I REFUSE to believe anyone ever saw all 72 levels of Dig Dug II without save states or emulation

This is the kind of sequel games used to get. Like Zelda II or Super Mario Bros. 2, it keeps some of the same basic concepts but ends up feeling like a totally different game. We're not digging down anymore, were slicing chunks off of islands and micro-continents, baby!

It's kind of cool as a novelty for fans of the first game, but the only time it feels better than the original Dig Dug is when you manage to lop off 40% of a landmass, sending a baker's dozen or so demons down with it to establish New Atlantis. It feels far more unfair than its predecessor, with inescapable ambushes aplenty. I never could have finished this without retrying levels over and over again on NSO. Pretty sure I beat it out of pure spite. Three stars!!

Even though I loved the original Dig Dug, I couldn't really get into this one. It is similar to the original, except now you are on land, and you have to destroy islands in order to properly take out the enemies, and it isn't exactly that well executed. You choose where you drill which part of the island, but it is hard to determine which part of the island will actually fall depending on what you do. You can still use the pump, but it isn't as useful, so you mostly have to rely on the islands to take them out. So yeah, while I still consider this good, I will definitely take the original Dig Dug over this.

Game #80

Bit of a strange choice to me for the sequel to Dig Dug to essentially remove one of the most interesting elements of its gameplay but I get that a lot of arcade sequels seemed to have an interest in seeing what radical ways they could shift gameplay ideas around to make it feel sufficiently distinct. My main issue really stems more from the fact that the gameplay style they ended up settling on is something that straight up doesn't work even if it's a cool one in theory. Turning each of the huge number of stages of the game into a sort of top down puzzler where you could take out huge chunks of enemy waves by making them sink into the sea with bits of the island. The issue stems from the fact that the enemies are all so aggressive that there's literally no time to actually enact any plans you could come up with, with the stages feeling more about madly killing as many of them as possible before they swarm you than actually putting yourself in some more truly advantageous positions.

You could argue that there's an element of risk-reward to destroying bits of the island with enemies on them, with the way that taking out larger quantities of enemies can often lead to dramatically smaller spaces to avoid the ones that are left, but it is yet another element of the game that feels too far geared against the player. Unless you kill basically all the enemies in the first couple bits of the island you get rid of (something incredibly difficult to do when you're having everyone beeline towards you), it's just a death sentence and doesn't really have any sense of dynamics to it. A big part of the problem comes from the fact that there's no real and easily usable form of crowd control in the game that warrants making you be at a complete standstill whenever you actually want to attack something.

The first game's digging mechanic paired excellently with the slow methods of dispatching things because you could largely control the flow of where things would be for long enough to put you into an advantageous position, rather than in here where you're immediately thrown into the deep end and basically required to not think too hard about interacting with one of the main points of interest that the game could have. That's really my main problem with the game more than the absurd difficulty, the fact that it's almost as if you're encouraged to not properly interact with a lot of the defining characteristics of the game once you get beyond the first few stages, it just makes for a very hollow experience that could have been something way better with a few other tweaks to the design.

Look, I get that for older arcade games, having bad difficulty scaling and unfair later levels is part of the design, but playing through these later levels is absolutely dreadful

But even when the game is rolling as expected, it's not especially fun. The music is pretty dreadful as well. It's not the worst arcade game I've played, and 72 unique levels is neat quantity-wise, but when half of them are just getting rushed by a bunch of enemies in a mostly empty stage, it comes down less to puzzle-solving and more comes down to button-mashing

Como todo excelente arcade game, as regras são simples e diretas.

Digdug 2 oferece uma insanidade de níveis (72) enquanto trabalha com suas mecânicas básicas de cavar o chão para destruir parte da ilha junto com os inimigos, ou inflar um a um com sua arma.

A perseguição frenética toma rumos inesperados quando vc consegue cavar no momento certo e destruir diversos inimigos de uma só vez e é interessante como as exacavações parciais criam um labirinto que auxiliam a driblar os inimigos.

Uma tática interessante pra ganhar tempo é usar a arma de inflar só uma vez (tem de segurar pra inflar até explodir). Dessa forma, o inimigo é paralisado momentaneamente dando tempo de desviar de outro que vinha pelo outro lado.

É um jogo que segue a fórmula de arcade e cada nível fica mais e mais complexo e difícil de passar. Eu adorei a mudança radical em relação ao Digdug original, que trabalha com uma perspectiva diferente, dentro do mesmo tema.

This is Dig Dug without the DIg... so I guess it' just DUG

The idea of taking this Namco icon with really dstinct gameplay idea nad just... get rid of it almost entirely is indeed weird, but honestly
The final result is not the worst thing in the world.
You got Dug, stuk in a island or something, and e is gonna kill all of the enemies near him, either by pumping them to death, or by literally dig the grounnd around them to make them fall in water. It's a weird blend that combine pump action and enemy swarimng with map manipulation... which in a sense is still the core of OG Digdug

It's a simple concept but the game plays a lot with it: I especially remember Stage 10 (I am pretty sure was that one), where you got an island made of 2 sections: you are on the left alone, and on the right you got a whole squad of like 10 enemies ready to beat you up.... figure how to destroy your own part of the island to trap them all.

But aside from these fun gimmick stages, the game doesn't really evolve from that: enemies never change, challenges are not that impressive after a while and the formula quickly becomes repetitive.

It' not a bad experience, just a bit of a mediocre one.

Also Digdug life icon reminded me of the Amogus crewmate, I dunno why

This is a franchise that is considered a classic of that era, it wasn't made for me.

While the first one was underground, the second game of that franchise is now taking place on the surface. This perspective brings a more "puzzledly" aspect to the game.

Instead of just use your pump to blow up enemies (which you also can in this game), you can now sink parts of the island to help you eliminate multiple enemies. While the idea is really good, the execution is poorly made since it's hard to determine which part of the island that will fall using your drill.

There are multiple stages, but the game can be repetitive. I still prefer this one compared to the first one, there's isn't a big gap between the 2.

Game #21 of my challenge