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System:
MasterSystem
Genre:
Action
Publisher:
Activision
Developer:
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Players:
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Release date/year:
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Other systems:
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- Rampage
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Activision - MS
Smashing and crushing things is always a fun and time wasting thing to do; no matter what system you’re playing. Rampage for the Nintendo Entertainment System is no exception to the rule, in which you take control of one of three creatures and smash your way through several stages of cities to defeat the government and eventually the world! Where the Rampage goes wrong {as it has in all other versions}, is that the game is unbearably long and cannot possibly be finished in a single sitting unless you have nothing else to do with your life.
Three characters is what you have to choose from, either a wolf, a gorilla or a lizard and all you have to do is smash your way through all of the cities that you come into contact with! The idea and the game play of this title are so mindlessly simple that looking deeper than that is a waste of thought and brainpower. Because of the control problems and the insane difficulty at later levels, most gamers will probably remember this game as the one they wanted the most and the least they wanted to play it after a single afternoon with it!
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-The Game Play-
The game runs a little like this in which you take control of Lizzie, George or Ralph and start smashing buildings and literally anything else that gets in your way. You’ll travel through several stages of property smashing madness in which you’ll break buildings from the roof down, smash cars and eat people all through your travels and only because they get in your way! Enemies range from gun happy citizens to the army, all of which are there to hinder your progress through the use of guns and other weapons of destruction. While smashing the buildings open, you can find health items that will ultimately help you regain your power and keep you strong through the stages. These items can also hurt you depending on what they are and you’re required to pay plenty of attention to this as it can either help you or cost you the stage!
The two player option is what really makes the game fun, in which you don’t have to take on the seemingly endless game all by yourself. With two people, the game isn’t as difficult to play, but can be just as mindless in which smashing buildings can become a tag team effort and killing the army can be fun! The cities don’t really change in how you destroy them and the only way to tell what stage you’re on is through the day that is located at the beginning of each stage. You may find that playing through the game to the end is damn near impossible because your eyes are bleeding or your fingers hurt from so much button pressing, so be prepared to take plenty of breaks from the game while you’re going through!
The control is also mindless in the way that all you have to do is use one button to punch and one button to jump. Jumping rarely comes up unless you’re at the top of a building that is coming down and you need to get off before you end up injured from the fall! Different attacks on the buildings will make different effects, but the overall point of the control is just to destroy things in your path. Eating people is a simple directional pad press and the punch button, while destroying planes and tanks runs along the same lines. Anyone can pick up the control and start playing with nothing special that needs to be done to get the job finished! It really doesn’t take much and most gamers will fall for the easy to use control that is offered here in Rampage.
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-The Visuals-
Visually, the game suffers from a couple of different things. The first of these is that the game looks pretty much the same no matter what city you’re supposedly in! This can be attributed to the lack of extra buildings and other landmarks that would prove that you’re actually destroying Chicago. The other of the two is the severe image break up that the game shows when you’re smashing and crushing the buildings all around you. When they come down, the effect isn’t dust that you see, but the image breaking apart because there is too much on the screen for the Master System hardware to handle! Aside from that, the detailing on the game is decent enough to warrant an average score, even though you can only look at the same things for so long before you go insane and start breaking things in your living room.
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-The Audio-
The audio in the game is centered strictly around the sound effects, with a music track that is little more than a thumping sound that is supposed to have an effect that escapes me. The sound effects are tinny and limited to what the hardware can handle, revolving around buildings falling and tanks taking pot shots at you from a distance! The sound effects also don’t fit the caliber of what the game is supposed to be, with different situations usually calling upon the same sound effects over and over again. Attribute this to lack of imagination or boredom, but it gets annoying after awhile and the mute button should probably be pressed after the first hour to avoid going nuts.
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-The Verdict-
Rampage is a different type of game that wants to be something popular but ends up being too damn long of a game to really enjoy! The visuals are decent with a fair amount of problems that bring them down along with a nearly non-existent nor effective audio track. Controlling your creature is blissfully simple to pull off through the mind numbing game play so the end result is a game that has an equal amount of good and bad considering the era it was created in. Most gamers will find this to be a good walk down memory lane for the first twenty minutes while others will find it rather droll after the first five!
6/10
//KasketDarkfyre
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