Game Review: Gauntlet
Handheld Game, Tiger, 1988
- The 3D Gauntlet you’ve all been waiting for.
Tiger handhelds were not a significant feature of my childhood. Despite this fact, many people seem to have a love / hate relationship with them. There’s a preponderance of ‘angry gamer’ reaction videos on one hand, a recent physical re-release of a selection of units on the other. They’re certainly a part of the modern retro nostalgia factory, and remembered as a gateway to video gaming for a certain generation.
One of the particularly noteworthy things about Tiger and their range of LCD games was their willingness to license the hell out of almost anything (and I mean ANYTHING) that might help shift some units. Sonic the Hedgehog, Afterburner, Outrun, Golden Axe, Street Fighter 2. Double Dragon…. M.C. Hammer?
My outsiders opinion on many of these handhelds is that they seem pretty poor even within the arena of LCD games. I can’t imagine how an attempt at a 1-on-1 or scrolling fighting game could be expected to work on such primitive electronics, and attaching the name of some hot new arcade license to these is just inviting disappointment from anyone familiar with the original game.
Despite this poor reputation, I do own a single Tiger LCD game - a licensed version of Gauntlet, the super popular 1985 Atari arcade game.
The first thing I need to state is that, obviously, this isn’t anything like playing Gauntlet in the arcade. In Tiger’s version of the game you can choose between 2 of the 4 arcade characters, the barbarian or the valkyrie. There’s a cosmetic difference to the choice, with some small LCD elements changed between each character (actually pretty clever!) and a slightly less aggressive bleeping noise when moving and firing as the valkyrie. Less superficially the barbarian starts with more health, but his attack is slower.
Upon pressing the start button you head off into a maze, which unlike the arcade is shown from a fixed perspective behind and slightly above your chosen character. Fairly simple lines are shown to represent the maze walls, and you can move in any of the 4 compass directions, as long as it doesn’t take you through a wall. The maze is populated with two different types of monster, a lizard man and some sort of hooded troll thing. These enemies move around the maze, and you can hit them once they’re next to you using the fire button. Too slow off the mark and they’ll score a hit on you, taking off a larger chunk of your health score, which is displayed as a number in the top right corner of the screen.
Just like real Gauntlet, your health continuously ticks down, and you use a little bit up every time you swing your weapon, which is a gameplay element I flat out dislike.
To aid you in your quest there items scattered throughout the maze:
Keys allow you to walk though one of the walls.
Potions (which the makers have labelled ‘bombs’ here because they didn’t trouble themselves with actually playing Gauntlet) kill all the monsters visible on the screen.
Health restoring flasks which ..restore health.. and look like potions with keys inside them because that’s the best they could do with the fixed elements of the LCD screen.
The adventure is split into a series of distinct levels, and you appear to progress between them by walking a certain distance through the maze in any direction, rather than navigating to a specific point.
There are 4 areas you progress though, with a few levels set in each:
The Castle
The basic maze with no twists. You’ll only encounter lizard men here.
Dark Forest
The elements of the maze itself are unchanged from the castle, but now you face both lizard men and hooded trolls.
The Lost Caverns
The maze walls start moving about, making everything confusing and chaotic.
The Unseen
The maze walls are now invisible, making things an exercise in pure frustration as you helplessly try to find a path.
The last level in every location contains only health flasks, and you can dash about trying to refill as much as possible before moving to the next. Once you’ve completed the last level of The Unseen you simply loop back to The Castle.
History
Somebody told me one of the other kids at school had a Gauntlet handheld game. Since I’d never seen such a thing in the shops I assumed it was bullshit. When I found out as an adult that there actually was a Gauntlet LCD game I was intrigued enough to try and get one. There are various other handhelds that have a maze theme, and Tiger themselves have an earlier game ‘Mouse Maze’ that uses the same basic perspective. They also produced a Robin Hood game, released in the same year as Gauntlet, but that appears to be exactly the same game with altered graphical elements.
Liked
I’ve seen various modern opinions that this game is laughable rubbish, but to my eyes it’s a really impressive effort …if you’re being objective about the limitations of the format. This game has very clever use of screen elements in order to create a 3D maze populated with different creatures. It has multiple different locations. You can play as multiple characters, and the choice affects the graphics, gameplay and sound. I’m pretty sure I’d have loved this if I’d played it in the 80’s.
Disliked
The physical feel of the controls, at least in my copy of this game, is really cheap and horrible to use. That may be partly down to its age - I don’t have another Tiger handheld to compare it to. Even though I just admitted to finding this quite an impressive effort, it was released only a year before the Gameboy was first introduced in Japan, and you’d be crazy to play Tiger Gauntlet if you had the choice of playing Super Mario Land.
🙉
Annoying sound. As ever.
