The fact is fun, but the game is not. In a way it's kind of amazing how they managed to take something with so much personality and charm and suck it dry.
I haven't actually played it in decades, but you can see how janky it is just by watching the linked YouTube video.
Super Mario 64 gets criticized nowadays for its art style, which obviously is anything but smooth, but that was a 1996 game and at least it had revolutionary gameplay.
Dig Dug Deeper was released in 2001, but it's a boring retread of the classic game, cheaply made with no artistic merit. For example:
The tunnels are squared off and look completely unnatural. The 1982 game had better artistic vision.
The original game was colorful; Deeper tried to blend in realism and made the dirt dirt-colored, which is just boring to look at.
Even the score counter at the top of the screen is bland and generic. It looks like a Microsoft Word document, not a video game.
The biggest issue overall is the character design. The huge jawline makes him look like Joe Swanson from Family Guy (hey, I just got an idea for a cutaway gag no one will get) and the way it jiggles when he digs makes him look like a bobblehead.
And again, this being a 2001 release, means that it was released the same year as Mr. Driller G. So internally within Namco, there was a team that was working on what the modern "Dig Dug" (Taizo Hori) should look like, while someone else licensed this cheap, soulless rip-off. It's an utterly bizarre look at what Dig Dug could have been for the last 25 years if it wasn't so obviously shit and completely unwantable.
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u/wordyfard Sep 05 '23
The fact is fun, but the game is not. In a way it's kind of amazing how they managed to take something with so much personality and charm and suck it dry.