Gauntlet Legends

"And lo, the sages tapped the hero to save the realm with ease, for had he not silenced Skorne's evil laughter with but one click of the 'x' button?"

The original Gauntlet held a great mystery for me. You got to play as one of four characters: elf, wizard, valkyrie and warrior, with different speed, armor, shots and magic. Its total levels were some impressive power or other of two, which was enough to offer a great chance for people throw away many quarters on the continue feature without getting very far. The ability to collect loot from treasure chests or food to regain your ever-decreasing stamina, along with special weapons to shoot at monsters meant that many people did--they even cooperated on the quest. But not me. With all the new video games popping up I fell a few years behind trying to explore all the fads, but I still felt starry eyed at the idea of Gauntlet.

Then one day a friend showed me the Commodore 64 version. We knocked around for about an hour(not including loading times) as he explained he and another friend had once left the computer on overnight. We weren't able to, but all the continues we used for free made me feel so frugal. I'd beat some Gauntlet game or other someday--I was sure there would be a sequel and being in favor of progress in my optimistic youth predicted the next versions would perhaps have 1024 levels and sixteen characters, and perhaps I could solve them, and wouldn't that make me smart?

I can't speak for all versions. I don't really have the time. These days long spells of time are devoted to looking at other series I didn't get to play on my old Apple. And I tend to look for quicker and often easier games. In this respect Gauntlet Legends(GL) did not disappoint--it's got a tolerable third-person camera to catch the epic actions and sites throughout six worlds and about thirty levels, where you go and collect power-ups and search through mazes.

There's still lots of food to restore health points, barrels with mystery goodies, and weapons that super size the damage you do, with a key for every treasure chest or door. You even have the less flustering elements of RPG's thrown into the mix: more levels mean better armor, shot and hand-to-hand power, and magic and speed, with each character improving differently or starting with better stats. And you can hog power-ups or keys or potions(magic damage in a radius) and even find secret doors to bonus levels where you can pick up new characters by racing against time to get all the gold pieces in a maze. GL seems to balance its features about right: by the time leveling up gets a bit tiring, you're ready to bash through, and it provides enough--and clear--side quests.

And if it doesn't unfold spectacularly, it feels that way. You start in a cathedral that acts as a hub to several worlds and even houses a tidy store of power-ups you can also find through the portals. Only one is open at first; Skorne, the bad guy, defeated Sumner, the good mage, in your usual magic arch-fight, likely with energy spheres and bolts, but before retreating to his safe haven Sumner managed to open a gate to the Mountain World, where you start. Entering each section of a world and finding the exit portal allows you into the next one, until you get to the boss fight.

Opposition mayhem aside your object is to recover lost artifact weapons from each world as well as thirteen runestones. They're all hidden but fortunately you can whet your skills by finding ordinary(and substantially less unobtrusive) obelisks to start out. As you dispose of bosses you can restore a piece of stained glass to the window of the cathedral. Get them all and you can fight Skorne the first time.

So. Obelisks. Runestones. Relics(not really, but they're cool.) Stained glass in the cathedral. A resurrecting bad guy. Sounds pretty cool. It has just about everything--except the massive fighting challenge and potentially baffling controls you'd expect to come as part of such a package deal. GL may have gone too far in the other direction as I didn't die after the first boss, and even then I chalked it up to gross incompetence on my part.

Perhaps this discrepancy can be chalked up(or spun) to the legends being REAL HEROES. No-one's changed from the classic except for the elf(she's an archer) and I was surprised how quickly I got through the first level. It got much easier as I ran through it again. And again and again to build up levels. Sadly by level 25, one of my favorite tricks didn't work as my warrior, who had three hours ago as a mere level 10 learned he could flawlessly whip lackeys every few seconds. The problem was, my warrior had acquired a sidekick whose second shot would kill the monster regenerator unless I ducked and swerved wildly.

I didn't need the turbo attack. There are several possibilities, based on your 'turbo strength' which goes down as you hit square to move your hero faster but otherwise regenerates slower--I found later I just ran to make certain areas I knew go faster, which often deprived me of that cool attack where I swept in a circle. In fact I didn't need the power ups--general quickness, three shots, quick shot, fire breath are the only ones I remember. The rest are pretty pictures that impressed me until I felt it was maybe unfair to the bad guys. The only problem with all this was when some applied automatically when I first got them, but I managed to pile them all up to maximum pretty quickly. The L/R-1/2 buttons provide a very convenient scrolling menu well separated from the action and in fact when I got tired of the vanity of watching my experience points I decided to look for power-ups. It got a bit tedious to cycle through as I gained more than one mortal ought to have and actually needed one, but there were plenty of places to rest and switch. The only needlessly complex thing is saving to a memory card but even if you get packed off you'll lose very little experience. You often can't shoot straight either, with your arrows releasing randomly within degree arc, and some small monsters like dogs continually drain you for one hit point every five seconds as a result, but most of the unfair goofery is in your favor.

Oh, and when I mention I ran through the levels I should also mention I got through by running into monsters--again and again. Each level has generators which you can shoot to destroy but reappear if you wait too long. They're actually quite good for you as monsters come out and you can bash into them and run around, and you can pick the weaker ones to beat up by getting in close. You don't even need to hit a button as the game understands what you meant. Perhaps Skorne put out all those wimpy minions so you'd have so much fun beating them up you'd forget about him, but he might have slipped up--this sort of thing makes seeing even the more deadly sights much more entertaining in the long term. (Plus he seemed to forget about training the bosses to be marginally lethal, but that's another story.)

