What I thought back in the days….

Not a very pretty game, but I really love the senseless amount of brutality in Rampage. Punch buildings into dust, eat people, eat toilets, and do a lot of crazy things as the unofficial relatives to King Kong and Godzilla. I love how this game seems like it never ends, although sometimes I do wish I could save halfway through. It’s a game that’s easy to jump into, with little or no learning curve. I wish I had some kind of special attacks to add to my methods of destruction. Regardless, solo, or with a friend, Rampage on the NES is a mindlessly awesome time!

Rating Then: 8.0

What I think years later….

Rampage has had a soft spot in my heart for many years, even though I have not really played it in such a long time. Lazy summer afternoons spent punching the piss out of buildings, eating pedestrians, and just running a muck because I could! Such a simple premise – destroy every building on the stage, move onto the next stage, rinse and repeat. Simple, yet engaging. It kept me busy for hours on end for so many days, and I ate it all up. But what about now? Does Rampage still satisfy an all day rampage through city after city and still reign as a premiere NES title, or did all those long summer days with no air conditioning melt my brain all those years back?

Never eat the toilet bowls....

....if you do, you blow chunks.

Jumping right into the game and past the uneventful opening screen, I am thrown right into work, taking buildings down. Okay, so let me jump onto a building with A….ah hell, I forgot this was one of those games with the backwards controls. B is jumping, while A is attacking. With that out of the way, now I get to work. Boy, color variation was definitely not a focal point here in Rampage. Ugly green, gray and blue variations are abound. It’s quite an ugly game for NES standards, and a little worse than I remember.

This is one of those games with one or two music bytes, tops. You hear basically the same music, over and over, throughout your play through, with the only variation coming when Lizzie drops down after every half dozen stages to punch the area on the US map you just went though, and ‘destroy’ it. It’s not WinBack bad, but it’s really annoying after a while. In fact, mixed with the uneventful sound effects, you’d miss nothing if you muted your television while playing this game.

One reason why Rampage had a lot of replay value for me back in the days, was because death had no consequences. You lose all your health? No problem! Just press B and you’re back in the hunt! Although I have to admit, with no actual important back story to the game, seeing George and Lizzie transform into humans upon losing all your health is odd. Pressing B and watching them grow back to their full size King Kong and Godzilla rip off look alike stature is just as odd.

When your health fully depletes, you turn into a human being, and shuffle off to the side of the screen. Press B and you magically grow back to your original state.

As I’m getting further and further into my play through, I’m starting to get really bored. All I’m doing is punching down different sized buildings, with a color palette as varied as Pong, eating toilets and poisoning myself, jumping off buildings before they crumble with me on it, getting shot up constantly by guys hanging out windows with guns, choppers doing flybys on me, tanks slowly driving by, Ecto 1 shooting me off buildings (yes….it’s freaking Ecto 1 car from the Ghostbusters movies does a drive-by on you) and none of it is really much fun after ten levels. Why was this fun nearly twenty years ago?

Who you gonna call?! KONGBUSTERS!

Then there’s also some major issues with controls and collision detection. Climbing a building seems like a game of Chance….you press Up where you should, and your character just stands there, often times getting shot while doing so. You seem to have to be in the most pixel perfect position to get yourself to climb the building. Trying to grab enemies walking on the ground is a chore too, as you need to have your punch land squarely on top of them in order to grab them. Easier said than done. When you’re climbing up a building and punch upward at a chopper coming down, you can hit it from a near mile away. At the same time, choppers dropping a missile down at you can literally graze your face, and yet not connect and damage you. Very sloppy stuff.

If there was one thing that could have saved Rampage, and definitely made me have a higher view of the game, it would have to be a save system. This is one title that could have benefited immensely from having a battery backup saving system, or even one of those god awful password systems a lot of NES titles had. This way, I could come back at a later time to continue my madness, and not feel as over burdened by how severely repetitious this all feels. In fact, I probably would have rated this game a full point higher if it had this feature. Sadly, I’d have to use save states via emulation on my PC if I ever wanted to do that, which I really can’t be bothered to.

Rampage does have its moments, unfortunately, they all come early on, before you realize how monotonous and repetitious the game really is. You can almost say that this game is a bad comedy, with bad jokes between stages, that you can make even worse jokes off of it. For NES standards, it was a lot more repetitious than most of the titles in the library, a lot less visually appealing, and definitely not the game I remember so fondly. I think its safe to say that Rampage is one of those titles that you should always remember from years ago as a title you had a good time with, and never try to relive those days ever again. If you HAVE to come back and relive these days again, do so in short spurts, via emulation, with a save state after ten levels or so. Come back a week later maybe, and repeat. Otherwise, it’s way too much of the same thing way too often.

That's what she said!

Rating Now: 5.0