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''Gauntlet'' is a fantasy-themed hack and slash arcade game by Atari Games.〔 Released in October 1985, Atari ultimately sold a total of 7,848 ''Gauntlet'' video game arcade cabinets. It is noted as being one of the first multi-player dungeon crawl arcade games.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=GDC Vault - Classic Game Postmortem: Gauntlet )〕〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Gauntlet Postmortem by Ed Logg )〕 ==Gameplay== The players, up to four at once in the arcade version, select among four playable fantasy-based characters: The Warrior, Wizard, Valkyrie, or Elf. Each character has his or her own unique strength and weaknesses. For example, the Warrior is strongest in hand-to-hand combat, the Wizard has the most powerful magic, the Valkyrie has the best armor and the Elf is the fastest in movement.〔 Upon selecting a playable character, the gameplay is set within a series of top-down, third-person perspective mazes where the object is to find and touch the designated ''exit'' in every level. An assortment of special items can be located in each level that increase player's character's health, unlock doors, gain more points and magical potions that can destroy all of the enemies on screen. The enemies are an assortment of fantasy-based monsters, including ghosts, grunts, demons, lobbers, sorcerers and thieves. Each enters the level through specific generators, which can be destroyed. While there are no bosses in the game, the most dangerous enemy is "Death", who can not only drain a character's health, but is difficult to destroy.〔 As the game progresses, higher levels of skill are needed to reach the exit, with success often depending on the willingness of the players to cooperate by sharing food and luring monsters into places where they can be engaged and slaughtered more conveniently.〔 While contact with enemies reduces the player's health, health also slowly drains on its own, thus creating a time limit. When a character's health reaches zero, that character dies. The character can be revived in place with full health by spending a game credit (i.e. inserting a coin) within a certain short time window after it died. This allows even the least proficient players to keep playing indefinitely, if they are willing to keep inserting coins. Aside from the ability to have up to four players at once, the game is also noted for the narrator's voice, which was produced by a Texas Instruments TMS5220C speech chip.〔〔 The TMS5220C speech was encoded by Earl Vickers.〔 The narrator (voiced by Ernie Fosselius)〔 frequently makes statements repeating the game's rules, including: "Shots do not hurt other playersyet", "Remember, don't shoot food!", "Elfshot the food!", and "Warrior needs foodbadly!" Occasionally, the narrator will comment on the battle by saying, "I've not seen such bravery!" or "Let's see you get out of here!" When a player's "life force" points fell below 200, the narrator states, "Your life force is running out", "Elf needs food", or "Valkyrie ... is about to die!". To accommodate up to four players, the control panel is wider than other standard uprights. Each player has a joystick and two buttons, one for "Fire" (ranged attack) and one for "Magic". The Magic button also starts the game. After ''Gauntlets release, other games started using this design, so it was a popular conversion target for newer games after it had its run. It is possible to play the original version of the game with a hypothetically unlimited amount of time on one credit, especially with the Warrior and Wizard. A ROM update was released, reducing the "extra shot power" and "extra shot speed" powerup bonus for Warrior and Wizard, and adding a new points-based difficulty counter to the game. The difficulty counter makes the game more difficult, in 16,384-point steps, which removes more designated food from the levels, and made the monsters respawn faster. However, this means that on the default game difficulty of 4, it is almost impossible to pass levels 1–7 without dying, and level 4 was designed so that some of the food drops would block the monsters from swarming the player. This is because the game removed some of the "default" food for playing solo; on difficulty level 0, at least one food placement was removed from every single level (at low scores), and on difficulty 4, two or three food drops were removed. This greatly increases the game's difficulty, unless the machine is set to difficulty 0. Instead, the game gives bonus food for three or four players playing together. (Three players gave all of the default food, while four gave extra food in random locations.) This was later refined for ''Gauntlet 2'', so that Valkyrie and Elf would not receive extra food removal penalties, and only Warrior and Wizard would receive the extra penalties. Valkyrie and Elf would receive all of the default food that the current difficulty setting plus points difficulty scaling would allow, although Valkyrie would receive the fewest food penalties at higher (non-point based) difficulty levels. Elf would get some food removed at difficulty levels 6 and 7. The game still gave extra food for three or four players playing together. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Gauntlet (1985 video game)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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