Dig Dug

If you’ve downloaded Pac-Man, Frogger and the like already, you’ll have more of the same fun with Dig Dug, once you get past the less-than-perfect controls that plague all these games.

Nothing has really been added to signify the arcade experience, aside from a few easily unlockable achievements and a live leaderboard. The upside? The game is still a delightful romp, filled with puzzling scenarios and a simplistic, colorful design.

For a lot of younger gamers it might be too simple a premise, but if you give the trial version a shot you should find enough challenging gameplay here to warrant a purchase.

You don't hear "digging" and think "Oooh, fun!"--but somehow, Dig Dug makes you crave it. [Holiday 2006, p.86]

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.

It is, after all, an extremely fun and addicting game. For five dollars, Dig Dug on Live Arcade becomes more of a game for the hardcore fans and uninitiated.

As much as we would have loved to have seen some sort of new co-op mode or something, Dig Dug is still retro gaming at its best.

Surprisingly absent from this version of Dig Dug is the alternating two-player mode found in the original arcade version.

It's an arcade-perfect port of Dig Dug, an experience that still stands up well enough, but easy achievements and a lack of additional features keep it from lasting too long.

The gameplay that was established in 1982 is archaic, but it’s as addictive as it ever was and will keep many players busy trying to top their friends on the Leaderboards. That’s the only place they can compete with one another unfortunately since there is absolutely no multiplayer to go along with a disappointing lack of additional content.

The coin-gobbling design exists to kill you off as quickly as possible, and with such a repetitive design you've soon seen all there is to see. But that said, it's a coffee break fix to remind yourself of a lost era of gaming innocence and comes for the price of a large drink in Starbucks. We still dig it.

The biggest misstep that Namco Bandai made was to not include multiplayer. That addition alone could have made the game a worthy purchase.

If you're a retro fetishist with a Jeff Minter costume, you might want to download this game, but we don't recommend it! [Jan 2007, p.96]