2022 VGS NES Weekly Contest - Rampart!

[Richardhead | 2,813]

1 minute ago, Bearcat-Doug said:

Come on, you can totally beat that @Dr. Morbis guy!

This game literally gave me a panic attack. Had to take some extra Valium to get what i got.

[Bearcat-Doug | 5,104]

6 minutes ago, Richardhead said:

This game literally gave me a panic attack. Had to take some extra Valium to get what i got.

It could be worse.

[Dr. Morbis | 2,088]

45 minutes ago, Richardhead said:

This game literally gave me a panic attack. Had to take some extra Valium to get what i got.

Well, do not ever play the game on "Very Hard" then, as it only gives you ten freaking seconds to rebuild your walls after every battle!!!

[Krunch | 303]

I'm really stoked this is the game for the week, I was traveling and played on emulator last time we played and I was active IIRC.  I'm only just about to start but I damn near might settle in for the next 7 hrs on it @Dr. Morbis

[Dr. Morbis | 2,088]

33 minutes ago, Krunch said:

I'm really stoked this is the game for the week, I was traveling and played on emulator last time we played and I was active IIRC.  I'm only just about to start but I damn near might settle in for the next 7 hrs on it @Dr. Morbis

Yeah, it's a really fun game; just a few tweaks away from being an all-time classic.  I like it enough that I've been trying to beat it on "very hard" for my personal list, but that damn last level with only two castles: it gets me every time...

[Krunch | 303]

1 hour ago, Dr. Morbis said:

Yeah, it's a really fun game; just a few tweaks away from being an all-time classic.  I like it enough that I've been trying to beat it on "very hard" for my personal list, but that damn last level with only two castles: it gets me every time...

I agree its close to being a classic.  Great for 2 players.  I keep getting screwed over by what I guess is supposes to be the rubble?  The bugs arent too big a deal but the rubble often makes it unsolvable for me so ill have to find a way to combat that.  I almost made it through level 5 of 6 (? dont know if thats the level count).  Is there bonus points for beating the game?

[Krunch | 303]

41,023

 

Edited August 15, 2022 by Krunch

[mbd39 | 2,020]

2 hours ago, Dr. Morbis said:

Well, do not ever play the game on "Very Hard" then, as it only gives you ten freaking seconds to rebuild your walls after every battle!!!

At that point the game might as well use its digitized speech to laugh at me and just go straight to the game over screen.

 

[Dr. Morbis | 2,088]

1 hour ago, Krunch said:

I agree its close to being a classic.  Great for 2 players.  I keep getting screwed over by what I guess is supposes to be the rubble?  The bugs arent too big a deal but the rubble often makes it unsolvable for me so ill have to find a way to combat that.  I almost made it through level 5 of 6 (? dont know if thats the level count).  Is there bonus points for beating the game?

Yes there are six levels total, first is skippable outside of this weekly competition, so five required levels to beat the game.  As for the end of the game, there is a cool surrender scene where the enemy flagship comes into your dock waiving the white flag; if you sink the ship, you get 10k bonus points, but if you let him live you get 20k bonus points on easy mode.

Some tips for you: holding down B during battle makes your cursor go faster, and most importantly of all, pause the game before the "rebuild" warning scrolls off the bottom of the screen, and you can actually view the situation and consider what your strategy is going to be before you restart the building phase.  Also, this one is kind of obvious, but kill the orange ships first to prevent rubble.  And to maximize points, surrounding castles garners way more bonus points than anything else in the game (outside of the game ending bonus), so making huge walls that cover multiple castles should be your priority if you're looking to maximize your points...

[Dr. Morbis | 2,088]

Well I finally beat this game on "Very Hard" using a single continue on level 4, and much like Franz Lanzinger's other NES game (Krazy Kreatures) the ending is top notch.  I've included a picture of the final screen before the high score.  And speaking of high score, there is like a 70k or more bonus for not shooting the surrendering flagship on Very Hard.  I don't know how many points I had exactly before I beat the game, but I was at about 40k plus or minus; now check out my score in the picture below after beating the game (obviously not a submission for this week's contest):

[Bearcat-Doug | 5,104]

46 minutes ago, Dr. Morbis said:

 

 

That's probably the most accurate ending screen of any NES game. I am indeed completely baffled. Congratulations!

