The Closeout Warrior

If you take a Warrior, a Valkyrie, a Wizard, and an Elf, throw them into a series of dungeons packed to the rim with monsters, and throw in a heckling dungeon master, you’ll have Gauntlet.

Each of the four characters has a projectile attack, the Elf fires arrows, the Valkyrie throws axes, etc. Your goal is to get to the exit, to make it as far into the dungeon as you can. This is made slightly difficult because each room in the dungeon is packed tight with abominations, each one hungry for your delicious Hit Points. It would make sense, then, to stand in a corner and pick them off one by one until the way was clear and then rush feverishly to the exit, but there are two problems: the monsters constantly are spawned by ‘monster generators’ replenishing their supply almost as fast as you can mow them down, and your health constantly deteriorates. You can mitigate these problems by moving quickly and collecting food that’s scattered through the level. However, some of the food is destructible. Move too fast and you will inevitably destroy the hit points you were working your way toward (“Someone shot the food!“).

The game is a bit deeper than I’ve gone into here. You have to collect keys to open doors and chests, you can collect magic bomb-things to annihilate screen-fulls of creatures, and you have to deal with Death on more than one occasion. The only flaw with this game? It goes on forever. I would like to have seen some kind of ending to this game, but I would have to wait until Gauntlet 2 or the NES port of this game to get one.

I’m reasonably certain you’ve heard of Pac-Man, one of the most successful games of all time. What do you do when you see something that’s really popular (i.e. making buckets of money)? Easy, create a clone! A direct clone, of course, would be way too obvious, so you might consider doing the next best thing, make a game that is similar, yet legally distinct from, the original game. Paint Roller is one of that kind of game.

Okay, so Paint Roller is only tangentially similar to Pac-Man. They both take place in mazes and both have monsters. The difference is that in Pac-Man you cleared the screen of dots while in Paint Roller you take your paint roller and paint the floor of the maze. Of course just painting the floor is incredibly boring, so the monsters are there to ’spice things up’. Occasionally, one of them will escape the cage that it’s in and run around your freshly-painted floors, leaving footprints. You have to re-paint the printed-up areas before the stage is complete and you move on to the next one.

I’ll be honest. I had an old book about arcade games that I wore ragged while growing up. This was one of the games that the preview in the book made sound fantastic, I couldn’t wait to play it, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. Many years later I was finally able to play it. Turns out that it’s slightly below average, and only worth playing once, if that.

In some kind of nuclear bombed-out New York City, monsters and mutants armed with ‘high tech weaponry’ have taken over the decaying ruins, stifling all attempts at restoration. What’s the government to do? Why, find two ludicrously-muscled brawlers and pay them some fantastic fee to enter the city and clean it up.

Duh.

Crude and Buster, the two heroes, are so muscular that they can’t find shirts that fit. They constantly walk to the right and savagely beat anything that gets in their way. The hook is that they are able to pick up an unusually large amount of scenery to use as weaponry. Weaponry like building rubble, street signs, burned out cars (I told you they were quite muscled).

Each stage has a mid-boss halfway through it and a full boss at the end. These guys aren’t quite the fodder that you deal with through the stage, they have ridiculous reach, unusual stamina, and will kill you. Since your guys are so muscular, they aren’t very maneuverable. Since the mutants are so… mutated, they’re very maneuverable and very able to kill you.

Controls in this game were so bad that I couldn’t make it very far. After about 15 minutes and the equivalent of $5.00 in quarters, I was partway through stage 3. I decided that it was best to fight again another day… with another game.