Gauntlet Legends
for the Sony PlayStation

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I will never forget the first time I played Gauntlet. It was 1985, and I was in the local mall in my hometown in Illinois. The mall had an Aladdin’s Castle, and as I made my way towards the arcade, I could hear a lot of commotion. I walked in, and saw a ton of people crowded around a new game. I couldn’t get close enough to see what was going on, so I went back into the mall to run my errands.

When I came back to the arcade about an hour later, the crowd had left, and standing proudly in the front entrance was Gauntlet. I stood there for a few moments watching the attract mode, and I knew that I had to give it a try. Before I knew it, I had shoved a few quarters in the machine, and I was playing the game.

Well, after playing the game for about five minutes, someone came up, and asked if he could join me. Before I could answer, he jammed in a few quarters, and we were playing together, but our little game didn't stay private for long.  Why? Two other guys came up and pushed in some change, and before you knew it, all four players were going, and a little crowd had gathered around to watch the four of us play….just like it had an hour before.

Gauntlet was a groundbreaking game. Oh sure, there were many multi-player games before Gauntlet, but here was a true cooperative multiplayer game, which was something (in my opinion) that the arcades were lacking.

Gauntlet spawned a sequel in 1986 called (appropriately) Gauntlet II. This game improved a bit on the gameplay and audio.

Well, the years went by, and we never saw a new Gauntlet game….until last year. Atari Games did an update to the game called Gauntlet Legends. The new game took the same medieval theme, and the multiplayer options, and combined it with some fantastic new 3D visuals and stereo sound. When I saw this game for the first time last year, I knew I had to give it a try, and I found it to be just as fun as the first game. Atari Games didn’t mess with the gameplay aspect at all. They kept the same gameplay from the original two coin-ops, which was a smart move in my opinion. Gauntlet Legends was a hit, and there is a sequel in the works called Gauntlet: Dark Legacy.

Like many other popular modern coin-op games, Gauntlet Legends has been released for home consoles.  Versions currently exist for the Nintendo 64 and Sony PlayStation.  A version of Gauntlet Legends will be released for the Sega Dreamcast later this year.

This review will take a look at the Sony PlayStation version.

If you are unfamiliar with the Gauntlet series of games, the object of the game is pretty simple. You act as one of four characters (Warrior, Wizard, Archer, or Valkyrie) who are making their way through the medieval land fighting an endless array of enemies who are out to stop you at all costs. At your disposal, you have weapons, power-ups, and magic. Each character has a strength and weakness. For example, the Warrior is a great fighter, but his magic is weak.

Here is the story behind Gauntlet Legends.....…

A great evil has descended upon the Four Realms.  A foolish young wizard has freed the mighty demon Skorne, who for centuries has been held at bay by twelve mystical Rune Stones.  Skorne, unable to destroy the Rune Stones, has cast them to the far corners of the great land.   Empowered by his magic Gauntlets, Skorne calls forth his evil minions. Goblins, golems, and undead in seemingly infinite numbers swarm the Realms as Skorne embarks on a reign of terror to turn the once beautiful land into his terrifying playground.

Just when things look blackest, four brave young heroes take up the cause of righteousness.  To restore their land, they must find and assemble all twelve Runes, defeating all obstacles in their path.  Laying in wait are the great Dragon, Chimera, Djinn, and Spider Queen - four legendary forces of evil who have joined sides with Skorne.   The champions must finally journey to the secret Fifth Realm, where they will find if they have what it takes to overthrow the rule of Skorne.

Gauntlet begins as the story of two brothers, both wizards.  One is a good wizard, keeper of peace across the Four Realms.  The other brother is foolish, and jealous of his brother's power.

The Good Wizard is keeper of the The Twelve Mystical Rune Stones, ancient relics of power that together function as both portal and barrier.  With the Runes, the Good Wizard can travel at will between the Four Realms.  These Runes were kept safe in the Good Wizard's tower keep while he roamed the Four Lands.

Jealous of his brother's status and power, the Foolish Wizard searches for a way to obtain power of his own.  When the Good Wizard is away on a task, the Foolish Wizard steals into the keep and attempts to use the Runes to summon a powerful demon, confident he can force the evil creature to do his bidding.  Underestimating the demon's power, the demon Skorne banishes him to the Underworld.  Skorne then tears asunder the circle of Runes, and hides the pieces in the far corners of the Four Realms so that they may never be used against him.

