Boulder Dash

Boulder Dash is a video game released for Commodore 64, Atari 400/800, ZX Spectrum, NES, IBM PC, Amstrad CPC and many other platforms. It is also an uncommon game case released for the game room after it has come out on home platforms. The first Boulder Dash (Atari) was written in 1983 by Peter Liepa and Chris Gray and was produced by First Star Software. The title is a game of words in English, between balderdash (nonsense, nonsense) and boulder (mass).

Gameplay
You need to drive the protagonist, called Rockford, inside caves to collect diamonds. The terrain is shown in cross-section, with multidirectional screen sliding, and consists of an invisible grid of boxes that can be occupied by the ground, fixed walls or movable objects such as diamonds and rocks. When the land in the boxes below is removed, the objects fall dangerously.

Rockford can dig tunnels in the four directions and does not suffer from severity, but must pay attention to various dangers: deadly contact creatures, explosions, falling rocks that can crush it or even trap it in unexpired situations. The rocks can also crush enemies, causing explosions that can destroy everything in the surrounding squares, including rocks and walls. There are three types of creatures:

Firefly ("firefly", but they look like iridescent squares), only move in empty spaces according to predictable paths. Butterflies, they move like firefly but in different directions, and when you crush generate new diamonds. Amebe, green clusters that gradually expand through galleries and earth; They can not crush, but if Rockford can trap them with rocks in a confined space, they die and become so many diamonds, otherwise they reach a certain size they become so many rocks. Crushing enemies, as well as defense, sometimes is a tactic needed to solve a level, to open explosion passages, or to get more otherwise inadequate diamonds. Rockford can also push the rocks horizontally if there is any empty space next to it.

At each level of play, Rockford has to collect a number of diamonds within a given time period. Only then can you open the door that will allow you to move to the next level. In the original versions there are 16 possible caves identified by A-P letters, each playable at 5 degree difficulty with different arrangement of diamonds; You do not have to face all levels in order, but you can select them within certain limits.