If you’ve ever wondered what you would get if you mixed Warhammer with Tetris, you’re one strange son of a bitch. But you’d also get Rampart, an arcade classic that dared to be different in a time when 2D fighters were crowding the market.

Rampart is a deceptively simplistic game. After you start a game you’re given the chance to pick which fort you want to start with. Once you’ve picked your location, a wall is generated around the castle and you have to place your cannons within the wall. After you place your cannons (or your timer runs out, whichever comes first) you enter the “attacking round”, where you must attack enemy ships with your cannons, while they lob cannonballs back at you. After your time runs out or you sink all the ships, you enter a repair mode where you’re given roughly 30 seconds to patch up your walls. After your walls are repaired, you start the cycle over until you conquer the level and move on to the next. Sounds so easy, right?

The first sign that there may be more to Rampart than previously assumed is with the repair phase of each stage. You see, after each round of combat you are tasked with repairing the holes in your fort’s walls, as well as capturing other castles by building walls around them. While it sounds relatively easy, the task is made slightly harder by the fact that you have to use Tetris blocks. This immediately makes the simple task of “building a box” a near-impossible feat. There are times where you have to think to yourself (think quickly, mind you) whether you want to try and patch up the six or seven single-block-sized holes, or if you want to just build a new wall around another castle. There are advantages to each: If you build a new wall, it’s easier. If you maintain your current keep, you get three additional cannons to the cannons already placed. Oh, and if you try to do both (which, in the later stages is just ballsy) you can get extra land, which will add to your point total and help you obtain total victory over the map sooner.

What made it even more difficult was that as you got further in the game, you came across enemy ships that would launch fire projectiles that would make the land they hit unusable. What that means is that if you had a crater where your wall once was, you have to build around it, and many times that’s just not possible since you’re only given so much space.

What Victory Typically Looks Like

But here’s the thing: For it’s incredible-if-not-artificially inflated degree of difficulty that surely left some early 90s arcade goers in tears, it has a certain charm that just sucks you in from the moment you first press start. For instance, while it may not be obvious at first, you’ll learn that every facet of the game interacts with each other. Sure, if you pick a castle close to the water you’ll get more shots, but so will the enemy, and you’ll be more vulnerable to land forces. If you decode to go cannon crazy and build a dozen around a single castle, when your walls are breached by flame rounds repair may become impossible. Trying to balance everything is the key to success, and even if you do – you’ll probably still lose.

Rampart, back in its heyday, found a nice home in the cold, dark arcades of yore. However, since arcades are a dying industry you’re going to have to turn to consoles. Rampart has made appearances on NES, Super Nintendo, SEGA Genesis, SEGA Master System, Atari Lynx, Atari ST, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, PC, Mac, and Amiga. Rampart has also appeared as a hidden minigame in Gauntlet on the Game Boy Advance, and as part of the Midway Arcade Treasures compilation on the PlayStation 2, GameCube, Xbox and PSP. Most recently, Rampart was released on the PlayStation Store for $4.99.

So go on, give this one a shot. You may be pleasantly surprised.

Popularity: unranked [?]