[PII | 1,884]

2 hours ago, Bearcat-Doug said:

2 hours ago, Dr. Morbis said:

 

That's probably the most accurate ending screen of any NES game. I am indeed completely baffled. Congratulations!

Basically just surround a different castle each time with just enough wall for the castle and one cannon, remove your old cannons and then attack your own walls to keep the yellow ships from making too many craters and then make it through 8 rounds or so on each turf until the end.

Art imitates life...

[Dr. Morbis | 2,088]

31 minutes ago, PII said:

Basically just surround a different castle each time with just enough wall for the castle and one cannon, remove your old cannons and then attack your own walls to keep the yellow ships from making too many craters and then make it through 8 rounds or so on each turf until the end.

Mostly, but there's a little more to it than that.  You have to decide when you want all white ships, and when you want all orange ships, because dealing with both is all but impossible.  When you kill a ship, it will randomly choose to replace it with a new white or orange ship, to a maximum of seven ships per level, that do not swap out until killed.  If you can get all white, it's easy because you just shoot out all your own walls and then only kill white ships that make landfall to prevent the little tanks from overrunning your land and castles.  The problem is, the longer you go without continuing, the more orange ships will appear to start each level, and they take more hits to kill.  So if you can beat two or three levels without continuing, you want to start killing all the white ships to get a full fleet of orange, then you no longer have to worry about any ships making landfall and releasing tanks, at which point you can do the strategy you basically described.  If you fail and have to resort to using a continue, it resets to white ships and starts over.  The problem is that the final level only has two castles, so the "easy" way to beat the final level would be to get there with a continue remaining, kill yourself and then just fight wimpy white ships to get the win.  Knowing this, I had a personal "no continues on the last level" rule so that I had to beat it legit with orange ships present.

I know that's a lot of typing, but the internet is full of keyboard commandos who don't understand that executing a strategy isn't exactly as easy as it is to type it up...

Edited August 15, 2022 by Dr. Morbis

[PII | 1,884]

@Dr. Morbis Ok, yeah; you still have to kill the orange ships once in a while.  It's a hard game but I think if one can beat it on easy, then medium and very hard aren't as much of an additional stretch as one would typically expect for a game this hard provided one changes up the general strategy to include the aforementioned tricks.

Anyway, nice score this week!

for once...  

maybe twice or thrice...  

[Dr. Morbis | 2,088]

1 minute ago, PII said:

@Dr. Morbis Ok, yeah; you still have to kill the orange ships once in a while.  It's a hard game but I think if one can beat it on easy, then medium and very hard aren't as much of an additional stretch as one would typically expect for a game this hard provided one changes up the general strategy to include the aforementioned tricks.

Anyway, nice score this week!

for once...  

maybe twice or thrice...  

Yeah, on Very Hard, the first couple of rounds of every new terrain are actual battles, but you pretty much have to outsmart the game by killing ships selectively to beat it in the long run.  No one is going to beat this game by sheer number of kills on the highest difficulty; there's not even so much as a single video on youtube of someone beating Very Hard with offense, so you have to employ a good strategy to survive.  If the designers had made it so you need to kill X-number of ships per map to advance, that would have made more sense, but also would have been crazy difficult on Very Hard, but no, they chose to make it a battle of survival.

Overall, I really dig the game; the only thing that really bugs me is how it says Blue "conquers" when you beat each level.  It's like, "um, no... blue barely survived for an arbitrary amount of rounds until you finally said, fuck it: next level!"

[PII | 1,884]

1 minute ago, Dr. Morbis said:

Yeah, on Very Hard, the first couple of rounds of every new terrain are actual battles, but you pretty much have to outsmart the game by killing ships selectively to beat it in the long run.  No one is going to beat this game by sheer number of kills on the highest difficulty; there's not even so much as a single video on youtube of someone beating Very Hard with offense, so you have to employ a good strategy to survive.  If the designers had made it so you need to kill X-number of ships per map to advance, that would have made more sense, but also would have been crazy difficult on Very Hard, but no, they chose to make it a battle of survival.

Overall, I really dig the game; the only thing that really bugs me is how it says Blue "conquers" when you beat each level.  It's like, "um, no... blue barely survived for an arbitrary amount of rounds until you finally said, fuck it: next level!"

