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hese days, it’s easy to look at a game and determine its genre in a few words: first-person shooter, action/adventure, etc. However, in the late ’70s/early ’80s—what we’ll call the arcade’s golden days, where video games were firmly establishing themselves as a part of our pop culture—it was harder to categorize games in this manner. What one- or two-word description would you give Space Invaders? How about Asteroids or Missile Command?

Another game from that era that defies easy definition is 1982’s Dig Dug, which was also recently added to the Xbox Live Arcade catalog. I guess you could call it a “maze game,” much like Pac-Man, but the maze isn’t fixed here—it changes as you dig through the earth. There are also the added mechanics of being able to drop rocks on the creatures coming after you or pump them up until they explode, which were unique “weapons” at the time the game came out.

But it’s impossible to say to someone who’s never seen it before that “It’s a ______ ______”—it needs a more detailed explanation: Your character drills through the underground terrain while evading/destroying the Pookas and Fygars moving around the same dirt patch. Contact with a baddie or getting in the path of a Fygar’s flame kills you.





As for your offense, you can use the previously described tools to take foes out and help you clear the screen of threats. There’s also some strategy potential, as the pump can be used to freeze a creature in place so you can get away or prepare a rock drop. Points are doled out for taking out the beasts, and bonus points are given if you can take out multiple creatures with a single rock drop. Dropping two rocks brings out the requisite fruit at the maze’s center, and in later levels it’s harder to get there without risking a monster encounter.

Watching the game being played, it looks pretty simple. However, it’s a challenge to play—more so as the level increases, where the creatures come in larger numbers and are faster. The Pooka and Fygar running speed also lessens your pumps effectiveness, because spending the time to inflate an enemy gives the others that much more time to cut through the playfield to you.

That brings up an important point—let’s call it a problem—with bringing some of these old games to Xbox Live Arcade: Coin-op titles were designed to provide a few minutes of gameplay at a time for each quarter, but giving you enough progress that you wanted to put more in. On a home console, you don’t want to keep getting killed every couple of minutes, so this structure is frustrating, but at the same time you don’t want to blow through the game from beginning to end in short order, even if you’re only paying 400 Microsoft Points (or $5 U.S.).

Add to that the ability to start a game at any level once you’ve completed it, and a good gamer can probably get through Dig Dug in a short time—and, well, with far less need to play through the early levels over and over. Yes, it’s also far cheaper than pumping quarters into an arcade machine, but sometimes you still want a game to have durability, where you can pick it up later and not feel like you’d played it to death. Unfortunately, the single-player-only Dig Dug feels like it falls into the “played it to death” category more than some other XBLA games that provide better durability.

Of course, for your $5, you do get to play an old-school coin-op from the “golden era,” and rack up the 200 Achievement points that each XBLA offers. In this game, most of the 12 achievements offered are for snagging the fruit in each level, with the others being for slamming two enemies with a single rock, dispatching four creatures with a single rock and (the nearly impossible) clearing a whole level’s soil. There’s value at a low price, but it may not be enough for some hard-core gamers.