Rampage
Too Funny Game #5
Type of Game
Tutorials on building repairs, furniture installation and residents, but everything backwards, basically.
Release date on our machines
1987 on Atari ST, but it was so long ago that no one has a more accurate date.
Developer
Bally Midway Mfg Co., a large manufacturer of pinball machines and later arcade games, and then nothing.
Publisher
Activision, Inc., a big company, plain and simple
Rampage: not available anywhere! You shouldn't have destroyed all the servers installed in the buildings.
Far be it from me to repeat myself, but I want to say that Rampage had us having a blast on my best mate Randall Geyser's Atari STE. At the risk of sounding completely incoherent, I would even go so far as to say that it was perhaps as much fun as International Karate +. It also had the advantage of being less taxing on our brains than Lemmings, while allowing us to let off steam almost more than Double Dragon. And for a while, we needed our daily dose of building destruction every time we visited his house. No sense of serenity or completeness, otherwise. I don't think we ever finished it. Well, I don't think so, I'm convinced of it, since we weren't even trying to win, let alone get the highest score. We just let loose for five minutes before launching into battles with G.I. Joe against Boglins and other weird monsters. These invigorating sessions undoubtedly increased the force with which the famous plastic soldiers punched the Xenomorph figurines or Slimer from Ghostbusters (which really took a beating in every toy fight). And so, since we didn't really care that much, stopping playing it forever didn't traumatise us either.
Entertainment without a plan
But still, I feel like I've missed out on something when I think back on it every six and a half months. Unused gameplay features, levels that were rushed through or not tested at all... I hope to discover lots of new features that will make my nostalgia explode.
Laughing in blocks... of buildings
The intro scene begins, as if I were seeing it for the first time. Well, launch of the title screen, rather. Against the backdrop of a stunning night-time city skyline, depending on our tolerance for horror, we are presented with a giant lizard getting hit in the gut by a shell, and an equally huge wolf, fist raised and jaws bared, no doubt yelling at the person who fired the missile in question. In the middle, the word Rampage is written in huge yellow and red letters, with a hairy arm piercing through the P. Between the stubby fingers of this arm is a woman with her fists on her hips, looking moderately annoyed by her situation, wearing a rather skimpy red dress, and therefore perfectly suited to this kind of activity. But lol, the chick is captured like in King Kong and she's not even screaming in terror! It's so not believable! Apart from that detail, um... BUT IT'S AWESOME!
Randall didn't lie to me, this image alone is pretty heavy stuff, especially for a six or seven-year-old kid who grew up watching Sly and the Governator flex their muscles. We quickly learn that the reptile is called Lizzy, the dog is called Ralph, and the arm belongs to a big primate with the sweet name of George. The woman in the dress is called Denise, but that's my invention. We quickly move on to the lore, which explains why these three aberrations exist: human beings who have mutated as a result of scientific experiments gone wrong. A different experiment for each of them, but at a similar time, because why not? We love coincidences like that. As in IK+, you can play with one, two or three players. And unlike IK+, you have to blow up buildings to win.
You climb on top of them and hit them in lots of places to knock them down, then you move on to the next level, and so on, perpetuating the long chain of gameplay that is a tad repetitive. Many critics emphasise this point. Well, we didn't have time to get bored, we died before that. Of course, the other people, the ones who haven't mutated, defend themselves a little. At least the ones who work in the army. Each stage sends us more and more helicopters, soldiers equipped with guns, sticks of dynamite or bombs, tanks... in fact, I know that our demolition company is based in the United States, but there are still a lot of armed individuals in these buildings! And they shamelessly shoot at us too! It's not easy to avoid everything that comes at us, with our big ten-metre-high carcass to carry around.
We always ended up getting buried under bullets and rockets. To be honest, I found it really hard pretty quickly. To think that there were 128 stages, each representing an American city (the names of which vary depending on the port, with some even being exported to Canada), and that you have to play through each one six times to actually finish Rampage! At least that's how it was on Arcade. Apparently, the developers claimed that no one had ever seen the end of it. Well, yes, it's easy to design a game that's impossible to finish when you use this kind of loop. A Super Ghouls'n Ghosts that's three times longer and has to be replayed fifteen times? No one finishes that either. Nor do they finish R-Type Delta. But in those two, you have to accomplish the feat of completing them even once. At least in Rampage, you can fight back and blow up just about anything with a single punch.
