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Wednesday, March 28, 2018

Gauntlet - Sega Master System [002] Shortplay PlayThru Levels 1-26


Title Screen
NOTE: A trainer was used for making this capture.

Gauntlet is a port of the Atari Games 1985 arcade title, which was ported to many other systems.

I remember when Gauntlet was new, and a local Time Out arcade had the cabinet.  Similar to Street Fighter 2 a few years later, people were lined up to feed quarters into the machine to get their 2000 health.  Back then, the Wizard was not too popular, since you could only have 1 of each class in the original game, so typically that controller on the arcade cabinet was empty.
Gameplay

I picked this cartridge up mainly from my interest in seeing how the port was done to the SMS. This title was one of many that did not make it to the US for release.

Treasure Room
Gauntlet is one of the early titles I had on the Atari ST, and I will dwell more into that story once I actually do the Atari ST capture.

On the SMS, this port of Gauntlet seems like a decent effort.  It is 2 players only, which is not surprising as the SMS did not have hardware to support more controllers like the Sega Genesis had.  Most of the digitized speech is absent; only the initial welcome is there.  Excellent effort was made with the other sound effects.
Game Insert

The graphics look good; color is nice, and not too far off from the arcade.  Graphics-wise, it was a very good conversion.  I am not a fan of how the score bar was handled, but it does work as needed.  I would have just preferred that the developer took the same care with that piece as they did with the mazes.  Overall, it is a pretty faithful port of the arcade.  I would think the SMS could have handled all of the voice samples, although that may have increased the size of the cartridge, so those cuts might have been due to a financial concerns.  Controls work very well.  One benefit this port has over the Atari ST version I grew up with is that the SMS has 2 buttons, one for fire and one for potions, not the single button on the ST controls, where potions would need to be activated by hitting a key on the keyboard.
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Capture info -

This gameplay was captured on February 11, 2018.

Game was played on a Sega Master System Model 1 equipped with a FM Expansion Board from Tim Worthington
A HD Retrovision Component cable was used, connected to an OSSC 1.6 (processing the video in Line4x mode), with the output being captured by a Startech USB3HDCAP.

Video was edited with Shotcut.

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