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Reviews A Great Classic Atari 8Bit game, June 22, 2006 Rating: 9.9/10 By Brant Sears from New York Sadly this game is obscure which I think is partially due to the fact that Atari released a more well known game with the same name a year after Donald Lebeau created this gem.
You control a ship that can accelerate in 8 directions and fire the 8 directions. One thing I love about this game is the controls. You move the ship by pushing the joystick in any direction with the fire button up (not pressed). Press the fire button and move the stick in any direction will cause the ship to shoot in that direction. Thus, you can be moving one direction and shooting in another direction. It is intuitive and easy to switch between the two modes and control the ship in a very sophisticated manner.
The space ship fires two kinds of weapons. The first is called "Bolts" of which the player has an unlimited supply. The second is a special weapon which the player gets to choose at the beginning of the game. The available special weapons are Missiles, Flares, and Tridex. Missiles are a somewhat intelligent weapon in that they choose a target and go after it. Missles are sometimes a good way to tell if there are any enemies left on the level. Flares are not guided, but can pass easily through the rocky terrain. Tridex makes kind of a cool sideways explosion.
The player's ship also has a shield which has a level between 0 and 99. When it reaches 0, the ship is destroyed and the game is over. The shield is added to after the completion of each level. The player gets 3 points added to the shield after every level and 10 points after every level where the user's score has advanced by 10,000 points. If you have a shield of 99, you can allow your shield to be reduced to 87 on a given level and it will usually be increased to 99 for the next level. Any lower than that, and it will take more than one level to get it back to 99. The shield is reduced when your ship is hit by enemy fire or if you run into the terrain. Sometimes you need to fly your ship through the terrain, but it takes a terrible toll on your shield.
There are many different kinds of opponents. Each type of opponent has different abilities and requires a different kind of strategy to defeat. Some enemies hide in the terrain. Others are space ships of various kinds. There are many types of weapons each of which work differently.
The game consists of 50 levels. The last 20 are in caves where the ship is actually flying underground. The caves are cool. On the final level there is a Boss ship called a Kingship that is hard to beat. When you defeat the Kingship, a cool victory tune is played and the game ends.
Gauntlet has three difficulty levels: Novice, Normal, and Elite. You can also choose an Exit type. Your choices are Hit and Run and Rampage. In Hit and Run mode, you complete a level when you fly your ship from one side of the screen to the other. In Rampage mode, you must destroy all enemies on the screen before you are allowed to exit the screen. The most difficult settings are Elite/Rampage mode.
Gauntlet was shareware before the term was even made up! Mr. Lebeau marketed his game by adding some text at the beginning that serves two purposes. First, it describes the concept of shareware (without using that term, of course) and tells where to send donations (I wonder if that address still is valid?) The text also describes how to play the game and serves as a user manual.
I downloaded this game from a BBS sometime in 1984 or 1985. At the time, I loved playing it and it was probably my favorite game for the Atari 8 Bit computers.
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