TDig Dug II takes place on an island with an overhead view. The goal is to kill all the enemies. There are two types of enemies: Pookas (round red monsters with goggles), which can kill a player by touching him, and Fygars (dragons), which can kill a player either by touching him or breathing fire on him.

Taizo Hori (the player's character) is armed with two weapons. One is an air pump that can inflate enemies until they burst. The other is a jackhammer, which can be used at "fault lines" on the map to create faults in the ground. If both ends of a system of faults reach the water, the ground surrounded by them will sink into the ocean, killing all creatures on it, including Taizo himself if the player is not careful. The points earned from this depend on how many enemies are killed at once. Once three pieces of land have been cut off an island, a bonus vegetable will appear somewhere on what remains of the island, which can be eaten for extra points. When only one, two or (on later rounds) three enemies remain on the island, the enemies will head for the edge of the island and jump into the water, killing themselves and ending the round.

I remmeber picking this because it was the only intriguing thing they had besides Toobin', and I'd already rented Back to the Future II & III (and been utterly dissappointed with it). So I rented this, and well, it was better than BTTF was, but still nothing to write home about. I was mildly dissappointed because it played like an Atari 2600 game. See, when we were growing up in America in the late 80's/early 1990's, there's a reason all these really really early NES titles never really got their proper due - because there were far more complex and fancy titles than these out there. That's one reason Super Mario Bros. eclipsed everything else. We felt that if a game system were this new, it needed to do things newer than how Atari did them in the early 80's - which was basically porting and cloning Arcade games for the home market. We had no idea that the NES had been out in Japan since 1983, we only knew this thing suddenly showed up around 1986 and it was the coolest thing ever.