One of the first games I played on the IBM PC was the original Digger, a four colour arcade game reminiscent of Dig Dug and Pacman. It was the sort of game where getting to the third stage was an achievement in itself, and it was played purely for score. Creat Studios have now, 25 years later, created a new version of Digger for the PS3 that both leaves the original game intact and updates it.

In Digger HD you control Digger, a little excavation truck that is digging for diamonds underground. Each stage is a single fixed screen and the action takes place on a 2D plane – as if you’re looking at a cross-section of a garden, or at an ant farm. Digger is able to make new paths in the dirt while the enemies that chase him cannot. On each stage a number of enemies appear out of a hole in the top right corner of the stage, looking a little like alien insects. They follow the paths you’ve made in a semi-random fashion, and generally get in your way. If they so much as touch Digger he does a somersault and dies, using up one of his 3 lives. Digger is able to shoot a fireball straight ahead of him that will kill an enemy, but there’s quite a long recharge time in between each shot so your main weapon is really the bags of gold dotted around the stage.

Similar to Dig Dug or Boulderdash (both games of the original’s era), if you dig away the soil underneath a gold bag it becomes unstable and falls down, crushing whatever is beneath it (including you if you don’t get out of the way). If you take too long and the enemies happen to meet each other in their random searching of sand corridors then they will transform into deadly, Digger-seeking, dirt-devouring heads and tunnel straight towards you. In this case you’re pretty much stuck in the mud unless you have a fireball charged. If you kill enough of the enemies a little fruit will appear in the hole they crawl out of and if you eat it you become invincible and able to kill the evil alien-bug-guys by touching them (so, similar to Pacman). The stage ends when you’ve collected all the diamonds or killed all the enemies, and you get moved to a new ant farm to collect new diamonds.

Creat have not complicated the mechanics of the original game at all. In fact, they’re almost completely identical to the original. Digger HD is certainly a lot easier, mainly as a result of a slower difficulty ramp-up. In the original game the first stage has four Nobbins on stage at once, but the HD one starts with just one at a time. There are 60 stages in the game: 20 with a mine theme, 20 with an ice theme and 20 with a desert theme. I can’t tell you if there are more than 4 stages in the original game. The variety between the stages is limited, but it’s definitely preferable to play different stages rather than the same few over and over. As you complete a stage you unlock the next one, so you’re able to start a game at any stage you want to. Creat have added some new enemy types in later stages that behave a little differently from the standard Nobbin of the original, and require some different tactics to kill and avoid, offering more variety of gameplay. They’ve also added some variations to the bags of gold; ice bombs, fire bombs and speed boost bags spice up the action.

Despite the subtle changes made in this update, the main difference between the original game and Digger HD is the graphics and sound. The action takes place on a 2D plane, as before, but everything is rendered in highly detailed 3D. Now the dirt really looks like it is being dug away as Digger’s claw chews through it (but where it goes is anybody’s guess). Digger and the enemies are all very detailed and their animations are full of character. The music is a little bit trippy, a little bit whimsical, and the sound effects are also vastly improved. In the original (vintage, they call it) game presented within Digger HD the music is also a lot better than the little beeps the PC Speaker used to output, although the iconic death jingle still sounds as annoying as ever.

Digger HD is a game about high scores. The scoring is identical to the old game – each gem is 25 points and eating an unbroken string of 8 of them gets you a bonus of 250. Each broken bag of gold yields 500 if you pick it up before an enemy does, and each enemy is 250 points. Eating the fruit that makes you invincible is the best source of score as it nets you 1000 points as well as points for the enemies you devour. So while usually in today’s games the goal of each level is simply to get to the next, in Digger HD you want to maximize your score on each level before moving on because the ultimate goal is to beat your previous score. Every 20000 points gets you an extra life, so it’s quite possible to keep a game going for a long time.

My only concern with it as a “high score” game is that the difficulty doesn’t ramp up quickly enough so posting a score can take some time. Fortunately if you want a shorter game with more challenge there is also survival mode – a one life mode where a single false move ends your game. There is also a co-operative version of the arcade and survival modes so you can play with a friend. The enemy count in the co-op modes is significantly higher so it’s not by any means easier than playing by yourself, be warned!

Digger HD is a solid update of the 80’s game that stays very close to its roots while giving it a huge graphical overhaul. The gameplay is simple by today’s standards, and was a little derivative by its own day’s standards, but it is enjoyable. If you’re not a high-score kind of gamer it won’t keep you occupied for very long as it only takes a couple hours to get through the 60 levels, but if you’re up for the challenge of maximizing your score or going for the trophies then it will keep you happily occupied for quite a while.

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