IGN: Rampart Review

December 3, 1999 - I've dropped more than a few rolls of quarters in a little arcade game called Rampart in my short life. This addicting game might never have reached the same public "classic" status as games like Pac-Man or Space Invaders, but to me it's one of the coolest designed games around. The Game Boy Color version of Rampart is damn near arcade perfect in the gameplay department, but system limitations keep this from being the ultimate rendition. Even with the petty shortcomings, this is a game you gotta get.

Features

Multiple levels of difficulty
Link cable support for two players
Only for Game Boy Color

Rampart is one hell of an addicting game, mixing puzzle, strategy, and action elements in a neat medieval package. It's what you'd get if you threw Warlords, Missile Command, and Tetris into a blender and mixed 'em up all nice. The idea is simple: defend your castles from the oncoming enemy sea fleet by surrounding your castles with walls and arming yourself with cannons. The game is broken into three phases: the building phase, the arming phase, and the attack phase.

In the building phase, you're given a certain amount of time (default is 30 seconds) to surround your land's castles with Tetris-like pieces of brick. When a castle is completely surrounded by wall, you earn cannons to place within this engulfed territory. The more castles you surround, the more cannons you earn for the arming phase. If you can't surround a single castle within the building phase, the game is over.

The attack phase is a mere ten seconds long ¿ you must aim your crosshair over the ships and fire your cannons to destroy the enemy. Ships take two or more shots to destroy, and each cannon must wait until its cannonball has landed before it can fire, so the more cannons you have, the better off you are. Later levels get more difficult: if a ship lands on the shore, it'll unload a flurry of one-tile tanks that will surround castles like ants, filling gaps in your walls. If they surround a castle, you'll find the castle destroyed on the next building phase. And let's not forget the powerful ships that will scorch the land with their powerful cannonballs, making that tile impossible to place a building piece on.

Strategy plays a huge portion in Rampart. You'll have to know the best spots to place your cannons, because if you squeeze them too close to the shores or the edge of the screen, you'll find it near impossible to surround your castles on the next building phase...especially if your enemy's pecked a single hole in your defenses.

Even with a great solitaire challenge, Rampart is really tailored for multiplayer action. The arcade game was originally a three player game, but system resolution and link-up limitations reduce this number to two on the Game Boy Color. Even so, Rampart is a great "screw you" game for you and a buddy, since the fastest fingers and brain always win the bout. Instead of ships, the screen is split into two sections of land divided by a neutral river that cannot be built upon. You've got five battle phases to either cause the other person to not be able to surround his castles, or score more points by controlling a large portion of your land. The victor gets to slice the loser's head in a satisfying guillotine sequence.

Complaints about this conversion are few and petty, but damn it...I'm a big fan of Rampart and I have to bring them up. The Game Boy Color conversion isn't the prettiest edition of the game ¿ the walls don't change from the simple Tetris blocks to the fancy brick walls during the attack phase like the arcade and Lynx versions do, and the land texture isn't much more than speckled mob of white pixels to simulate a grassy field. In the sound department, it's great to hear every explosion and musical fanfare digitized from the arcade. But since the system can't mix digital channels some samples play over others, and there's no real priority to which sample should play. This results in awkward cuts into the sound and music that really show off the audio limitations of the Game Boy Color. Lastly, the default difficulty setting is placed way too easy ¿ some gamers might never bother to switch it over in the options menu, believing the game to be a breeze to conquer.

Closing Comments
Rampart on the Game Boy Color is excellent, a great conversion of the arcade for what the system can do. I'm going to have to give a nod to the Atari Lynx version as being the best portable conversion of Rampart ¿ but don't think that Digital Eclipse's rendition is anything to scoff at. The original gameplay is completely intact, and it's still one of the best two-player link-cable games to get for the Game Boy Color.

IGN Ratings for Rampart (GBC)