U.S. Gold
Price £24.95
The much awaited ST version of this excellent game
has finally arrived. Many months of waiting are finally over, so was
it worth the wait? The eight bit version was reviewed in issue
twenty eight and was given a not very favourable review. Is the ST
version any better, then? Well, yes and no.
Graphically and sound wise the game is superb, but
U.S. Gold have yet again failed to iron out the bugs. Purchasers of
the game on the various eight bit formats persistently complained to
U.S. Gold about the bugs, through letters to the company itself, and
through letters to various other computer publications such as
'Computer and Video Games'. This I would have thought would be an
incentive to actually get it right this time. But I fear that yet
again many, so very obvious, bugs have managed to get through what
should have been quite rigorous play testing. Bugs such as suddenly
having two of yourself instead of just one! Or such as when one
character goes through an exit to the following level, and the other
exits to, say, level eight and the game goes completely nuts. It
can't then be played until one of the characters' health points run
out and he therefore dies!
When the game loads (it comes on two disks) you
are greeted by the now famous Gauntlet title page, and with some
quite impressive music, which has been sampled from the actual
arcade machine. The sound is the one thing in this game which is
consistently excellent, all of the sound work being done by 2-bit
Microsystems (presumably with their Replay cartridge). After the
music etc. was over I attempted to start the game by selecting the
Wizard, as this is my favourite character both in the arcades and on
the eight bit version of the game. I pressed 'insert' to bring the
Wizard into play, and I waited.... The disk drive whirred and chugged a
little before finally the computer splatted four 'bombs' across the
middle of the screen. Oh no!!! I quickly reloaded the game and tried
selecting the Wizard again, and yet again the game crashed. After
much experimentation I discovered that with joystick 1 it seems you
could only be a Warrior or an Elf if you are playing a one player
game! Yet another BUG??
The sprites in Gauntlet are all very good, the
four major characters are extremely well drawn and the various
nasties are significantly better than in the eight bit version. The
backdrops contain much detail and in many cases look very close to
the arcade version. My only real complaint about the graphics is the
scrolling, which is terrible. It is probably the worst scrolling I
have yet seen on an ST game. It is so bad that after a while it
sends you almost boss-eyed!
But ... even though the scrolling is bad, and the
game as a whole is bug ridden, it is still, underneath, an
infinitely playable game! The ST version has not lost any of the
playability of the arcade machine, other than the four player
aspect. With two players you will find yourselves shouting at each
other and helping each other out and generally having a good time.
I'm not sure if it was worth the wait, as I was
personally expecting something a little better than this. The longer
you wait the more you expect and perhaps if it had been released
earlier it would have had much more impact.
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