Pong and Beyond

280th played so far

Genre: Action
Platform: Arcade
Year of Release: 1985
Developer: Atari Games
Publisher: Atari Games

Regular readers may remember that this set of fifty games are all games I haven’t played before. And today we get a game where we are very strict about this, as I’ve played the hell out of Gauntlet II, this game’s sequel. The whole family did, on the NES version, playing for days at a time.

Gauntlet is its own dungeon crawl. Action, go around, kill things and explore. And Blue wizard shot the food!

Our Thoughts

I’ll admit it’s difficult for me to properly separate my feelings about this game from the memories. The basics are the same, but (aside from the graphics differences) the game still felt different – or maybe I’ve just changed. It is so fast! So many enemies! Or maybe this is PSP compilation versus NES?

The game is a top down dungeon crawler, with up to four players taking part taking on different typical party roles – fighter, wizard and so on. Your goal is simple – run around and find the exit on each level, all the while killing and avoiding enemies. Enemies sap your time, not life – or rather, your life is drained as you walk around the level, making it worth it to get there early.

In proper arcades, the way to really boost your life was to pay, we played it on the PSP collection that allowed us to insert a few credits every time we needed it for free. I found I needed it more than I expected, although it also seemed having more people around would have helped lots.

Most enemies come from spawn points. These spawn points keep spawning them forever. If you take a while to get to them, there can be a true mob waiting for you there. That’ll kill you sooner than you’ll expect.

The other source of life is, of course, that in the phrase that’s become immortal – in my mind at least. Food is dotted around the area, mostly in liquid form, and increases your life by a little. Unfortunately they didn’t seem very common, so it doesn’t make the game much easier.

Aside from the overwhelming amount of enemies at times, the game’s level design is fun too. They are quite large and varied and have quite a few puzzles inside them (even if not all are that difficult). They’re also quite colourful, allowing for some pretty interesting environments at the same time.

Final Thoughts

The game is clearly old-school arcade tough, eating coins and forcing you through difficult stuff. Having the infinite health PSP ‘cheat’ helps quite a bit. At that point, the game becomes fun to play, racing through to kill enemies and continue – through what I believe are at least 100 levels, which will take you quite a while to complete. Fun enough to mess around with for sure.