Stupid Fun! It's Dig Dug!
Sometimes the simplest games are the best. Especially for people like me - I can appreciate the multi-layered worlds of the Zelda games, and while personally I've never been into 'em, it's easy to see why so many people adore the Final Fantasy series. Those kinds of all-emcompassing gaming experiences probably give you more of a 'I just read a really good book' type of vibe, but for me, getting that favorable Heathcliff-punchline is terrific in it's own right.
Dig Dug is a simple, stupid game. It's repetitive, it's not the Queen of Aesthetics Island, and it certainly doesn't challenge your mind. The graphics are basic, same with the controls. As for color schemes, you'll find prettier patterns if you look hard enough at dog vomit. There's hundreds upon hundreds of video games out there that blow it away in the Impressive! department, but so what? Sometimes entertainment comes cheap - and don't even try to argue with me on this - using a hand-pump to blow up underground dragons is Entertainment Personified.
 
As is the case with most old video games, very little thought went into the origins of the character you're playing and the goal you're trying to reach. In this one, the title refers to your character, the white-and-blue robot, Dig Dug. While most heroic robots are equipped with missile launchers and the trademark arm-lazer to defeat bad guys, Dig Dug got shafted by the mechanical genius responsible for him: all he's got is a shovel and a pump. Booooo. All the books about the future I've read claim that, in time, we'll have special robots to carry out our menial tasks. I can't think of a task more menial that blowing up small creatures so far below the earth that nobody should bother caring that they exist. By this logic, I can estimate that the Dig Dug game is set in the year 3115. It's futuristic fumigation!
Your token enemies include Pooka and Fygar. Lots of Pookas and Fygars. Thousands of Pookas and Fygars. The future is a pretty dismal place. Pooka is a chubby tomato who wears skate raver goggles. They don't seem to mean any harm, but they're cursed with Rogue's mutant super abilities: if they touch you, you die. Because of that tragic flaw, they've become Future Earth's enemy #1, and Dig Dug has been created and employed to, quite simply, blow them up with extreme predjudice.
Fygars don't strike me as being particularly evil either, but historically, green dragons in video games are an enemy character. And since the poor schmo shares Pooka's subversive icy touch of death skill, Dig Dug has no choice but to annihilate him too. But watch out! Unlike Pooka, Fygar is equipped with a little bit of weaponry - the ability to spit fire. He does this so randomly and without reason that it's impossible to claim evil intent, but I guess the soil of our future home is important enough to the economy to warrant wiping out their entire species.
Moving on, here's what you've gotta do: use your super-shovel to navigate your way around the underground, carefully enterting the chambers of the beasts so you can pump them full of air until they explode. It seems easy enough, but here's something to remember: these creatures may look stupid, but they're not without a brain. When they get wind of the fact that there's this robot going around blowing up their buddies with a pump, which let's admit is pretty damn insulting, they all gang up and attempt to kill you first. And that's where the magic begins...
Pookas and Fygars have the astounding ability to morph into a ghost-like state, floating from chamber to chamber. I'm shocked that we're opting to murder these guys before having the chance to study and replicate their amazing teleporation powers. Then again, maybe everyone above ground in Future Earth can do that. Who knows, this game's all mantle, no crust. Whatever the case, it makes the gameplay a lot more difficult, which isn't saying much, since previously it was easier than beating Glass Joe with one of those techno-super-turbo controllers in Punch-Out. Now, it's still really easy, but there remains a 5% chance of death on the early levels. Beware.
The going doesn't get rough till you pass a number of stages. With each new level, there's more and more creatures. Sometimes three of them stay in one single chamber. Those kinds of underground crackhouses pose the biggest threat to Dig Dug's vitaltiy. It's a total subterranean infestation of annoying asshole villains, and it's up to US to stop them!
That's pretty much it in a nutshell. You aren't awarded much for your efforts, either. In the Nintendo version, all you get aside from a heaping amount of useless bonus points is the addition of flowers to the top of the screen. I guess gardens are more prone to success if fire-breathing dragons aren't having Fez-and-Pez parties under the roots. Fortunately, there's two points to the game which, sheerly by accident, make it a lot more fun:
#1: Soil Patterns: If you become well adept at avoiding the dumb bad guys, you can have a real good time trying to spell out your name in the soil, trying to draw a picture of a turtle in the soil, or my personal favorite, trying to make the soil tunnels look like Uncle Sam.
#2: Total Torture of the Final Enemy: While all of the enemies try to attack you when their friends are around, as soon as there's only one left, he'll try to exit stage left as quickly as possible. Now this is the real perk point of the game. Since there's no other bad guys remaining to hit you from behind, you're given free reign to pump him full of air, let him deflate, rinse and repeat 10,000 times till he's a exhausted, frightened SHELL of the underground pest he once was. The best part of it is, once you get tired of torturing his ass and demeaning his soul, you can just blow him up for good and move on to the next stage.
PS, you can also trick your enemies into walking directly underneath falling boulders, smashing them to bits.
Fun like that shouldn't come cheap, but with Dig Dug - it does.
- Matt
matt@x-entertainment.com
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