Skorne proceeds to summon his minions from the Underworld and sends them off to the Four Realms to drive the populace from their homes and establish a stronghold of power.   Skorne enlists the aids of powerful evil beings that have been kept at bay by the humans - the Dragon, Chimera, Djinn, and Spider Queen form a vile alliance.

The Good Wizard returns later to find the land in chaos.  He battles Skorne and forces the Demon Prince to retreat to an abandoned cathedral.  The Wizard's power is greatly taxed and he cannot enter the protected lair.  Skorne has entrusted each of his greater minions with a magic key.  Only these keys can break the wards of protection surrounding the cathedral.

The Good Wizard uses his remaining power to summon a hero from each of the four kingdoms.   He sends them off to defeat Skorne's minions, retrieve the keys to Skorne's lair, and recover the scattered rune-stones.  With the keys, the heroes can enter Skorne's lair and banish him to the Underworld.  Using the rune-stones, the heroes can follow Skorne to the Underworld and destroy him forever. Only then will the torturous reign of Skorne end, and the beauty of the Four Realms restored.

Now that we have some of the preliminary stuff out of the way, lets take a look at the game itself.  When you start the game, a few minutes of full-motion animated video sets up the story.  The video itself is extremely dark.  When I say dark, I don't mean that the content is evil.  I mean that it is lacking brightness.  Parts of it are difficult to distinguish, as the screen capture on the left illustrates.

Once the video is completed, you must select the character that you wish to use.  There are four characters to choose from, with four "hidden" characters that can be unlocked later in the "hidden" levels.

The four characters have been brought to the tower by the Good Wizard.  He wants you to go forth and save the land from the evil Skone.  The game itself has several different areas that you must explore.   Each area has multiple levels that must be conquered, along with a "Boss" at the end.

You start the game in the Tower.  It is the home of the Good Wizard, and also has the teleporters that move you from level to level within the various areas. 

As the heroes make their way through the game, they will gain experience points during battle.  Your character starts at level one, and can advance as high as level 99.  As your character progresses through the level rankings, each of their four basic attributes (strength, speed, armor, and magic) increase.  The game has a bit of a "role-playing" feel since your characters get more powerful as they gain experience.

You have a number of ways of fighting your enemies.  For example, the Warrior can be used in close range "hand-to-hand" combat  just by running into any enemies on the screen.   It is effective, but you lose health points fighting in this fashion.  For longer range attacks, the Warrior can throw his axe at enemies, which is an effective way of eliminating them.  This is a slower way of fighting, though.  Finally, you can use magic against your enemies, assuming that you have some magic potions in your inventory.

As you move around each level, you are constantly looking for two things:  Rune Stones, and Obelisks.  The Rune Stones are used to fight Skone.  There are thirteen of them hidden in the game.   Obelisks are used to open up portals that can be used to travel to new areas in the game.

Also peppered around the levels are keys, locked doors, potions, hidden switches, treasure chests, and barrels.  Treasure chests and barrels can have items to help or harm you.  For example, some treasure chests generally have gold, or some other prize in them.  Occasionally, you will open a chest and "Death" will come after you.  "Death" was a character from the original Gauntlet/Gauntlet II games that would sneak up and steal your health points.  "Death" looks like the Grim Reaper, and magic is your only real weapon against him.

Like the original Gauntlet/Gauntlet II coin-op games, you will come across many "generators" in your travels.   These devices are what is responsible for the constant stream of enemies that are sent towards you.  Using your weapons against a generator will destroy it, and stop the flow of enemies to fight against.  Generators take several forms depending on the type of enemy it generates.  For example, the "undead" enemies in the cemetery level are created with a Tombstone.  The "grunts" that inhabit many areas of the game are generated by a small "guard shack."

You also have multiple weapon "power-ups" which you will encounter.  These will give you additional capabilities, but only for a limited time.  For example, "fire breath" will kill everything in your path almost immediately.  There is an invisibility power-up that will allow you to sneak around the game and kill everything in sight before your enemies know what hit them.

The game is presented in a pseudo third-person perspective, with a "floating" camera.  If you have ever played Super Mario 64, you have a pretty good idea of what to expect.  A camera follows your heroes through the quest, and presents the action from behind, or above.   While this does work OK most of the time, the camera will occasionally make some wild (and fast) moves that will cause you to be a bit disorientated.

Take a look at the screen captures on the right.  Our hero, the Warrior, is is in the center of the screen.  He is currently making his way through one of the levels in a castle.  The enemies around him are supposed to be Knights in armor.

