The concept of Boulder Dash is a classic: you are digging through a maze trying to recover jewels while not falling prey of the boulders, which can fall if you dig below them, or can even roll over other boulders if you dig next to them. This game allows you to play Boulder Dash on your TI-89, but suffers from various flaws in doing so.
For one, you don't see very much of the playing field around you; then the next issue is that it's hard to advance just one step: unless you lift the key very quickly the character is going to advance two steps or more, and you could end up meeting your death (through an enemy or a boulder); so you have to be careful to exert very precise motions and take your time, but then you risk having the timer run out on you, so you always feel the rush while needing to be careful, not a very enjoyable gameplay (thankfully, in case of need there is a pause function, which pauses the timer). Furthermore, there is no way that I could see to save your progress, and you are only allowed to start at cave A (first) or⦠cave E (fifth) (and I: ninth, etc.), so if you are playing through cave D (fourth) but have to stop playing (and can't just pause and leave the calculator unused because you have math class next), you have no choice but to end your game and start over from cave A.
The result is that I barely managed to reach cave D and have been unable to progress further (damn butterflies) even though I have competently played Boulder Dash clones before (in particular an old Mac one called Infotron); maybe this difficulty is intended, but it makes for a frustrating game.
The graphics are nothing out of the ordinary, in particular why do they need to be based on pixels twice as large as they are high? They could certainly be better.
(2/5)
(reviewed on a TI-89 HW1 AMS 1.00 with DoorsOS 0.98)
