Lode Runner

One day, while sitting at your computer, and reading Saddening Goat, you decided to go acquire lots of money very quickly. For most people, this may seem rather difficult, but not for you. You just do the same thing you do every night – go into a labyrinth, and collect treasure than happens to be scattered around, while avoiding the evil enemy monster/robot/thief things. If this is an accurate description of you, then you have probably discovered one of the best video games ever – Lode Runner.

Originally made for the NES in 1983, then remade many, many times, Lode Runner is a game where, as a random person wearing a blue hat and overalls, you walk around a puzzle board/maze, like that pictured above, collecting the random piles of money that conveniently happen to be lying around all over the place. Unfortunately, you have three enemies, which depending on the version of the game you are playing, could be monsters, robots, or other people that look like you but with a different color scheme. When they run into you, you put all your money back where you found it, and return to where you started, while the enemies do the same, then restart. This continues for a while until you get all of the gold in one go and leave up the ladder in the top right corner, which leads you to the next maze! And the cycle continues.

Fortunately, to fend off the evil people, you have a super power: at the click of a button, you can make a hole appear to the left or right of you! This is helpful in two ways. The first is that the evil people, for whatever reason, cannot look anywhere other than horizontally. Thus, if they're following you, and you make a hole appear in their path, they fall into it. This goes especially well with the second characteristic of the holes you can make – after a couple seconds, they magically close, and everything in them (generally evil people) dies. Unfortunately, when an enemy dies in Lode Runner, they just reappear at the top of the board a couple seconds later, but it wouldn't be interesting otherwise. Sometimes, though, the evil things manage to climb out of the holes before they close on them, so you don't always succeed in killing them if you manage to make them fall in a hole. You, however, can also fall in your own holes, and you cannot climb out, no matter what, because obviously, people with different color schemes than you have better upper-body strength.

If you happen to be on an upper level, however, the holes can help in another way: you can just jump through them, and land one level lower. This is especially helpful because when the enemies try to jump through holes that have no bottom, instead of falling to a lower level, they somehow float in the holes anyway, and just stay there until they lift themselves out or are crushed and "die." Also, if you make a series of holes in a row, and an enemy falls into one of them, when they climb out (which they do by holding onto… another hole… and lifting) they just fall right into the next hole!

Despite all these random impossible things that happen in Lode Runner, it is still one of the best games I have ever played. I highly suggest you go and download it from the Xbox Live Arcade, or the Wii Shop Channel, depending on what system you have, or going to someone's house who has a Wii or Xbox 360, and downloading it on theirs, and playing it there. It's worth it.

Looking back, I'm not sure if this whole post will make much sense to those who have never played Lode Runner. Therefore, you should all go here, and maybe watch other YouTube videos of Lode Runner as well, then come back, and it should make more sense. Hopefully. A la prochaine!