New game from Atari Coin-Op
Atariz
Has anyone seen or tried the new game from Atari Coin Op, GAUTLET?
I played it at one of those shopping mall arcades. For those who
have bever heard of this game, it is in the D-n-D genre. It lets
four players play at the same time. Each person gets a different character.
There is a barbarian, fighter, wizard and elf. The game seems to
have the speaking and video graphics of Indiana JOnes. When you
are about to die or are weakening, it says,'I think that elf is about
to die." It's a real neat games and the title screen is a work of computer
art.
Will
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nom...@uiucdcsp.cs.uiuc.edu
The game is Gauntlet by Atari. It is a 1-4 player dnd/rogue style
game with a fair number of (fixed) mazes. There is no goal except to stay
alive; scores are kept, but they don't mean much in a game which allows
you to continue play indefinitely by inserting money. You die when your
health counter reaches 0; you lose health by monster attacks and time.
Each level you are confronted with a massive horde of enemies.
There is also food to be found on each level which adds to your health,
although the amount of food does not increase with more players (which
sucks). The idea is to blast your way thru the hordes, work through
the maze to the stairs and descend to the next level. The first 8 levels
are in a fixed progression; after that you get random levels from a set
of perhaps 20 (I don't know exactly how many).
The game is well crafted, which is an impression I get of many of
Atari's games - most are original, compared with their previous offerings
at least, and have excellent graphics and sound. The negative tone in
my previous note is due to my annoyance with the other Atari characteristic,
their style of "pattern" games which seem designed to prevent anyone from
gettting good enough to play for a long time. I imagine that video game
owners hate games which people can master and play forever, but I consider
being able to do this a feature of a video game, not a design error,
and it is what attracts me to a game. Thus I was a Williams game fan
for a long time; both their video and their pinball were the best in
my opinion until they were bought out by Bally (*heavy sigh*).
Now their latest pinball, Comet, has the stupid Bally side drains and
the bumpers and lanes finely tuned to aim for them - the kind of game
where five balls can bounce around and drain without touching the flippers.
Atari put massive work into Gauntlet and various other games, but invariably
it is impossible to stay interested in them, as you either finish the
pattern (Marble Madness, Crystal Castles), or tire of feeding the machine
with tokens. I think it works against Atari in the end.
nom...@uiucdcsp.cs.uiuc.edu
The game is a tour de force by Atari; unfortunately it is in classic
Atari style: it is designed so you cannot "master" it and play indefinitely.
In fact, this machine is an incredible coin hog. Here in C-U you pay
one token for 600 health, which maybe lasts 2 minutes (or as little as
a couple seconds) on levels below 8 where you are getting random levels
from the same set of 20 or so. It is a blast to play 4 player, but you
run out of tokens in a hurry.
Mike Farren
Well, I finally saw GAUNTLET the other day. Something about the
game, though, left me scratching my head in recognition. Then I had it!
This is just a very jazzed-up version of a game that Atari released under
their Atari Program Exchange (APX) program - a game for the Atari 800 and
400 computers - called DANDY. Excellent game, and costs a lot less than
you'll probably end up spending on GAUNTLET (even if you have to BUY an
Atari 400 or 800!). Check with ANTIC magazine if you're interested, I think
they are still selling it....
--
Mike Farren
uucp: {dual, hplabs}!well!farren
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