Rampage Finale

    Hello everyone and welcome to third and final blog looking at games in Rampage series. To this point we've looked at the series entertaining arcade debut along with it's remake, Rampage World Tour, and Rampage 2: Universal Tour. While I find all three games to be good mindless fun, they are by no means without it's flaws. Critically, the games all pretty much reviewed as average games. Nothing special, but not bad either. After Rampage 2 attempted to breathe some new life and features into the series, there were two more games that did things their own way.

****SPOILERS AHEAD*****

    Rampage through time was published by Midway Games and released on the Sony Playstation in North America on June 9th, 2000. The story of the game picks up soon after the events of Rampage 2: Universal Tour. With the mutants effectively stranded on the moon, Scumlabs develops a time machine to help with the cleanup effort. When they use it though, the mutants manage to get back to Earth and are joined by yet another mutant, Harley the warthog. The mutants manage to enter the time machine and well.... travel through time destroying the past, present, and future. Eventually the monsters are again defeated, but not after an entire timeline has been destroyed. 

    Gameplay wise, there really is not much new here. You're still going around eating people and smashing pretty much anything else in sight for a time.... Okay so I lied. There is a major gameplay change and it is something that I feel kills this game outright. After destroying a few cities you are forced to do a minigame. Now this is not something new as the previous installment also had minigames but here is the difference. If you are playing single player, the AI will actually control two other mutants. So in each level there are three mutants on the screen. You would think the AI would work with you to help bring destruction through time, but no, they mostly go after you and each other. To make matters all the more frustrating is that you have to beat them in the minigames. If you do not place first in a mini game, it is game over. The minigames themselves have changed too. In Rampage 2 you may need to eat more people or destroy a building faster than you opponent. This actually had some strategy behind it as the mutants all had their different stats. If you were playing single player the minigames were basically a way to net health, powerups, or lives. In Rampage through time though, the minigames are basically old arcade games with Rampage characters. I mean literally you compete in a game of Pacman with Rampage character heads. I don't even know what else to type about that. On the plus side they did add some more moves to the mutants. On the downside, none of them accomplish anything that a basic punch or kick can't do.

    The problems continue in the sound department. By that I mean not much has changed. Honestly this time. It's basically the same tired sound effects from the previous two games. The music isn't anything special either for what that's worth. By the third console installment in the series you would think we'd have more sound effects than the same woman screaming, the same man screaming, and the same explosion noises. Lastly, the graphics department became stagnant as well. The game does not improve upon the graphics of Universal Tour. In fact, they may have even taken a small step back. No improvements have been made on any backgrounds, foregrounds, etc. Personally, this doesn't hurt the game much for me, but I understand where the frustration comes from.

    Rampage through time is the low point in this series for me. I was able to enjoy the previous three games, but just could not get into this one. I blame the vast majority of that on the single player problems. Having two AI controlled mutants that exist largely to mess with you is just frustrating. There is nothing fun about it. Yes knocking your friends off buildings and beating them up is fun. Getting knocked off of buildings and getting beaten up by your friends is fun. Having that happen by a computer, not so much. There's a charm to couch multiplayer. You can trash talk and have fun with it. Against a computer, you just get frustrated. That frustration peaks when a minigame loss equals game over. Imagine playing a 50 turn game in Mario Party, getting to turn 49, losing your first minigame and getting a game over. That's Rampage Through Time. The game had potential, but a series of blunders and I'd say a lack of common sense doomed the game to be the worst in the series.

    The last game in the Rampage series before it took the leap into more modern gaming consoles was Rampage Puzzle Attack. The game is similar to other Drop Mania games that came out around that time. It was published by Midway Games and released in North America on November 29th, 2001. The gameplay is simple, drop two colored blocks at a time. As like colors join together they form a larger block. Eventually you'll get a detonate block of that color that will remove the big block. What do the Rampage characters have to do with any of this? Nothing. You pick one and it hangs out on the side of your screen and will punch the puzzle board when you detonate something. It's a fun puzzle game, but can and does exist without the random Rampage mutants.

    It is funny to me that this game is sometimes looked upon as the best of the Rampage series considering it's not a true Rampage game at all. All in all it is a fun puzzle game, but that's about all to say about it.

    So with that we have reached the end of our journey through the Rampage games. The series would not end with Puzzle Attack as Rampage Total Destruction would come out on the Wii, Gamecube, and PS2 in 2006. That game would see mixed reviews, as is the case with pretty much all of them. Again, the lack of things to do outside of just smashing buildings and stuff led to many complaints about the game. Now in 2018. Silence. No new Rampage games have come out since 2006. Will that change with the Rampage movie just over the horizon? Who knows. For now though Rampage will live on in arcades featuring games from a time not forgotten at all. It will live on on both the Nintendo 64 and Sony Playstation. It will kind of live on on the Game Boy Advance as well. At the end of the day though, no matter what game you look at, it lives in the past. Perhaps it is best kept there. Personally I wouldn't mind seeing a remake with updated graphics and sound, but by no means do I find it needed. 

Final Thoughts: Rampage as a whole is a lot of fun for a while. It is good mind numbing experience that allows you to just destroy everything. It is best experienced with friends. As a series it has alright highs and low lows. All that said, Rampage is a series that I will continue to revisit as it always has that fun classic arcade feel without needing to dedicate too many quarters or practice to really enjoy. Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed this trip through the Rampage series!