Diamon Cricket Catcher

CG&AHL LTD

About this game

Diamond Catcher - Mine Rush is a timed arcade game set in a narrow mine shaft. A cart runs on a rail at the bottom of the screen. Gems and rocks drop from the ceiling, and you slide the cart so the open bed lines up with the gems. Each round lasts 90 seconds and starts with three lives. The score, the time remaining, and your lives stay on screen while you play.

Four kinds of gems can fall. A blue diamond is worth 10 points. A pink gem is worth 15. A green gem is worth 20. A gold piece is worth 30. Blue diamonds appear most often. Gold is the rarest, so a gold catch is the largest single addition to the score. When a gem lands in the cart, a short burst shows the points you just gained.

Rocks fall in the same stream. Catching a rock removes one life, clears your current combo, and shakes the screen. If you lose all three lives, the round ends immediately with the message that you are out of lives. Letting a rock pass the cart does not cost a life. Letting a gem fall past the cart does not cost a life either, but it does reset the combo to zero.

The combo is the main way to raise a score beyond the base gem values. Every gem you catch in a row, without a miss and without a rock, adds one to the chain. Every five catches, the multiplier goes up by 0.5. A combo of 5 scores gems at 1.5 times their base value. A combo of 10 scores them at 2 times, a combo of 15 at 2.5 times, and so on. On every fifth catch the game marks the chain on screen. At the end of the round you can see the longest combo you held during that run.

The shaft gets busier as the clock runs. Items begin falling about once per second and gradually come faster, down to a little under half a second between spawns. They also pick up speed, so later catches need a quicker slide. Rocks start as a smaller share of the drops and become more common as time passes, up to about three in every ten items. A clean early combo is easier to hold than a long chain near the end of the 90 seconds.

Drag anywhere on the screen and the cart follows your finger or pointer along the rail. It stays inside the shaft and eases toward the point you are touching, so you can change direction while several items are still in the air. The round begins after a short how-to-play panel. From there you can start digging, and the timer begins.

During a round you can pause. The pause screen lets you resume, open the how-to-play notes again, or restart the round from zero. A sound control in the corner turns the effects on or off, and that choice is kept on the device. Sounds mark a gem catch, a combo step, a rock, a lost life, and the end of the round.

When the timer reaches zero, the round ends even if you still have lives left. The result screen shows the score for that run, the longest combo, and the highest score saved on this device. If the new score is higher than the saved one, the saved score is replaced. Play Again starts another 90-second run with three lives, an empty combo, and a clear shaft.

There is one continuous round each time you play. There is no account, no separate stage list, and no second mode. The aim is to read the falling mix, keep the cart under the gems, stay off the rocks, and hold a combo long enough for the multiplier to matter before the clock or the lives run out.