BANK HEIST

The game's difficulty maxes out after 32 towns (as implied by the manual).  If you make it to the 33rd town, the previous maze layout will repeat itself there, and then the typical four maze cycle starts over in the 34th town.  The game seems to treat every screen from the 32nd onward as looping between the 27th and 31st in terms of difficulty, as evidenced by the bonus cash awards (described below).  {Gordon Taylor}

In the 31st and 32nd towns (the two hardest in the game) and their repeats, the cop cars will spawn almost right on top of you!  Surviving these towns requires a good bit of luck in addition to excellent driving and timing skills with the dynamite to avoid the cops catching up to you.  {Gordon Taylor}

The maximum cash bonus that can be earned by escaping a town after robbing nine or more banks in that town is $2,883 - it will not go any higher than that.  Values greater than $2,048 will cause a graphical bug when awarded (described below).  {Gordon Taylor}

If a player passes $100K earned, the leading "1" in the counter overwrites the dollar sign that's normally in front of the score digits.  It's debatable whether this counts as a bug or a "feature", since $100K is very hard to achieve and fixing the "bug" would've required adding an extra digit to the score counter.  Here is a TAS video showing play up to 100K.

The placement of banks in the maze is not truly random, but instead seems to be randomly chosen from a predetermined list of coordinates within the maze.  Notably, you will regularly see banks be placed in corners or near the tunnels on the sides of the maze.  The game will also often put a bank inside the upper-right tunnel leading to the next town (instead of the lower tunnels that let you wrap around) to bait players into going through it unintentionally.  {Gordon Taylor}

Note that you can't blow up more than one cop car at a time with a stick of dynamite, even if the cars are overlapping each other! Keep this in mind when you've got more than one car hot on your tail.  {Gordon Taylor}

BUG: If you try to drop another stick of dynamite while one is exploding (before the score digits appear), the stick won't drop and the screen flashing effects will be extended instead.  {Gordon Taylor}

BUG: The chirping that accompanies your car robbing a bank can be delayed or even interrupted (depending on timing) by the dynamite explosion sound.  {Gordon Taylor}

BUG: The bonus cash award for escaping the 32nd town should be $2,976 according to the manual, but the game awards $2,511 instead.  This is the same bonus as the one awarded after escaping the 27th town, and seems to indicate the game is treating the 32nd town as the 27th (i.e. 5 less than it "should") in terms of calculating the bonus.  The subsequent four towns give cash bonus matching the town's number minus five and then the 37th town gives the same award as the 27th.  This is apparently the game's way of looping once maximum difficulty is reached (although the manual does not mention this).  {Gordon Taylor}

BUG: Although the transition between towns is normally seamless, starting on the transition to the 24th town the screen may "jump" or black out during the transition before displaying the next town.  This seems to be caused by the bonus cash award for escaping a town after robbing nine or more banks in that town; if this bonus is greater than $2^11 ($2,048) it appears the game either takes too long to calculate the value or can't update the score digits properly in the timespan of one frame.  This has a chain reaction that results in the rest of the screen being drawn incorrectly for that frame, producing a "jump" or black out effect.  {Gordon Taylor}


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