Friday, August 26, 2011

Atari Emulator -> Buried Bucks

Or I guess that's Buried Buck$! This has got to be the silliest video game of all time... Now that I've got either your attention and/or the web crawler's attention, allow me to back up my assertion. Here's the deal: you're flying a helicopter. And with this helicopter, your mission is to pick up dollar bills. There's just one catch: they're buried underground. Your only weapon... rather, your only tool to help you get those damn dollars is a virtually endless supply of bombs. Your score drops as the bombs dissipate, and it also drops to the tune of about 4 points per second, just for good measure. Your score is measured in dollars, so it serves as a metaphor for real life, I guess. Here's the other catch: the holes you blow in the ground get filled up. By what, you might ask?  Why, by clumps of dirt being dropped by a passing plane, of course!  What are you, STUPID or something? Needles to say, it represents a complete yin/yang circle of life somehow. Must be what I like about it. The explosions look just like the ones in programmer Tom Hudson's other big game, Planetary Defense. At least that one made a little more sense.

Buried Bucks at Atarimania


Lesson learnt: When you run out of bombs, go back to the landing pad and get 75 more. Your best bet is to throw off the dirt-dumping plane and bomb the hell out of as much of the landscape as possible without disturbing the water.

Good double bill with: O'Riley's Mine. Might as well tell my O'Riley's Mine story here. I had an illegal copy of the game, and I was an especially naughty boy. I found the byte that controlled how many treasures were strewn about the playing field. I found out the hard way that the maximum is 40... something like that. So, to make the game less challenging I set it to 255 and GBOOM! Highest scores ever for O'Reilly's Mine. Ah, the good ol' days. I don't know how one would do it now, but it might could be done. Might could.

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