Previous Next

At last it's here! The smash hit game that took the arcade world by storm, and was almost a licence to print money for a large nummber of arcade owners. The US Gold version of the game is identical to the two player version of Gauntlet that came into the arcades a few months ago after the original four player version first emerged.

The plot is simple, you and possibly a companion descend into the depth of a treasure filled dungeon. Evil nasties abound and you need keys, food, potion and lots of other odds and ends to survive. Occasionally, you find a treasure room where there is masses of treasure and no monsters, but it's a race against the clock...

In the first original game, four people could play using the four characters that the game provided. Elf, Wizard, Warrior and Valkyrie. Each character has a number of good and bad points to it, like the Elf is fast, but isn't as strong as the warrior. And the wizard fires magic balls that destroy everything.

The implementation of the game on the Amstrad is as close to the original as is physically possible on that computer. The sixteen colour mode is used to great effect, and the gameplay is identical to the coin-op machine. Even the title screen and the character selection screen is reproduced from the original game.

The gameplay is identical to the coin-op game, the little men run around in the same way, the nasty monsters all move around in the same way. The dungeons are all the same as the coin-op game, and all the objects are in the same place, so experienced Gauntleteers will not have wasted all their time (and money) on the coin-op game.

The only difference in the game that I can see is that when your energy drops a bit low, you can't shove in extra coins. Though my bank manager thinks that this is an excellent idea.

Compared to Dandy, this is whole orders of magnitude better, there is no comparison. The 512 levels of this game (and they are all good levels) in one load, are so much better than the Dandy 15 levels in three loads. With Gauntlet on the shelves, I can't imagine anyone wanting to buy any of the clones.