Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!aplcen!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!sdd.hp.com!ucsd!rutgers!mcnc!thorin!hatteras!mueller
From: mueller@hatteras.cs.unc.edu (Carl Mueller)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.games
Subject: Re: Gauntlet II
Message-ID: <16144@thorin.cs.unc.edu>
Date: 19 Sep 90 21:39:57 GMT
References: <2112@charon.cwi.nl> <2096@enea.se> <1990Sep13.160118.15626@cs.umn.edu> <4333@monu1.cc.monash.oz>
Sender: news@thorin.cs.unc.edu
Reply-To: mueller@hatteras.cs.unc.edu (Carl Mueller)
Organization: University Of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Lines: 35

In article <4333@monu1.cc.monash.oz> you write:
>  Here at Monash there are still a few Gauntlet addicts myself included, so I
>wanted to ask some questions to see what types of things other Gauntlet addicts
>in the states have done.

I and a friend of mine who is now at Perdue became "gods" of the original
Gauntlet.  If the machine was set properly, either of us alone could play
theoretically forever on a single quarter.  I played for something on the
order of 8 hours on my first game like this.  You can build up several
thousand health, which makes getting through the "bad" boards easy. (Room
full of ghosts?  No problem!)   If the machine was set harder, then we
could still play forever, but we both had to play (the game could be set
to give food proportional to the number of players; for one player it could
be set too low to let you live forever).

I don't recall too much unusual stuff that happened.  It has been a long
time, though.  Building up health takes a lot of time.  I think the most
my friend got was 13,000 or so.  I played with a heavier hand and never
got that high.  We had planned to set up a marathon once, but never got
around to it.  These days it's hard to find an original Gauntlet machine.

The game was in our combined opinion the best arcade game ever made.  The
attention to detail was extraordinary, and the concept revolutionary.
Unfortunately, much of that attention to detail was left out in the home
computer versions.  This is so very annoying.  There are some fairly
glaring errors which would have been simple to fix.  (Take for instance
the clicking sound you hear between all the sound effects).  Oh well.

It's too bad that now that there is an "official" release there likely
won't be any other releases with the bugs fixed.  By the way, has anyone
seen Gauntlet I for the Amiga?  I think I saw it advertised once by a
non-US company, but I don't know if it ever made it over here.  Does it
work "properly"?

-Carl Mueller (mueller@cs.unc.edu)