A playthrough of Jaleco's 1992 arcade strategy game for the NES, Rampart. Played through on the medium difficulty level. After the game ends I show a couple of extra things. At 40:50, I show the alternate ending that you see if you shoot at your enemy as they try to surrender, and at 41:05, I show executioner scene that you see at the end of a two-player match. It's pretty amusingly censored for the NES. Rampart is a great game, no matter which platform you chose to play it on, but I've always been partial to the NES game. The premise is simple - you build walls around your castle, place your cannons, and fend off an invading sea fleet. If you can hold out until the last round still in control of one of the castles, you win the battle. If a round ever ends and you don't have at least one castle completely surrounded by walls, you lose. The genius of the whole thing is that despite the simple premise, matches are generally anything but. There is a whole lot of planning and strategy require to get beyond the first couple of rounds - do you place as many cannons as possible, risking that you might not be able to build around them later? Do you fire at the incoming ships, or do you fire at your own walls so that the enemy can't set them on fire? Do you surround all of the castles at once, or do you surround just one, and fill the remainder of the fill with wall pieces to distract the enemy from your homestead? And things get even better in two-player mode. The NES port is obviously a big downgrade in graphics and sound from the arcade game, but it doesn't really matter. Everything is well represented, the battlefield graphics are clear and easily read, and the sound is tacky and loud in a way that makes the whole thing pretty fun. "Ready! Aim! FIRE!!" But most importantly, no matter how it stacks up against other versions nor how you might judge its individual components, Rampart is simple, immediately engaging, tough to master, and most importantly, it's fun. If you liked games like North & South and Spy vs. Spy, I guarantee you'll love this. Oh, and if you like Rampart and haven't seen the Japanese NES version of it, it might be worth your while to take a look. It was done by Konami, and features three campaigns with full storylines. It's an excellent take on the classic Atari arcade game. You can find my translated playthrough of it here if you are interested:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_vGgDZ6ps4 *Sorry about the repost - I didn't realize until after I uploaded it that the original video's a/v sync was mangled at a couple of points. Here is a new video with no such issue present! _ No cheats were used during the recording of this video. NintendoComplete (
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