Diamond Run rates this game: 3/5Diamond Run is an early screen completion game. One each screen, called "Scene 1", "Scene 2", etc. , you have an initial layout of diamonds, emeralds, green cheese, and 2 doors (good stuff), and spiders, red smiley face monsters, rocks, walls, and bombs (dangerous but potentially useful stuff). You can move up, down, right, and left, digging thru the "dirt" as you go. You can also push the one button while pointing in one of those directions in order to dig the dirt or take the jewel in that space without actually moving there. The object is to get a certain number of jewels and then get to one of the 2 doors to exit the scene. The number of scenes is infinite, but after scene 60 or so they basically start repeating thru a cycle of about 10 of the former scenes. From the very beginning, people said that Diamond Run was quirky and unpredictable. This is because some of the rules for dying are somewhat but not completely intuitive. Normally, you will die if you touch a red smiley face, if you are in the space of an explosion, or if you are adjacent to a spider at any time. But you also have to be really careful when picking up jewels that touch spiders because it often leads to mysterious death. Another quirky feature is the way things fall. Basically, a bomb will fall off another bomb or a jewel, and a jewel will fall off another jewel, but nothing will fall off dirt or green cheese. Diamonds count as 3 jewels, and emeralds count as 1 jewel. On most screens you have to get 60 to 100 jewels to finish the scene. Each screen requires a particular strategy to get out of certain predicaments. Most screens have far more jewels available than what you need, which is a temtation to stick around and get more, which often leads to mysterious and unwanted deaths. After dying, you have to start the scene over from the beginning. When a spider touches green cheese, it explodes into about 10 emeralds. Stay away from this explosion but then go and get the emeralds. Picking up emeralds is tricky because a falling emerald will kill you. Generally, you should pick them up from top to bottom, but sometimes it is advantagous to carefully mine them from below. You can usually go straight up thru the jewels or duck quickly to the side and rest under a non-falling jewel without it killing you. You can turn a smiley face into about 10 rocks and 3 diamonds by dropping a rock on it. The rocks can continue to fall and hit other bad guys. When a rock hits a spider, it turns into about 10 emeralds. Bombs can blow up certain walls (the ones made of round rocks rather than rectangular bricks). Bombs can cause chain reactions with other bombs and spiders. Most scenes require some combination of breaking thru walls, reducing dangers by turning spiders into jewels, and finding the doors. A couple scenes often cause players a lot more trouble than the other scenes, requiring perhaps hundreds of "quarters" to get thru. I will not give all the hints, here, but basically they require figuring out how to break thru walls, or figuring out how to get thru 3 rocks to get to a door. The first scenes generalloy take hundreds of trials to get thru, but all scenes are all quite doable (some are comically simple), and once you master the game and its quirkyness, you can play pretty much endlessly (although not without losing lives).
