Full Review

This GBA combo pack just might be the end-all of Game Boy Advance games classic combo packs. I am a lover of classic games and consider Gauntlet and Rampart to be two of my favorites. Lord knows how many hours I’ve logged playing Gauntlet on the NES and I distinctly remember playing Rampart on my old 486 PC. It came on a 5.25” floppy disk! To have these two great games together in one pack is awesome.

Rampart, my favorite of the two games on this cartridge, combines elements of Tetris and Missile Command into a medieval castle defense game. You start out on a territory populated with several small castles and you must pick a castle to defend. The game will draw a wall around the castle keep, then you place several cannons inside and defend from attackers in sailboats. This phase of the game functions very much like Missile Command.

After the first round of battle is over, you have a limited time to rebuild your castle walls and prepare for the next round. If you don’t completely enclose your keep, the game is over. If you’re good, you can even enclose the other nearby castles, thus allowing you to have more cannons at your disposal. Rebuilding the castle walls is a lot like Tetris in that the wall pieces appear in random sizes that you have to fit into the walls as best you can.

Rampart is a pretty simple game, but fun as hell. It can be quite difficult if you aren’t able to rebuild your castle quick enough, plus enemy units on the ground will get in the way of your building. This game might be considered the predecessor to more complicated titles such as the Lord of the Realms or Stronghold series for PC. The graphics look like something from the 16-bit days of gaming, but this is the type of great game where the gameplay surpasses all.

Gauntlet was one of those must-have titles from the early NES days and it spawned quite a few sequels that continued on into today’s game consoles. It was one of the first games with a top-down view where you run around fighting enemies and collecting items and health. The entire game is like a big maze full of various monsters and you collect keys to open doors and continue into the deeper levels of the dungeon.

At the start of the game, you can be a warrior, valkyrie (fighter/magic user), elf (archer), or wizard. The easiest way to play is with the warrior, but you get to do a lot of cooler stuff with the wizard. It is best for new players to be the warrior for a while and then graduate up to the more difficult and interesting classes.

The graphics in Gauntlet look pretty faithful to the original version. In fact, they look better compacted into the small GBA screen. The sound is definitely improved and there are voice effects mixed in. Sure, this game could have been spiced up a bit, but I kind of like that it remained basically unchanged in regard to the look and feel of the game.

While it is fun to revisit these classic games, there is a major drawback to both of them: No multiplayer support. One of the key fun elements of Gauntlet was being able to have four players at once, so it takes a lot away from the game when you have to do the whole thing solo. It also makes the game much more difficult. I do not remember ever playing Rampart in any kind of multiplayer mode, so at least there is nothing lacking there.

Most of these GBA game combo packs include one really good game and the rest are filler. I was very pleased to see both of these great classic gaming titles included on one cartridge. I only wish the game developers would try to pack more on a cartridge. I know they could squeeze more in there. You can purchase this game for less than $15, and I think it is well worth it.