Rampage on the NES is an Awesome Arcade Port

Rampage is one of the first NES games I remember renting. I thought it was about Godzilla and King Kong; I was also six and couldn’t read the game description. This is an arcade game, and knowing the plot isn’t important.

As a kid who was into giant monster movies, I found this to be an amazing game! My friend Drew and I spent most of the night playing this game and trying to beat it. It was so much fun, and I remember laughing at all the cartoonish violence in the game.

As far as I know, neither of us knew it was based on an arcade game. Many games I enjoyed on the NES are ports of arcade games, but I wouldn’t find out about this until decades later. Rampage is one of the many games I looked for when I started collecting NES games.

Bally-Midway released the arcade game in 1986, and Data East published the NES port in 1988. The next installment in the series would be released another decade later. The NES Port only featured two of the monsters.

TLDR: Mindless Fun that can be a little Tedious.

Narrative

In the arcade game, the three kaiju were people who were mutated by Scum Labs. George is a scientist who became a giant gorilla due to experimental vitamins, Lizzie is a woman who turned into a giant lizard after swimming in toxic waste, and Ralph becomes a giant wolf creature after eating a hot dog laced with an enhanced food additive.

The three go on a rampage across the United States and parts of Canada. The game ends with the player destroying all the major cities. It is interesting that this game has a narrative ending because that wasn’t always the case for games released in the 1980s.

This brief story gets expanded in the later installments. This series has had a few reboots over the years. Each time, these original three characters would return, and experiments and a corrupt corporation would cause the mutations. It is really cool to see that commitment to the story.

The manual is available online. You shouldn’t need it, as the game has simple controls. The manual is so basic that it doesn’t even have the story in it.

Gameplay

Rampage is a single-screen arcade game in which the player destroys a group of buildings representing a city in the United States or Canada. Once the buildings are destroyed, the player moves on to the next location. There is an ending to the game, which is rare for most arcade games from the 1980s.

In the NES port, you can play as George or Lizzie. If you want to play as Ralph, then you need the arcade version or the Master System version. I had no idea there was a character named Ralph in the game.

While destroying buildings is your main goal, you’ll also have to fight a few enemies:

• Helicopters
• Soldiers
• Tanks

Those are the only enemies you’ll fight. The game also has civilians and cars that can be destroyed or eaten. It is everything you would expect from a giant monster movie.

The game contains health items and poison. They are easy to identify, so watch what you eat! The only other thing I want to mention is something I love about the NES port.

You have infinite continues in Rampage. This is awesome and something I wish other arcade ports would’ve done. This is only in the NES port. The only barrier to beating the game is if you get tired of playing.

There are no special moves in the game, which is a little disappointing. Having some kind of super attack or special move would make the gameplay more interesting and exciting. It would’ve been awesome to see Lizzie breathe fire or George use electricity like in King Kong vs Godzilla.

I love this game! It was the closest I got to playing a game like the Godzilla movies I watched as a kid. Much later on, I played the Godzilla games on the NES, but they never felt like one of the movies where giant monsters would fight and destroy a city.

Visuals

Rampage on the NES looks pretty good. It isn’t as detailed as the arcade or Master System versions of the game, but it looks good. If this had been ported in the early 1990s, it would’ve looked better.

The color palette is rather limited in this game. In the NES port, the buildings are less detailed and tend to be one color or shades of that color. Blue, Green, and Grey are repeated a lot in the game.

While your characters have normal-sized sprites, the people look tiny. The developers attempt to keep the monsters on scale with the rest of the world. It sometimes makes the vehicles look out of scale with the people.

It is easy to see the health items, people, poison, and other things you might find while bashing buildings. The damage you do to the buildings is rather boring. You just punch holes in them.

This is a little disappointing, especially if you went into the game thinking that Lizzie was Godzilla. The two monsters in the game don’t have superpowers or special moves, so you can only punch. This leads to some boring-looking damage.

The upside is that it is easy to see when a building is about to fall down. When this happens, you’ll have to jump off, or you will get hurt. I like that the game warns you about this.

Overall. I like the look of Rampage. The graphics remind me of when I was a kid, huddled around a CRT TV, waiting for a turn to smash some buildings. While it wasn’t exactly like watching a Godzilla movie, it was close enough for me.

8.5/10. This is one of the games I feel like I enjoy more than other people. It takes a while to beat, but it does something other arcade ports don’t. Rampage on the NES gives you the chance to win if you want to.

Conclusion

This is one of my favorite NES games. When I made my list of the Best NES Games, this was an easy one to add to it. I have a lot of great memories of playing this game.

I want to say that I first played this game at an after-school thing. It is one of those things that I don’t remember what it is or how to describe it. When I was a kid, one of the people in the neighborhood acted like a babysitter for a group of kids.

I’m not sure why my brother and I went there after school, and at some point, we stopped. The thing I remember the most was playing video games. We had about 30 minutes to an hour to play games there, and then we had to go outside to play.

It was a strange time, and I’m sure it is something that isn’t done anymore. I learned about a number of NES games from this place. I didn’t have a Nintendo Power subscription, and I didn’t learn about the magazine until I met my friend Drew. Hanging out with different people or seeing something at the rental store were the only ways I had to find out about the different NES games.

If you liked this post, check out my other posts about NES games, such as WWF WrestleMania or Stinger.