Crystal Fever is a Boulder Dash clone that also takes cues from Kingsoft's Emerald Mine series of games. It has quite a few shortcomings, but I'd still count it as one of the more successful Boulder Dash variants on the C64.
Let's go explore some caves and get rich quick!
Or die trying!
I was never quite sure if the guy's expression in the title screen was meant to show elation or fear. I mean, sure, being chased by green suckerbats is no time for celebration, but if you squint your eyes a little, the miner's mouth starts to look like a smile. What if the titular crystal fever overrides rational thought? What if it alters the afflicted's mind and makes the collection of crystals seem to be their only pursuit in life? Besides, a sane person probably wouldn't run with a stick of dynamite in their pocket, especially not with one they found just lying around in a cave.
The above image is a bit of a rarity, as the only place where I could find it online was on GameBase64. The game's disk copy protection was apparently effective enough that it took quite a while for a proper crack to emerge. At least, that's the impression I got. In the second half of the nineties, when C64 emulators started to become viable, I could not find a working image of the game. Even to this day, I haven't seen a functional copy that also featured the title screen and music. This is a bit of a shame because the title track by Markus Schneider is quite catchy. I also think to remember that the title image switched to a credits screen after a while, which is probably now lost to the digital past.
Instead, the game starts up with the -FIRST MENUE- where you can choose whether you want to play the regular game or launch the level editor. Yes, Crystal Fever has a full-fledged editor, and this is the main reason why I like this game.
The editor was also the only viable way for me to play the regular levels because my (legitimately purchased) copy contained a game-breaking bug: Whenever I tried starting a level, any crystals in it would immediately explode. This made collecting them and thus finishing any stage impossible. I am not sure if this bug was caused by an error on my particular disk or if the drastic copy protection screwed up the game somehow.
Before we jump into the editor, though, let's take a look at the regular game:
As you can see, the MAIN-MENUE contains options that go beyond a simple "Start New Game". For one, the game is player-based, by which I mean that up to six different players can enter their names and save their progress individually. What's more, there is a separate two player mode that allows two players to solve levels simultaneously. This is very much inspired by Emerald Mine, which has an almost identical menu.
There is no concept of limited lives. If you die in a level or run out of time, you can restart the stage as often as you want. The game keeps track of the levels a player has already completed and allows restarting from any previously played level, which is something rarely seen in a C64 game. Crystal Fever also offers a "review" feature where players can watch a replay of the last level they played. High scores are saved as well, and each level has its own score table.
On paper, this all sounds great, if it weren't for a game-crippling drawback: The difficulty of the levels is unnecessarily high, mainly because the time limits are often so tight that you basically already need to know in advance how to solve the levels. What is making this worse are the incessant loading times that you have to endure between failing a level and restarting it. The game doesn't immediately restart the level. Instead, it loads the associated high score table and then dumps you back to the menu where you have to reload the level. This totally disrupts the flow and makes the playing experience worse for no good reason.
Luckily, there is an easy solution to that problem, but before I get to that, let me just play the first few levels as they were intended:
Each level has its own name, which is displayed with a couple of hyperactive raster bars, while data is being loaded from disk.
Here's me running through the beginning of the first level. Compared to the original Boulder Dash, Crystal Fever's graphics are more colorful and the screen scrolling is much smoother. The player sprite in Boulder Dash jumps from tile to tile, while Crystal Fever's little miner dude smoothly transitions between tiles. Keep in mind, though, that the latter came out six years later, so the technical improvements are not surprising. Emerald Mine was released on the C64 and the Amiga, but the 8-bit version looks a bit crude. In that regard, Crystal Fever is actually closer to the Amiga version, which makes it one of the best looking Boulder Dash games on the C64.
The time limit in the lower left is not in seconds, as it decreases much faster. I checked the actual time, and the counter took 32 seconds to get from 050 to 000. This means one time unit in Crystal Fever corresponds to about 0.64 seconds in real time.
The controls are curiously unresponsive. I feel that the joystick commands take a couple of frames until they register, which occasionally causes me to move by accident or overshoot a target. This could be connected with the player sprite's smooth movement. The game only checks for joystick directions when the player has reached the next tile, and very brief nudges are not registered at all. Weirdly, the same problem is also present in the menu, where moving the joystick up or down isn't always met with an immediate reaction.
The first level isn't very complex, and this mountain of crystals is fun to collect. Here you can also see the game's physics in action, heavily based on Boulder Dash's system. Neither the player, nor blocks of stone or sand are affected by gravity, but crystals fall down if there is nothing under them. I guess the sand and the stone stay put because they are connected to an invisible wall in the background. In case you're looking for a real-world equivalent of this weird physics model, think of an ant colony in a formicarium where you can see them dig tunnels within a two-dimensional plane.
