Game needs review badly!
Gauntlet‘s place in gaming history is pretty well established – it was an immediate hit, thanks to its its hack-and-slash gameplay, its ability to support four players at once, and its highly memorable narrator. I love that narrator. Some friends and I even named our original World of WarCraft guild “Needs Food Badly” in its honor.
Gauntlet II was released just nine months after its predecessor, and was promoted in a pretty cool way – a monthly Atari newsletter put out a call for fans to design their own Gauntlet levels, with the promise that some of them would eventually be featured (and, indeed, some of them are). I’m not sure I know of any other game, especially one of this caliber, that crowdsourced its design quite like this.
So what’s different about Gauntlet II? Honestly, not a whole lot – Atari thankfully knew better than to tweak the formula too much. There are a few new features to speak of, though – the levels have more variance, there are more secrets, more enemies, and more statements from everyone’s favorite 80s game narrator. You can also play as any color/character combination, which is a nice little difference. The frantic multiplayer experience is still entirely intact – this is a great one to play with a friend.
One of the game’s more amusing new enemies is “It” – not the clown thing, but a ball that makes you, well, “it.” When you’re “it,” all of the game’s enemies will focus on you. You remain “it” until you die, or, if you’re mean, come into contact with another player, who is thereby “it.” This ends up being a pretty amusing addition to a lot of levels.
There’s one feature, however, that’s a lot less fun, and it’s near the bottom of this screenshot:
Invisible walls! As it turns out, navigating a maze is often a tricky enough prospect when you can see where you need to go. When you can’t? It’s dumb. Just really, really dumb. In co-op, you can also end up reasonably close to each other on-screen and still not be able to meet up, leading to a lot of backtracking and confusion. This is a bad mechanic, and if the person who came up with it is reading this, please know that I hate you.
That said, if you enjoy the manic, “I need to kill a million things and am constantly dying” gameplay that you get from the Gauntlet games, this is one of the best in the series. Its improvements on the original are almost entirely positive, and there’s a ton of it to play through (100 or so levels in total, so bring a lot of quarters if you’re playing on an original cabinet).
Gauntlet II was the first of many sequels in the series. The home computer release Gauntlet III: The Final Quest was ironically followed by the outstanding Gauntlet IV a couple of years later, and the late 90s entries Legends and Dark Legacy are both a ton of fun as well. This series may feel very simple by modern standards, but there’s still something fun to the straight forward hack-and-slash experience. Oh, and needing food badly.
Next week’s game is going to be just so, so stupid, and I can’t wait. You won’t want to miss it.