Sometimes its about surviving to fight another day.

I agree with what you said earlier that it is just shy of being an exceptional game and a true classic.  (Although I have to admit I haven't played it 2-player yet and that's the sort of thing that might very well change my mind.)  As sick as everyone, myself included, likely is of the term "hidden gem" or "lost gem" it is definitely that much.  A must have in my book.

[Dr. Morbis | 2,088]

1 hour ago, PII said:

Sometimes its about surviving to fight another day.

I agree with what you said earlier that it is just shy of being an exceptional game and a true classic.  (Although I have to admit I haven't played it 2-player yet and that's the sort of thing that might very well change my mind.)  As sick as everyone, myself included, likely is of the term "hidden gem" or "lost gem" it is definitely that much.  A must have in my book.

Two player mode is excellent.  The only problem is that they have no handicapping options, so if we were to play someone who wasn't too familiar with the game, it would be over really quickly...

[PII | 1,884]

12 minutes ago, Dr. Morbis said:

Two player mode is excellent.  The only problem is that they have no handicapping options, so if we were to play someone who wasn't too familiar with the game, it would be over really quickly...

Is the SNES version a NEW game, just a 16-bit version, or an update somewhere in between?

[Dr. Morbis | 2,088]

1 hour ago, PII said:

Is the SNES version a NEW game, just a 16-bit version, or an update somewhere in between?

Two player mode is essentially the same between them, but the SNES has a few more options to customize your battles.

As for one player mode:  NES is almost identical to the arcade version in terms of gameplay and levels (minus the three-player compatibility, of course), with the exception being that each level ends after a battle sequence in the arcade, whereas the NES version makes you rebuild your walls one last time before advancing to the next level.  There are other minor tweaks, and obviously a huge graphical difference, but the NES version is about equal to the arcade game, generally speaking.

The one player mode of the SNES version, on the other hand is massively expanded to the point that it takes hours to beat, and incorporates "mode 7" and has such a huge amount of new/expanded levels that it requires a password system.  My issue with it is that the levels get so large that you can't see the whole playfield at once, so it's kind of like playing a Bubble Bobble game on the Game Boy where you can't alway see whats going on because some stuff is always off screen.  It gives the game a zoomed-in clausterphobic feel to it that I honestly don't care for.  So for all intents and purposes, the SNES version is a new and totally different game based around the same core concept, kind of like how Konami's Famicom version took the same core concept to make a completely different game.

Conclusion: everyone knows I'm a biased NES-head, so take this with a grain of salt, but I much prefer the short sweet arcade style of the NES port, where you can see the entire battlefield at all times in all game modes.

Edited August 15, 2022 by Dr. Morbis

[Bearcat-Doug | 5,104]

On 8/14/2022 at 11:23 PM, Dr. Morbis said:

Overall, I really dig the game; the only thing that really bugs me is how it says Blue "conquers" when you beat each level.  It's like, "um, no... blue barely survived for an arbitrary amount of rounds until you finally said, fuck it: next level!"

That was basically my experience playing it on Easy. I did get better after I finally finished the game, but I totally messed up the stage with the castles in the C shaped layout by only being able to surround one castle due to the others all being blocked by fires.

[Bearcat-Doug | 5,104]

On 8/14/2022 at 7:27 PM, Dr. Morbis said:

Well I finally beat this game on "Very Hard" using a single continue on level 4, and much like Franz Lanzinger's other NES game (Krazy Kreatures) the ending is top notch.  I've included a picture of the final screen before the high score.  And speaking of high score, there is like a 70k or more bonus for not shooting the surrendering flagship on Very Hard.  I don't know how many points I had exactly before I beat the game, but I was at about 40k plus or minus; now check out my score in the picture below after beating the game (obviously not a submission for this week's contest):

I guess that I can't feel too bad about finishing second even though I still don't like it. Congrats on the win!

[BeaIank | 1,618]

Final standings posted.

[JamesRobot | 5,793]

32,654

Still playing Rampart.  Lol.

 

[Dr. Morbis | 2,088]

18 minutes ago, JamesRobot said:

32,654

Still playing Rampart.  Lol.

 

Well it sure is a great game.  Now that I've gotten to know the NES version due to this weekly contest, I actually like it far more than the SNES one...