Boulder Dash II picks up the original 1984 design from First Star Software, the work of Peter Liepa and Chris Gray, without changing a thing: Rockford has to dig through rocks, mine diamonds, and dodge the cave's creatures before time runs out, now across sixteen new, tougher screens. The 8-bit Atari version was, in fact, the base Liepa worked from before porting the game to the Commodore 64, though at the time it wasn't released as a standalone title on that machine. Today it remains, alongside the original, a benchmark of the action puzzle genre: the logic of falling rocks and diamond counting has aged better than almost any other design of its era. For anyone who's already burned through the first Boulder Dash, this second round offers the same rigor with a sharper curve.
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