If a crystal falls on the player's head, the sprite blows up in a rapid explosion that destroys all surrounding tiles. I guess the impact causes the old stick of nitroglycerin in the miner's pocket to go off. He probably wouldn't survive anyway, because he decided to put on a baseball cap instead of a mining helmet, even though he's wearing proper protective gear in the title screen.
I just noticed that in the above animation the game seems to celebrate my demise by giving me the finger. In later levels, I won't need any visual clues to feel that way.
After all crystals have been collected, the only thing that needs to be done is locating the exit gate and leaving the level through it. You can see how strict the time limit is even in the first level where I exit with only five seconds (real time) left.
Finishing a level (successfully or not) results in this very shiny display of the associated high score table. I like the music playing in this part, but it really needs some sick guitar riffs to complete the utter metalness of this screen.
After that, the game loads the main menu with the next level unlocked, and you have to select the START GAME option again to continue. As I mentioned before, this is too much loading between stages, especially if it takes you several attempts to finish a particular level.
Level 2 is a bit more complex than the first one, but its main challenge is still collecting all crystals before time runs out. The only new element that gets introduced is the blue crystals. Collecting one of these counts as three regular crystals.
Level 3 adds boulders that are affected by gravity. Unlike crystals, boulders cannot be collected, but they can split your head just as well. You can move a single boulder sideways if there is an empty space next to it. How long you have to push a boulder until it moves varies a bit, which is also something directly lifted from Boulder Dash. Another move both games share is holding the fire button and then pushing into a direction. This allows you to collect an adjacent crystal without having to move into its space. You can't use this move to push boulders, though.
Depending on how you navigate through this level, you may also learn that blue crystals are very brittle and shatter if a boulder falls on them. This is not really a big issue in this stage, but rest assured it will be in later stages.
Other than that, level 3 is a collect-'em-all with a tight time limit, just like the previous stages.
Here's level 4, and it gives you the first opportunity to blow stuff up that doesn't involve you sacrificing yourself. The red bombs work like boulders, but when they fall down, they explode on impact. Their explosions can destroy boulders, crystals, the player, and weakened walls. In the above animation, you can see me do some planned demolition in order to progress.
Level 5 starts with a bit of a dick move by placing a bomb right above your head, leaving you about half a second to move out of the way. At least the bomb doesn't explode when it lands, as the water at the bottom just swallows anything that falls into it. This includes crystals, so you need to be careful not to drop any of them by accident.
The main challenge in this level is the green slime, a dripping substance that spreads over time. Any slime tile can spawn drops that create more slime tiles if they land on something solid. In the above GIF you can see how three tiles have already piled up on that boulder. The drops are deadly if they fall on your head or spawn at your location. Thanks to the water at the bottom, most drops just vanish in there, which slows the spread a bit.
The key to completing this level is to make a run for the crystals and avoid any slime drops from above. The longer you wait, the more green guff gets in the way.
Level 6 represents a sudden spike in difficulty where several concepts are introduced simultaneously. The stage is symmetrical and features these pyramids of boulders and crystals on either side. Violet crystals can't be picked up. However, if they get hit by boulders, they turn green and become collectible.
Like this. However, if you now start collecting the green crystals, you make the level unwinnable. You are expected to obtain 200 crystals in total, and this pyramid only has 21.
The solution to this problem is the magic wall of blue bricks below the pyramid. Any boulders falling through this wall get converted to green crystals, and green crystals transform into blue versions. This only works if there is enough space underneath the wall for stuff to pass through, otherwise objects just start piling up on top of it.
And that's where this level's main problem lies: Just letting the pyramid pass through the magic wall results in a couple of boulders and crystals to get stuck on top of it. The stage is symmetrical, thus I need to collect at least 100 crystals from either side. Unfortunately, the above move results in only 97 crystals.
What I have to do is shift the pyramid's tip to the side by collecting three green crystals and move several boulders to the right, like so:
But even that is only half the solution: As soon as something passes through a magic wall tile, all blue bricks of the level get activated. This state only lasts for a short time, and then the blue bricks stop converting objects and don't activate again. This means I have to set up both pyramids and then make them fall down one right after the other.
And that's the solution to level 6. Considering how little time is provided to figure all these steps out, it is very likely that you'll need several attempts, which will result in a lot of reloading. In fact, I used emulator save states while I was trying to complete this stage because I didn't want to subject myself to the constant waiting.
Here's what I recommend: Play the levels in the editor instead, where a failure doesn't force you through several loading sequences before you can start another attempt. Furthermore, level 7 is apparently buggy and can't be completed in the regular game. I don't know if this is an issue with the crack or if this occurred in the original version as well, but either way, it works fine when played in the editor.
Here's the level editor in its entire glory. It is the main reason why I have fond memories of the game because I spent a lot of time in here making my own levels or just playing around with the pieces.
Naturally, there are no mouse controls, but the editor is perfectly fine to use with a joystick. Note how the programmers made clever use of sprites in the border areas above and below the level view to move the interface out of the way.
