Friday 3 January 2014

Real Miner

By Arda

Genre: Ore-full Maze

It gives me great pleasure to announce that Arda, host of the 2012 CSSCGC and author of Drawlander, has been biding his time and entered a sizzling little maze game.



Done completely in BASIC, it brings to mind the joys of ScrapYard Scrapes, and I’m pleased to say I’ve enjoyed Real Miner just as much.  The aim of the game is to get to the green exit and get as much ore as you can en route.  You can move through bright red material and, Charles Atlas style, push the rocks that are larger than you.  To move through diamond and rubble you must use your pick axe, which appears to be made from substandard material as each one is capable of doing only one hit!  Mercifully, like any real mine it is scattered with equally unserviceable pickaxes in sealed pockets throughout.



Real Miner offers a nod to some modern gaming styles with its ‘Career Mode’, in which you play a preset game and follow a real life emulation of what it’s like to be a miner (and what an uncanny representation it is!).  Alongside this, more fun can be had with the random game and coded game, the screens in real miner are generated cleverly using procedural generation.


What’s crap about it?  For some the UDGs, it returns to BASIC for the random and coded game (see HACKSACK), the career mode may be impossible (though I’m not sure – more play needed) and random generation of impossible screens.  I love it to bits though, and it would sit nicely on the Cassette 50.

You might be wondering why it’s called real miner.  Well during play you may be sent into a mine with no pickaxes or in impossible traps and it becomes clear just how hazardous the life of a miner can be.  Arda’s game is clearly a call to arms for better working conditions in the mining industry.

Thankyou Arda!

Download here.

HACK SACK:

Download bugfixed versionhere.
 More pickaxes: Line 3000, LET pf=X, where ‘X’ is number of pickaxes.

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