chasing you which delivers the same play style and adrenaline rush as the classic Pac-Man. The game is more about navigating tight corridors and outmanoeuvring enemies than killing them outright. Several 20,000-point bonuses later, the extra lives are beginning to rack up, which shows that this is how you are supposed to extract longevity from a single credit.
While attempting to avoid burying an enemy to reach that 20,000 bonus, further techniques reveal themselves, showing the nuance and depth to Cratermaze. For example: If you use a flashlight, yo-yo, or ice power-up on enemies, your bonus is forfeited. However, if you're in a pinch, you can dig a hole and let the enemy walk into it. Don't fill in the hole; just walk over the enemy and leave it, and your chance for the 20,000 points is still intact. It's basically Pac-Man married to Lode Runner.
You are thus compelled to make selective choices when picking up power-ups. The multiple-hole shovel power-ups are useful, but can become suicide in Difficult or Expert mode since you dig a line of holes, an enemy falls in only one of them, and you can't fill them in for fear of losing the bonus, yet you need a clear path in order to escape.
After you pick up all the treasures and the bonus point-bearing "NEC" icon, you are now finally free to start killing enemies with reckless abandon for those 1,000-point bonuses. You can also kill the same enemy many times in a row for kill bonuses increasing to 3,200 points. This gets much tougher in the Difficult mode since there's a much larger number and variety of enemy on each stage, and a tighter time limit.
I might seem to be going on at length all about "points, points, points", but these bonuses are a hint from the designers as to how the game was meant to be played. Don't attack violently like some weapon-toting brute, but rather, evade and incapacitate like an Aikido master.
Online reviews when the Virtual Console version was released show how much they missed the point: "there's really no point to Cratermaze. They're both maze crawlers, but Bomberman '93 delivers the explosiveness that Cratermaze lacks..." I'm willing to bet that put side-by-side, BM'93 would be the more tedious game, your player having to trudge from block-to-block, destroying only one or a few blocks at a time, and perfecting the timing through trial-and-error to blow up your enemies.
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Other things: the music to Cratermaze is fabulous. Groovy boogie-woogie gets your toes tappin' far more than the PCE's Doraemon version of this game.
Perhaps this game (and its arcade parent) had gameplay that was too classic and old-fashioned (like Pac-Man & Lock 'n Chase) and so people never quite figured out what it was meant to be in the advanced year of 1990.
Any other comments, discuss!
Topic: Let's talk Cratermaze! (Read 378 times)