Here is where the main flaw in this game comes into play.  The Gauntlet Legends coin-op game uses the "Vegas" graphics chipset from 3dfx.  The "Vegas" design is actually a modified version of the Voodoo2 graphics technology used in many PC's.  As a result, the characters in the coin-op are crystal clear with many small details.  The Sony PlayStation can't even come close to the graphics power from 3dfx.  As a result, the heroes, and the majority of the enemies look like little semi-animated "blobs" on the screen.  I expected that this might be a problem for the home ports of the game, but I never expected it to be as severe as this.  There is hardly any detail to the enemies at all.  The knights look like white blobs.  The "undead" in the cemetery levels look like green blobs.  The Good Wizard in the tower looks like a yellow blob.

I mentioned above that some of the full-motion video was had to view because it was dark.  Well, there are many portions of this game that suffer from the same problem.  The castle area, and the Ice area seem OK.  Other places such as the mountain area, are extremely dark, and could not be played properly without cranking the brightness on my TV.

The backgrounds, textures, and fogging effects all look pretty good.  Fog in particular is used effectively in several portions of the game, and there are some great uses of fire that look very realistic.  Despite the "eye-candy" in the background, it just does not cover up the fact that anything in the foreground that is polygon-based is visually unappealing.  The PlayStation just can't keep the polygon count high enough to show fine details on the heroes, and the various enemies, hence the blob effect I mentioned above.  I imagine that the framerate probably suffered by attempting to make the characters more detailed, so the polygon count had to be scaled back.

Since I mentioned framerate, let me bring up another problem.  In the Gauntlet Legends coin-op (and the original Gauntlet/Gauntlet II coin-op games) you could have up to four players involved at once.   Since so many people can play simultaneously, the home port of Gauntlet Legends should be a fine candidate for a "party game."  However, the PSX version only supports two players.  This had me completely baffled for a while, as I know for a fact that the PlayStation can support up to four players through the use of a joystick port adapter.  Then it hit me...the problem probably has to do with the aforementioned polygons & framerate issues.  My guess is that the PlayStation just can't keep the framerate high with four players and all of those polygons.  This is pure conjecture on my part, as I do not have an answer from Midway as to why they did this.  (Note that the N64 and Dreamcast versions of Gauntlet Legends do support four players.)

Gauntlet Legends for the PlayStation takes several dramatic turns away from the coin-op.  In this version, you can take the gold that you earn, and but extra weapon power-ups, or food in the store located in the tower.   So, between levels, you can stop and turn in your gold to replenish your health, or stock up on other supplies you may need in your quest.  The photo on the left shows the various items that can be purchased in the store, including keys, magic, food, and several power-ups.

In the Gauntlet Legends coin-op, the only ways to replenish health was to find food hidden within the levels, or by shoving more quarters into the game.  Since you can't put quarters in your PSX to buy more health, the "store" concept seems to be a fair compromise.

Another way that the home translation is different from the Gauntlet Legends coin-op is with your characters.  Aside from the basic four heroes, there are some "hidden" characters for you to find.   There are some "hidden" levels within the game.  The four "hidden" levels do not have any enemies to fight.  Instead, you are given a task that must be completed in a certain amount of time.  For example, one "hidden" level consists of finding your way through a maze and grabbing all of the gold.  If you can get all of the gold before time runs out, one of the "hidden" characters is unlocked, and made available for you to use in the game.

At the end of each area, you must defeat the "boss."  Each "boss" is the toughest enemy that you will face for that particular area.  I have never been a big fan of the "boss" concept in video games.  I hate that you have to work and work to finish a level only to reach an enemy that can't be killed without spending an enormous amount of time getting the job done.  However, once I got my character built up a bit, I have found these "boss" enemies to be incredibly easy to defeat.

The third "boss" in the game is the "Green Plague" shown at the left.  Like most of the other enemies in the game, he is nothing more than a blob (albeit a bigger blob) with one blue eye and tusks.  He breathes a green poison mist towards you as you move around.  You must stay clear of the mist, and keep firing at him.  There is a health meter in the top portion of the screen that shows how much more damage you must do to kill the "boss."

The Plague was a breeze to kill.  In fact, he was almost too easy to kill.  If you take your time, and investigate the battleground, you will find several areas that are safe from the green mist.  Once you find one of those areas, don't move and keep attacking until he dies.  You won't even have to use any of your magic, or power-ups.  Just sit back and hold down the fire button.

