Digger

Two ways to kill, and one is better

You clear each level by removing the roaming enemies, and you have two tools for the job. The first is your pump: face an enemy in an adjacent tunnel and fire to pop it. The second is gravity: dig away the earth under a rock until it drops on whatever stands below. The rock is the better deal. One well-placed boulder can crush several enemies in the same shaft, while pumping is a one-at-a-time, get-close affair that leaves you exposed the whole time. Strong players tunnel with the rocks in mind and treat the pump as the sidearm, not the plan.

Setting up the crush

Here's a kill you can build on purpose. Find a rock with enemies patrolling somewhere below it. Dig a vertical shaft beneath the rock but stop one scoop short, so it hangs there, ready. Now make yourself the bait. Let the enemies spot you and pile into the shaft after you, then carve the last scoop and clear out of the lane. The rock drops the instant its support goes, and everything queued underneath is gone in one crunch. Three enemies under one rock is the best trade in the game.

Timing is the whole skill. Cut the support too early and the rock falls on nothing. Too late and the chasers are already around the corner and on top of you. Treat any rock you've undermined as dangerous ground: don't loiter beneath it, and don't route a tunnel you'll need later through its drop zone. When a screen has several rocks, prepare them early. A half-dug support costs nothing to leave waiting, and a prepared rock turns any chase into an ambush you can spring on demand.

Tunnel with an escape in mind

Every tunnel you carve is both your road and theirs. Enemies chase you through the passages you dig, and some can drift through solid dirt to head you off, so the shape of your digging decides how dangerous the level is. Spend the first seconds of a screen scouting rather than sprinting: note where the rocks hang, pick the shaft that will be your kill zone, and carve yourself a short base near an edge with two exits. A plan made in five calm seconds beats improvising with two enemies on your tail.

• Never dig into a dead end with an enemy between you and the opening. Always leave a second way out.
• Fewer tunnels, fewer ambushes. A tidy network you understand beats a sprawling maze that gives them routes behind you.
• Use the pump for stragglers and emergencies, the enemy right in your face, rather than as the main plan.
• Clear from the edges inward so you're never surrounded, and keep half an eye on any enemy swimming off the beaten paths.

Think of your two tunnel types differently, too. Horizontal corridors are roads: you travel them, you pump down them, you keep them clean behind you. Vertical shafts are traps, because enemies chasing you down a column stack up in single file, which is exactly the shape a falling rock wants. You move with the arrow keys, WASD or the pad, and you pump in the direction you face, so line up along a corridor with escape room behind you before firing. Touch an enemy and you lose a life. Clear the screen and the next one loads.

Straight from 1982

This is the Dig Dug formula, from Namco's 1982 arcade hit. Dig Dug's clever idea was that the ground itself was the game: the screen was one solid block of diggable earth, and your weapons were an air pump and gravity. Its two enemies became mascots. Pooka is the round red one in swim goggles; Fygar is the green dragon that breathes fire. Both could turn into ghostly eyes and slide through solid dirt to ambush you, which is exactly where this game's dirt-crossing enemies come from. The digger himself was later named Taizo Hori, a pun on a Japanese phrase meaning I want to dig. The design has aged well because the terrain is never a backdrop. Every scoop redraws the map, and the choice between the slow, risky pump and the big rock drop gives each screen a little puzzle underneath the arcade action.