Mine Shaft

The Good
* Familiar gameplay

I can count the number of games where I run around a playfield collecting something (eg: Mr. Do!) so it didn't take me a long time for me to learn how to play Mine Shaft. You even have the choice of gathering all the gems or kill the robots. Instead of the game taking you to the next automatically, you have to enter a door that will take you there. To not get stopped from robots, I would rather kill them first.

* Lives Aplenty

Unlike many arcade games that were released at the same time, Mine Shaft awards you with one extra life when you complete each level, instead of it having you to get a certain score. This is ideal for players who are new to the game. If the same players are able to complete a level without losing a life, then there would be no shortage of lives.

The Bad
* Awkward controls

Most arcade games at the time used the IJKM combination, which moves your character Up, Left, Right, Down respectively; and anyone who has played these games with the keyboard felt comfortable playing them. The [M] key moves your character down. However, Sierra mapped the down key to [K] meaning that your fingers are going to be in a strange position. I found it very hard to control my character, especially when navigating diagonal passages.

The title screen only appears once per session, meaning that when the current game ends, the demo is just shown. This means that you can't change how you control the game, and you have to exit and then re-run the game and choose the controls from there.

The Bottom Line
I thought that Mine Shaft plays to a PD game that I had on my Commodore 64 where you mine for gold and then take a certain amount to the bank. But instead, what we have here is Sierra copying games of the time, therefore lacking any original concept.

This is a good game, although not quite as good as the previous arcade games the company has done. The object is to go around the maze, getting the gems while avoiding or killing the robots. The controls are awkward, so as Gravel said in his review, use a joystick to control your character.