The Closeout Warrior

Dateline Peoria – Three giant monsters are destroying the city. What will you do?

If you answered ‘Try and stop them’ then you’re very wrong. Rampage lets you take on the fantasy of just about every preteen (and some post-teen) person on the planet and assume the role of the monster and destroy the cities. You can choose between 3 giant monsters, George (a giant gorilla), Ralph (a giant werewolf), and Lizzie (a giant lizard [and the only girl]).

Each city is represented by a set of buildings that you must destroy to reach the next. You destroy buildings by punching them and jumping on them (standard giant monster moves). Do enough damage and the building falls to the ground in a rubble heap. Inside the building are power ups and power downs. You, for example, want to eat the roast chicken, but not so much the fire extinguisher. Keeping your health up is vital, as there are bullets coming from every direction all at once in an effort to stop the carnage. Bullets coming from helicopters (which you can punch) and soldiers (which you can eat).

This game is actually pretty fun, if you have the quarters and the patience to play all the way through it. You eventually smash your way through the entire USA. What do you do after you finish the USA? Why you go to other countries and eventually other worlds, but those are different entries for different days.

Karnov is an icon of video game of the 1980s. He’s an unlikely hero in a world that doesn’t make any sense, out to save the day. You see, Karnov the guy is a chubby, bald-headed fellow that breathes fireballs, fireballs that sound like radio static. Hit him once, he turns blue, hit him twice he turns dead.

He has to travel a landscape that looks like some kind of burned out villa, fighting gargoyles, birds, suits of armor, and stone heads that look suspiciously like Abraham Lincoln. If Karnov merely had the fireballs, he’d be a force to be reckoned with. But, as it happens, he has a host of items available to help out. Things like bombs, gas masks, and ladders. A quirk about this game is the usage of these items. Your items that you’ve collected are at the bottom of the screen, and you press the ‘Select’ button to use the highlighted item. But you choose the item you’re going to use by pressing the left and right buttons on the d-pad. You can imagine that placing things like a ladder are exponentially more difficult when you’re moving around every time you try to choose the ladder to deploy.

I never was able to make it very far into this game, I just wasn’t willing to put in the required hours. But I do know that the game gets weirder. Thanks to a video that I have detailing secrets of many games, I know that there is a stage underwater where Karnov is wearing flippers and goggles, and a stage in the sky where he’s sporting wings. Karnov would go on to make ameos in other games, but those games will have to wait until another day.

Since it was one half of the pack-in cartridge for a ton of Nintendo Entertainment Systems, Duck Hunt is probably the game you think of whenever you see a picture of a Zapper.

Duck Hunt, like a lot of light-gun games of the time, is exceedingly simple. There are two things you can do in this game: shoot ducks and shoot clay pigeons. When shooting ducks, your dog will rush into the marsh and flush out the ducks, either one or two at a time depending on the mode. You have three shots to shoot them all in each wave, and must hit a certain number of ducks to continue. Hit them and the dog will pop up with your duck(s) in hand. Miss or take too long and the dog will laugh at your pathetic marksmanship. This frustrated just about everyone I knew that played the game, and they desperately wanted to shoot the dog for laughing at them. While it wasn’t possible in the NES version, Wikipedia claims that it is possible to shoot him in the arcade version, though I was not able to figure out how to do that.

The second mode you could try was shooting clay pigeons. They would fly out from the bottom of the screen two at a time into the distance. You had to shoot them before they hit the ground and, like the ducks, have to shoot a certain number of them to make it to the next round.

I spent hours with this game, simple as it was, mostly because I didn’t have any money for anything new for a few months. This isn’t to say that it’s a bad game, it’s not, really. It’s just at this point, I’m pretty much done with it.

I do not know who Hogan is, but his alley is infested with cardboard cutouts of gangs and good guys. Good thing I have a Zapper.

Hogan’s Alley is the first light gun game that I played in the arcades. Though to clarify, I didn’t play it, my mom did. But I saw it in action, and that’s what counts!

The home version is slightly more limited, but the basics are the same, the main mode, the bread and butter of the game, is to travel down an alley. Popping out from behind walls, in windows, around fences, and the like are cardboard cutouts of a woman, a professor, a police officer, or one of three gang members (creatively named Gang A, Gang B, and Gang C). Of course, your goal is to shoot the bad guys while not shooting the good guys. Shoot a good guy or take too long to shoot a bad guy and you get a miss. Get too many misses and it’s game over.

Alternatively, you could play the shooting range mode where you are presented with 3 cutouts and must shoot the bad guys instead of the good guys. It’s pretty much the same as the other mode except that the background doesn’t change.

The third mode is a little bit different. You have a series of platforms on your left. From the right paint cans flip onto the screen. You can shoot the cans to bounce them a bit. Your goal is to bounce them over to the platforms and make them land on them for points. If any cans fall off the bottom of the screen, you miss. Miss enough and it’s game over.

I did quite enjoy this game, and am slightly puzzled why there hasn’t been a proper sequel made.