Weirdo suicide attackers scream offscreen before rushing at you with explosive red barrels to do damage(it's never enough.) Then there are those folks off screen that shoot arrows at you. Generally you can fire in their direction and you stop getting shot at, but it's also fun to check when your experience stops rolling up. There are also golems--one of which fell repeatedly to the ground from my turbo spinning attack near the end of a favorite level-up scenario. The worst enemies are probably bomb chuckers from off screen(they knock you down) or Death, who pops out of certain treasure chests, but to each his own particularly effective power-up.

Yet the melodrama gets a bit old if you can't move on to different scenes. The obelisks can't really be hidden too far out of sight, and this introduces you to new worlds that still have slopes up and down, makeshift elevators, and hidden areas and hollow walls that you can chip at if you explore carefully. Ice(a favorite of mine in ANY game,) a castle, a dark slimy world, and heaps of Just Plain Evil like the penultimate battlefield. The thirteen runestones are a bit tougher to find. Switches(turning oh so stoplightly from red to green) are a big deal here in your exploration; step on them and lower a gate, set an elevator platform in motion, or even cause a runestone platform to rise from a pit. Sometimes they just reveal nice treasure or items for power-ups, along with the corresponding key, but they always point in the direction of what they raise. If this isn't enough help, when you feel stuck Sumner will tell you the next relic or runestone to find, and there are handy scrolls along the way giving clues that seem more oblique and riddlesome than they are. It's all part of the grand show: GL has some great tricks to make the game feel more epic than it really is. Although you'll spend a good time searching, and often the best method to do so is a relatively tired old algorithm, the cliffs and castle walls and weird pits that serve more as atmosphere than traps make the trek less tedious.

The impressiveness over actual difficulty is especially obvious against the bosses. They provided a new level-up niche for me; it turns out the relics that spin in the air and thrust in to cause each boss(and your hero's eardrums. All that yelling) some damage to start your fight also are wholly unnecessary. Bosses spray flame or poison clouds most impressively, from the dragon to the chimera to the griffin. They seem to take the venerable path of cutting off the center and occasionally breathing at you, which often works great in chess. Later you find out they learned these tactics from Skorne himself. He finally gets down to business with an attack you can't really stop, but he's not smart enough to use it ruthlessly. Guess he was too busy recruiting useless foot soldiers or thinking up taunts when you missed a runestone.

On the other hand it's pretty clear why Skorne would want to take over the GL universe. It's a pretty cool place despite being drenched in darkness--or maybe Skorne spent all the time that should've gone to his henchmen on creating a forbidding atmosphere. The general utilitarian concerns of gradually increasing levels aside(the Mountain Valley to start out is linear except for a door you can avoid wasting a key on later,) they're a joy to run through. Some of the background music sounds like it's from a harpsichord but possesses none of the dullness associated more cynically with standard classical music. What guitar music there is seems from the good old days of rock and roll. In fact even the graphical faults will be pleasing--there's the usual problems of polygons getting exposed, and in this case you frequently see some sort of treasure hidden behind.

Most of the time, though, it's all a bit more poetic. As your fighter hits certain milestones(level 10, 25, 50, 75, 99) his weapon gets bigger; mine's axe turned into a shimmering lollipop of destruction, with bigger bolts and even a sidekick to shoot out death that would zap through three enemies in a row. Monsters may start out as goblins but they have many grotesque and psychedelic colors. Nothing's ever truly hellish, but some poisonous monsters glow freakily, and later there's a perverted Ren-and-Stimpy type. The annoying monsters that slither on the ground range from rats to slugs, and the monster generators are quite apt; they start as big doors, rubbish piles for vermin or even big tents for undead legions, and you can slowly chop them down to dust heaps or ruins. But mostly there's a great reward for getting further through the game--skewering more monsters in ever more improbable attacks, with your experience gauge flipping like crazy to re-emphasize the extent of your carnage.

Some of the level designs also work well too as you may reach one pinnacle which allows you to see the ground below and recognize a place you need to visit while enjoying the view--although camera angle is strictly based on where you are, you generally get to see enough, and the convenience easily offsets the need to run a bit to cover a blind side. Nothing important is blocked. And though there are some disconnects with seeming to be able to walk over something, there are also impressive features such as doors that slide when you step on a switch. I just knew the Gates to the Underworld would do that, but the grinding to reveal the Shimmering Beyond still impressed me. You'll also notice whole slabs of ground you'll need to raise up to make a passage to where monsters fester, and the relics I was able to find appeared in some secluded area with weird pools or elevators. The locations felt very secret.

You even have four extra levels after the game proper, where you face stumps that spit out tree-people and a cavernous pyramid-type area. It's the sort that leaves you saying More Please, but after the previous action you're pretty sure you've had enough, and being brutally linear it makes a satisfactory denouement and even features a cute side-quest.

Although GL was rather easy to complete you will probably miss some of the relics or characters and want to get them, and having hordes of enemies to hack through without the real bother means that you can center your creativity at frying them en masse. You'll find ways you didn't know existed. I know I've read and enjoyed some of Lloyd Alexander's fantasy books about how heroes' adventures can be tedious and emotionally demanding. With console games before GL I'd started to worry that all RPG's were too involved to get into, and GL showed me they didn't have to be. It's certainly got faults, but you'll have to step back to analyze them. Sometimes GL feels too dumb or too obvious, with a bit too much maze searching after the combat is over and you were just about tired of it anyway, but other times it has a smoothness that feels like what RPG adventures are supposed to be.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 07/16/03, Updated 07/16/03