Chagunitzu

The Good
Keith Schuler is not a programmer that I am familiar with. In the early ‘90s, he created Chagunitzu, which I believe is his second game (the first one being a chess game), and the first thing I thought of when I tried out this game is that Schuler must have been a fan of Boulder Dash - all of the elements that made First Star’s game great are right here. The game was distributed on Big Blue Disk #44 and was designed to run on slower PCs.

As Alabama Smith, you need to explore 25 levels collecting treasures, avoiding certain types of nasties, and overcoming traps. The first level is basically easy, but from the second level onwards you will encounter the first of the nasties, the spiders. These hug the walls and explode when they are trapped, turning into diamonds which you can pick up. Then halfway through the game you will meet skeletons, explorers who have lost their lives. They seem to wander in a straight line, but occasionally go in a different direction. Once you have gathered enough gems, the screen will flash and a square resembling the exit will appear. Death comes to Al when he hit by nasties or traps. You will see him get electrocuted, turned into a skeleton, and crumble.

The puzzle part of Chagunitzu usually involves pushing the right boulders in the right way to crush a spider so that you can get enough gems to open up the exit. Schuler has thought of some creative traps. There are blue orbs that fire crossbows at Al if he is in their line of sight; and in one of the levels, having him get electrocuted after touching a certain gem and have him get trapped in a small area is a stroke of genius. If you are in the middle of a puzzle, you can press the [ESC] key to restart the level, but at the expense of a life.

You get three lives, with an extra one awarded if you get far enough in the game. Exhaust all your lives and the game is over. If you get a good enough high score, you'll be among the "Pros of the Pyramid". You can save your game and come back to a level at a later stage. The good thing about it is that you restore the game at the same spot, not at the beginning of the level. Having said that, I wouldn't recommend saving several seconds before you run into a spider.

Chagunitzu is shipped with a very informative text file, which I recommend reading before you play the game. It has a brief definition of where the title came from, instructions on how to play the game, and hints on each of the 25 levels.

Graphic-wise, the visuals are not bad. Al reminds me of Mrs. Bucket from “Keeping Up Appearances”, and everything is drawn nicely. Apart from the nice transition between levels, there are no animations of sprites. The sound effects come through the PC Speaker. There is no background music in the game, but it was quite commonplace for games released around this time not to have any.

The Bad
A couple of times in the game, I thought that I collected all the gems in a given level, only to find out that the exit door didn’t appear. Having said that, it would have been nice to have some information that states how many gems you collected and gems required (in the form of “(collected / required”).

The Bottom Line
Chagunitzu is a very good puzzle game from Keith Schuler. It has all the hallmarks of Boulder Dash, except that in this game, the boulders don't crush you to death. If you are into BD-like games, check this one out.