Diamaze
After an all-night poker game Lord Carruthers owes you a great deal of money. You knew he was cheating, but you were able to win because of your superior playing skills. Carruthers, however, is a man you cannot trust. He claims he is unable to pay his debt to you because he is "cash poor;" all his funds are tied up in properties and investments. He makes the following proposal:
"I say, old bean, I almost forgot about my diamond mine! If you will cancel my debt, I will let you have the run of my diamond mine for as long as a lamp can hold out. You can keep whatever gems you find. It could bring you much more than what I owe you! What do you say?"
You have to give this careful consideration. You probably will never get your money any other way. But this idea of his could be dangerous, and if Carruthers is as devious as he seems, it could be downright fatal! He will probably give you a lamp that does not hold much fuel, and when it goes out you'll be stuck in the dark… FOREVER!
You also wonder if there are enough gems lying about to cover the debt. Most of the diamonds are probably still locked deep in the rock walls of the mine.
Should you take Lord Carruthers up on his offer?
Yes, you accept the challenge, but you have some "cards" up your own sleeve in THIS game. You will take his lamp, but you have a fuel gauge that will tell you how much time you have left at any moment. You will also smuggle in ten sticks of dynamite to let you get at some of those unexcavated areas. And, best of all, you have a specially designed X-ray scope that shows you where the diamonds are, even behind walls. With careful timing and well planned use of the explosives, you may very well be able to clean out Lord Carruthers' mine and teach him a lesson he will never forget!
Diamaze belongs to a type of game that does not exist any more. You might call it an adventure, but really the story is a bit to weak for that. I called it a puzzle game, but it puts a lot of emphasis on speed and little on thought. You might call it an action game, but there are no enemies, and picking up diamonds in a mine hardly counts as action.
Whatever you call it, it is a fun little game you can play over and over again in spite of its simplicity. Diamaze puts you in a random maze that contains about 30 diamonds. You have ten sticks of dynamite, and you have about a minute till the lamp oil runs out. In this time, you try to collect as many diamonds as possible and make it back to the entrance.
If you are caught in the dark, you have lost. If you make it back, your diamonds are evaluated (another random element) and the game keeps a kind of high score table of the "best hauls." The dynamite, of course, is for blasting holes in the walls, for not all the corridors connect.
Diamaze was created by Steve Herring in 1990 and is shareware. For $6 you are supposed to get instructions for upgrading to the registered version, in which you will find a storeroom with extra lamp oil and dynamite at one side of the mine. I have no idea if the contact adress (snail mail only) is still valid.
The game is not as pretty as Alphaman or the Kroz games, but it is skillfully done and pleasant to play. Only controls are the arrow keys for moving and u, d, l, and r for blasting dynamite up, down, left, or right. And since the game neither supports nor requires color, it can be played with equal enjoyment on any PC running any version of DOS.
