Monday, April 05, 2004
Rampart: Released in 1990, and people are finally starting to copy it
It's kind of heartening to see that people are starting to shamelessly rip off Rampart the way they've been ripping off Asteroids, Tetris and Puzzle Bobble/Bust-A-Move for years. A search on the web turned up Invasion: Repel and Rebuild, Castle Combat and Kajaani Kombat.
I was only able to play one of these things, since Castle Combat is two-player (at one keyboard) only, and Kajaani Kombat required a server that didn't seem to be in the Windows ZIP file I downloaded. But from what I can figure about these games from observing screen shots, and what little play I could get, none of them seem up to matching Rampart's legendary (and legendarily frustrating) gameplay.
This is a game that's been ported officially, to date, ten times. Still, the best versions are the arcade version (recently made available legally in Midway Arcade Treasures) and the SNES version (which changed a lot of things, yet still managed to be rather playable).
By the way, if you want to get freaked out, go out and look for Konami's little-known Famicom port of the game, which never made it to the U.S. (we got a more arcade-accurate version), where in one of the modes your cannons are apple-throwing elves, the enemy ships are wolves, and your castle is Little Red Riding Hood. Oy!
It's kind of heartening to see that people are starting to shamelessly rip off Rampart the way they've been ripping off Asteroids, Tetris and Puzzle Bobble/Bust-A-Move for years. A search on the web turned up Invasion: Repel and Rebuild, Castle Combat and Kajaani Kombat.
I was only able to play one of these things, since Castle Combat is two-player (at one keyboard) only, and Kajaani Kombat required a server that didn't seem to be in the Windows ZIP file I downloaded. But from what I can figure about these games from observing screen shots, and what little play I could get, none of them seem up to matching Rampart's legendary (and legendarily frustrating) gameplay.
This is a game that's been ported officially, to date, ten times. Still, the best versions are the arcade version (recently made available legally in Midway Arcade Treasures) and the SNES version (which changed a lot of things, yet still managed to be rather playable).
By the way, if you want to get freaked out, go out and look for Konami's little-known Famicom port of the game, which never made it to the U.S. (we got a more arcade-accurate version), where in one of the modes your cannons are apple-throwing elves, the enemy ships are wolves, and your castle is Little Red Riding Hood. Oy!