The top row of buttons offers a lot of options, such as clearing the level, switching between a pen and a fill tool, changing the level settings (such as the time limit and the required amount of crystals), and saving the level to disk.
The top row's center button allows you to scroll through all available tiles that can be placed in the level. As an added bonus, you get to see what they are called. Let's go through some of the more interesting ones:
Apart from the explosive that goes off in your pocket whenever something lethal hits you, there are sticks of dynamite you can pick up in later levels. In order to ignite a stick, you just have to hold the fire button and then quickly move away as soon as it gets dropped on your location. Unfortunately, the dynamite has such a short fuse that it detonates in less than a second, so you really have to react instantly if you don't want to be vaporized as well. Most levels that feature dynamite take me several tries to complete because I often manage to blow myself up.
The mine acts like a wall, but walking into it is extraordinarily deadly. I mainly listed it here because I like its animation.
True to its name, this twitchy fellow tries to hunt you down. If it runs into you, it cheerfully explodes and drags you with it into oblivion. On its own, a hunter isn't much of a threat, because it only moves one tile every few seconds in your general direction. In a group, though, hunters can become dangerous if they close in on you and manage to cut off any escape routes. Despite that, I always felt that the hunters' behavior and appearance made them look a bit dopey, in an adorable kind of way.
When you touch this beacon, it starts blinking and emits a warbling sound for a short while. During this time, all hunters in the level temporarily forget to chase you and move towards the flashlight instead. Especially in levels with a lot of hunters, this can be a life saver.
This sentient boulder moves around by rolling along walls. If it happens to roll into a tile without adjacent walls, it changes direction. This can cause it to get into an endless loop, like the one shown to the left. Due to the walker's inherent talent to attach itself to adjacent tiles, you already get killed just by standing next to one. There are four variants of walkers which differ by their initial traveling direction.
A Luigi is faster than a hunter, but it doesn't follow the player. Instead, it just trundles along a cardinal direction until it encounters an obstacle, and then it goes off in another random direction. Luigis are even dopier than hunters, especially because they audibly bump into walls. You can occasionally observe a Luigi spending long moments in corners and dead ends, accompanied by a flurry of loud thuds.
Collect keys to get through doors. Nothing special there, except for the weird color choices. From left to right, the doors are described in the editor as yellow, green, red, and blue. The C64 isn't known for having particularly radiant colors, but it can definitely do better reds and blues than this.
Any object that is governed by gravity gets moved sideways if it sits on a running conveyor. There are three versions of conveyors: One goes to the left, one to the right, and the third can be controlled by the player with a remote switch.
The editor is what makes Crystal Fever stand out among other Boulder Dash clones. It's easy to use, and it offers the aspiring designer a lot of options to create interesting levels. If you want, you can put together a whole campaign of 40 levels and save it on a disk for others to experience.
Unfortunately, the levels that come with the game are a bit of a mixed bag. The first few levels are fine to play, but later on the stages degenerate into exercises of frustration. Some levels are extremely difficult to finish within the given time limit, others expect you to know their layout in advance, and there's a whole load of stages that look like someone just placed stuff at random and called it a level. For example, here is stage 34:
Just looking at this makes me not want to play it.
This is a real pity because all the elements for an entertaining game are there, but the shipped levels do an inadequate job demonstrating Crystal Fever's strengths. However, if you are prepared to dive into the more creative side of the game and start building your own levels, you'll find that there is much to be enjoyed.
CONCLUSION
Nostalgia can do curious things to one's memory, and revisiting Crystal Fever made me aware that the actual game, with its rough level design and needless loading times, isn't as good as I remembered. On the other hand, the editor is still fun to use, and creating my own levels was the main draw for me anyway.
From a technical perspective, it's quite amazing how much stuff gets simulated in real-time without any noticeable slowdown. Crystals and boulders don't just drop down tile by tile, they actually fall down smoothly. I've encountered some bugs in the original as well as in the cracked version. Due to the relative obscurity of the game, I can't tell how widespread these issues are.
The graphics are colorful and have some nice tile animations. Sentient boulders roll around, crystals glitter, and the player sprite taps his foot if you leave him standing. I'm not sure what happened with the door & key colors, though. They are so similar-looking that I usually forget which keys I already picked up, and the game doesn't bother to display the ones the player is carrying.
The music was provided by Markus Schneider and is of his usual high quality. During the game, only sound effects are played, but they are plentiful and have some nice oomph to them (for lack of a better word). The player sprite's footsteps are a bit too pronounced, though, which sounds more like tap dancing than cave exploration.
Despite my misgivings, Crystal Fever feels like a proper Golden Disk title to me, especially because of the editor. Yes, the game is marred by balancing issues and strange design decisions, but feature-wise it comes pretty close to the original Boulder Dash and Emerald Mine. If you are interested in creating your own levels, I recommend giving this a whirl.
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