Apart from buildings, they take a little longer, so don't overdo it. But destroying a chopper that halved our health bar is still a thrill. Crushing two tanks, a tram and five cars without getting hit once is even better. And then we eat all the time, mostly people calling for help from their shabby flats, at least those who don't have their super golden bullet card from the NRA. They give us a little health when we bite them, ‘Thank you for your service’. By the way, the woman in red on the home screen is one of the potential victims. In the arcade version, I saw her beat up fat George and run away while she was trapped in his hand, ready to be devoured; I had misjudged her, with her make-up and cleavage. She was actually just angry, and quite capable of defending herself. Getting a lesson in feminism from a 1986 game in which big monsters tear down buildings for fun, it hurts my deconstruction.
That said, I don't think her cousin in the Atari ST version was doing so well, which is where my prejudices come from. Except that one of the monsters you play was a woman before being exploited by crooked lab technicians! So, is Rampage an ally of the cause or what? I'll leave the answer to others. But let's get back to the topic at hand. Who else can we snack on? The mutants themselves! When their health bar drops to zero, they revert to human form and try to slip quietly off the screen. They hold their crotches, since they're naked, lmaooooo. All the more reason to eat them, right? They should have just worn underpants from the same brand as the clothes found in Dragon Ball. Do people end up naked after taking three Final Flashes in Dragon Ball Super Butoden 2? Never! Come on, get in line, you so-called woke video game! I didn't mention it, but absolutely everything I just said made us laugh hysterically.
What else did we laugh about? All the items we found by breaking the windows of skyscrapers: televisions, for example, which you weren't supposed to bite into, or you'd get a nasty shock. Bathtubs, I think, which immobilised you for a few seconds while you managed to chew them (you'd have to be stupid to confuse a bathtub with a sugar-coated almond). Finally, other things that earned you points. Just points, or life too, I can't remember. But there were fewer of them than in the arcade version, I'm almost certain. Finally, you could trip over pools filled with water. As if there were outdoor swimming pools that took up the entire width of an avenue, right? So there you have it, we've reached the point where pretty much everyone agrees. It quickly becomes repetitive. So what did we do to revive interest in the game? Well, we beat each other up. Yeah, like in Streets of Rage or Golden Axe; not to mention the even more hilarious variation of knocking down the building the other person was standing on. We lost even faster, but the ratio of speed of defeat to intensity of laughter swung heavily in our favour.
Better than the arcade !
Rampage has achieved the remarkable achievement of offering music on Atari ST, even though the arcade version does not! We owe this miracle to David Whittaker, a big thank you to this composer who was very active in the 1980s and early 1990s on the most popular computers of the time. He is responsible for the soundtracks of Barbarian, Ghosts and Goblins on Amstrad CPC, SimCity on Atari ST, the versions of Tetris on old computers, as well as the sound ports of Bubble Bobble and Golden Axe. So, he only released one composition for Rampage, let's not get too excited. Not the best choice to break up the monotony of the gameplay, at first glance. Still, this music rocks pretty hard. The long siren that rises in the high notes at the beginning, then the dramatic melody that kicks in, accompanied by horrible shrill trills that I've learned to love, nostalgia helping (nostalgia doing all the work would be more accurate). Yeah... as it loops endlessly, with no break other than the screen indicating the next city to destroy, I wonder if we didn't stop playing because of this piece, even before we used up all our lives. It must have driven us crazy, especially in the middle of a sugar rush, after eating a snack consisting solely of eighteen chocolate Prince biscuits. No wonder our toys always ended up with torn-off limbs.
Solid as the Rock
I think if I played Rampage again today, I wouldn't last more than five minutes. Just like back then, except that I wouldn't go and torture my G.I. Joes afterwards (for the sole reason that I don't have them anymore). It's one of those games that I'd rather leave as a dusty floppy disk in the back of my mind than risk ruining it forever by playing it again. Thanks to my fond memories, I chose to watch the 2018 film on a plane journey, and nothing else. Throughout, I searched for references to the video game with a bewildered grin, almost indifferent to the mediocrity of the scenes unfolding before my eyes.
Luckily, Dwyane Johnson makes it somewhat watchable. Sorry, mate, but your character, as beefy as he is, wouldn't have lasted ten seconds on Atari. We would have beaten you up like the others, Randall and me. Denise too, she would have kicked your arse. Nevertheless, the franchise has spawned no fewer than seven games in total, the last one released in the same year as The Rock's blockbuster, as part of the promotion. I dare to hope that the mechanics have evolved a little since 1986, otherwise it would be a lot of running around in circles. I won't bother finding out, both for fear of wasting my time and of making myself want to try one or two (and thus wasting even more time). But I salute the self-sacrifice of those who have tested all the instalments. I'll stop there, before I change my mind and consider them to be complete lunatics.
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