Music and audio are a mixed bag.  The music itself is VERY good, although some of it seems a bit inappropriate to me.  For example, the early levels of the game make good use of classical music complete with French Horns and Tympani.  It feels extremely fitting for the medieval setting for the game.  Later on, in the cemetery level, the music has a haunting feel -- complete with an Organ, and some wolves howling in the background.  It is spooky, which is great for a cemetery complete with "undead" people attacking you.   Unfortunately, the tune has a bit of a "techno" feel.  The choice of instruments and sound effects was great, but why on earth did they do it using "techno" beat?!?  Also, I noticed some major problems with some of the music.  During certain tunes, there would be a distinguished "pop" noise at the end, and then silence for several seconds before starting the tune again.

Sound effects could be better, but there is some occasional brilliant use of sound in the game.  One of your enemies is called the "Suicider."  He is a little grunt with a red barrel of TNT strapped to his back.  He will run right up to you, and blow himself up...which kills him, and injures you.  He tends to come out of nowhere, but before he attacks, he lets out a loud roar.  It is a great (and scary) warning that you are about to take a serious hit in your health points.

One thing that the PSX version (and the Gauntlet Legends coin-op) is missing is the running dialog from the original Gauntlet/Gauntlet II coin-op games.  There is speech in this game, and it is used appropriately, so don't get me wrong.   It's just that the original Gauntlet/Gauntlet II coin-op games had some great things to say during your quest.  Remember when the game would say thinks like "Use keys to open doors" or "Warrior needs food!" 

I noticed some major problems with clipping.   There were a number of places where I was able to fire THROUGH SOLID WALLS and kill enemies on the other side.  I also had problems maneuvering around bridges, and other tight areas.   In this game, it is supposed to be impossible for you to fall off of a cliff, or bridge.  However, I noticed that it was possible for my character to walk off the side of a bridge, and hang suspended in mid air.

The controls were responsive, but again, maneuvering in tight places could be difficult at times.  The game works best of you have one of the Analog PSX controllers.

Gauntlet Legends does support saving your game to a PSX memory card.  You are allowed to save your game while in the Tower.  This only happens between levels.  This really annoyed me.  If you need to stop play in the middle of a level, you can forget about saving your game.  This gets to be a severe problem later in the game.  For example, the levels in the Ice area are made up of multiple stages.  Some of those levels can take 15-30 minutes to complete.  While I was testing the game for this review, I got about 75% through one of the enormous levels.   It was getting late, and I had to work the next day, so I wanted to stop and go to bed.  Since I had no way to save the game, I had to pause it and hope for the best.   Sure enough, when I got home from work the next day, the PlayStation had been shut off, and I lost 20 minutes of work.  AARRGGHH!! 

Conclusion:

If you have read this review, and feel that I was disappointed in this game, you are correct.  I was looking forward to a home version of Gauntlet Legends for quite some time.  I knew that the PSX would not equal the visuals of the coin-op game, but I expected that it might come reasonably close.   It didn't.  The basic gameplay from the coin-op is there, but it is buried under the polygon blobs.  I just did not have any fun moving my blob around while killing other blobs.

All of the Gauntlet coin-op games excelled at providing a rich multi-player experience.  Since the PSX version only supports two players, I feel that the gameplay suffers.

I have been a big fan of Midway's games (both home & coin-op) over the years, and it was hard for me to give this game such a poor rating.  I cannot even count how many hours I have spent playing (and enjoying) Midway titles.  In the end though, I have to be honest -- I feel that the PSX port of Gauntlet Legends fails in most every aspect except music, and as I noted above, the music has some problems as well. 

Since the coin-op is based around a 3dfx graphics chipset, I do not understand why Midway has not yet announced a version of this game for the PC.  I own Midway's near-perfect PC translation of their NFL Blitz 2000 coin-op.  After seeing how good NFL Blitz 2000 is on the PC, I'm sure that Gauntlet Legends for the PC could look and play just as good as NFL Blitz 2000.

If you are one of the many people who feel that the PSX is an aging & tired old console, games like Gauntlet Legends will confirm your thoughts.  I have not seen the N64 version of the game, so I cannot compare it.   However, I have seen some pre-release screen captures of the Dreamcast version, and it looks pretty darn good.  Time will tell if the Dreamcast version of Gauntlet Legends can out perform the PSX port.

For more information, visit the Gauntlet Legends
homepage at the Midway web site

http://www.midway.com