Buried Bucks

Name:Buried Buck$
Number:117
Year:1982
Publisher:ANALOG Software
Developer:Tom Hudson
Genre:Side-scroller
Difficulty:4/5
Time:40 minutes

Here's something a bit different than usual for 1982, a game where the player is trying to take buried treasure. Developed by Tom Hudson and published the type-in magazine ANALOG Software, an Atari 800 magazine. Both are more well known for being involved in the debut games of text adventure legend Brian Moriarty, Adventure in the 5th Dimension. Unfortunately, Hudson seems to have only worked on games for ANALOG.

After a jaunty intro tune and an animated title screen, the game begins. The objective of the game is to drop bombs on the various piles of gold and then extract them to your base while not touching the dirt, either the stuff already in the ground or what's being airdropped by some dude flying by the place. Don't know what his problem is, but as you blow up the dirt he comes around to fill in the holes. There is a ammo limit, but you can return to the base on the left side of the screen at any time to reload your bombs. You can also destroy the bucks by destroying all the dirt underneath it until it reaches the bottom of the screen.

Its not very complex game, but the change of objective from the usual games from this year made the game more interesting. It becomes quite a bit about baiting the overhead plane by bombing areas without the bucks. There seems to be a limit on what he does, though I'm not quite sure the specifics of it. Your helicopter is not very swift, so those slow descends to the money are fraught with danger. Better make sure the dirt is all clear, because hitting any of it, or getting caught in your own explosion, will kill you.

The game increases the difficulty by firstly, increasing the number of layers there are underneath the player, and by adding water. Water ruins the cool terrain destruction thing the game had going for it until now, because it completely changes the game. All your bombs are harmless against it, and trying to siphon it off just creates more water. You can't even tunnel to the bottom of the screen. It is entirely possible to screw yourself over completely with this stuff, and the game doesn't even have the politeness to end the game for you. You have to manually run out of lives. At least The Alien Island 3D had the forcefulness to tell you to end it.

By the 4th level, this seems to create an environment that's seemingly impossible to beat. I suspect this was done in order to create an unwinnable situation so the player wouldn't write-in to complain about a lack of a real ending. Its a shame because the game is actually pretty fun, it just needs a smoother difficulty curve.

Weapons:
Simple, but effective. Though I feel like the nature of this ties in more to the environment. 1/10

Enemies:
A single plane, constantly flying around and upset at the environmental destruction. It was very satisfying to outsmart him. 2/10

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
More randomized levels. 0/10

Player Agency:
Standard joystick controls. Not the smoothest, but it works well enough. 3/10

Interactivity:
Nothing quite like a game that freely lets you destroy everything. 3/10

Atmosphere:
None.

Graphics:
Nothing exciting, but it does depict everything well. 1/10

Story:
None.

Sound/Music:
Your standard blips and bloops, plus a strange intro tune. 1/10

That's 11. At this point, fair to say its definitely above average for 1982 and worth a look if you like the time period. The immense difficulty the later levels reach are more worth defeating if you aren't playing games the same way I do.