Rampart (video game)

Did You Know?

• In Japan, Game Machine listed Rampart as the seventh most successful table arcade unit of May 1991.
• Julian Rignall of Computer and Video Games gave the arcade game a 93% score.
• Nintendo Power placed it the fourth best Game Boy Game of 1993.

Gameplay

Rampart blends strategy with action, putting you in charge of a walled territory filled with castles and cannons. Play alternates between two timed phases: building and combat. During building, you repair damage and try to expand your land. During combat, you use your cannons to attack. In single-player, your enemy is a fleet of ships; in multiplayer, players face off across rivers that divide the battlefield. The game starts with an automatic building phase where the computer erects a wall around one castle. Owning a castle gives you control over a set number of cannons. Once the wall is up, you place those cannons inside your territory. When building ends, combat starts. In single-player, ships sail toward your walls and fire at them. You shoot back at the moving ships, but cannonballs travel slowly, so you must aim ahead of your targets. In multiplayer, players fire directly at each other’s walls. The attacker’s goal in either mode is to punch holes through the wall. Combat stops when you sink enough ships or, in two-player mode, after a fixed amount of time. After combat, you lose control of any area no longer fully enclosed by your wall, along with any cannons in that area. Then a player-controlled building phase begins. Tetris-like shapes appear, and you move and rotate them to plug gaps in your wall or extend it around additional castles. Once tile placement ends, any castle or cannon completely surrounded by a continuous wall becomes part of your territory. The cycle then repeats, starting with cannon placement again. Each castle you surround gives you one cannon during the arming phase, except your home castle, which gives two—but only if there’s room. Repairing damage is tricky because hits tend to be scattered. The blocks you get are usually larger than the holes you need to fill, though single-unit blocks do show up sometimes. Filling a small gap often requires a big block, and the leftover parts of that block get in the way of future placements. As the game goes on, larger blocks may not fit into the shrinking free space, making repairs harder and harder.

Ports

Rampart saw releases on a wide array of home systems, including the Super NES, Master System, Mega Drive/Genesis, Atari Lynx, MS-DOS, Macintosh, Commodore 64, Amiga, and Atari ST, with distinct versions also appearing on the Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and NES. Bitmasters handled the NES, Super NES, and MS-DOS ports; the NES version was initially intended for publication by Tengen without a Nintendo license but ultimately came out under Jaleco, which had secured a license. Electronic Arts published the Super NES and MS-DOS editions. Most home ports introduced updated features. The Japanese Famicom release, put out by Konami, offered seven training levels, three difficulty settings, and a robust two-player mode; an unofficial English translation of this port appeared in May 2017. In the Super NES and MS-DOS versions, players could also convert captured cannons into powerups. The original arcade game appeared in the Midway Arcade Treasures compilation for GameCube, PlayStation 2, Xbox, and PlayStation Portable, as well as in Midway Arcade Origins for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. It was also bundled with Gauntlet on a single Game Boy Advance cartridge. A PlayStation 3 version featuring online multiplayer launched on the PlayStation Network on May 10, 2007.