I used to visit arcades fairly regularly.

Whether they were full on arcades like Nickle City or they were the arcades stuck onto the movie theater like some sort of flashy tumor, I was there quite often. I can recall playing House of the Dead and numerous other games within them, but perhaps the pinnacle of arcade gaming memories for me lies in playing Rampage World Tour with my mother. My mother, the few good memories I have, used to really like video games. She really liked Pitfall, Space Invaders, and she really loved Rampage. We would often go to where the Rampage cabinet would be and we would play it all afternoon.

The thing is, in hindsight, I don't think the name was so much ironic as it was more foreshadowing for the years to come with her in my life.

I used to have bad anger issues. So bad that I would tear my entire bedroom apart, hurt myself and more. A lot of this was because of poor emotional regulation due to autism but also because of how I was reacting to how my family treated me, which was not well. These days I more or less have my rampaging anger under control, but my mother...while she never got violent, but any means, she still rampaged psychologically. Perhaps this is why she liked the game, as did I, because it allowed us to get our frustrations out in a non violent manner. Video games became an outlet for our bottled up emotions, and as I got older, this would only become more and more the case.

I don't think I've played a Rampage game in 15 years or more now, but I still remember playing it with fond memories, despite what it was attached to. At one point, I even owned one of them for Gameboy and I loved that one just as much as the arcade versions. Rampage is a great game. Even with my association with it being somewhat negative, that doesn't put the game in a poor light. The idea of playing as a destructive enormous monster destroying a city is nothing short of a power fantasy, but a delightful one at that. It's got a great sense of humor, the character designs are top notch and the visuals were really solid even for the year it was released. It's a shame that when they finally made a film based on it, they made everything hyper realistic instead of just making the monsters goofy. What a missed opportunity.

I still get angry, don't get me wrong, but I don't get the kind of angry that I used to. And I certainly never got the kind of angry that my parents got. The yelling I endured just outside my bedroom door throughout my childhood was brutal, and I hated listening to it. The combative attitude only lead me to believe, for a good while, that unless your relationship was somewhat fraught with peril of one kind or another, that it wasn't a relationship worth having. That something was wrong if you weren't actively aggravated towards one another constantly. I thankfully unlearned this by the time I got my first girlfriend, but it still is an issue I have at times where I feel like, unless I'm being pitted against someone, that I'm not actually alive. That, to really exist, I have to fight for my existence.

A sick thing for a child to learn.

I've often thought about loading up Rampage on an emulator of one kind or another, but the thing is...I don't think I could ever relive what it was, and that whether I played it trying to relive that or not, it'd dilute one of the few good memories I have of my mother. That was a special moment in time, tied to a certain game in time, and that to go back to it would feel almost disingenuous. Sometimes, late at night, I'll cry because I so badly wish I had a mother who loved me, who didn't verbally abuse me, who didn't throw things at me or belittle me. But that was the mother I had, and while she rampaged, I persevered and overcame. She might've been the monster on a destructive path, leaving nothing but pain in her wake, but I was the one building left standing thanks to a solid foundation. The one thing she couldn't knock down, despite all her efforts and attempts.

These days I don't like fighting games or games where you just rain utter devastation down on things, and this is perhaps why. Because when your entire life is spent fighting, it's painful to do the same thing in your escapism. These days I do my best not to fight with my girlfriend, and not to get angry at every little inconsequential thing even if it feels like it's making my life harder on purpose. I still rage at video games, but that comes with the territory, I feel.

I just know that, at a certain point, I realized rampaging might get the job done, sure, but it'll be a poor job at best, and nobody will want to work with you after the fact.

And these days I sometimes wish I could go back to that arcade, any arcade, and be a little girl again and play Rampage with my mother. But those days are gone, and so is whatever relationship we might've had. It's funny, in the aftermath of a disaster, usually people try to move on and forget it, but here I am, romanticizing utter devastation through a video game because it brought my mother and I closer for a little while. I liked the monsters on the screen, completely unaware of the monsters in my life.

So take it from me...childhood is not supposed to be combative.

It only creates another monster in the long run.

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After spending the past hour and a half playing Rampage World Tour on the Gameboy Color, I have to ask myself the question: why does this exist? I mean, Rampage is a cool arcade game and has one of the best video game ideas ever. Someone out there thought “what if I could play as Godzilla and destroy some cities?” That is such a cool idea and the arcade succeeded on realizing it pretty well… the Gameboy Color however, could not.

It is the same exact 2 minute gameplay loop over and over, which is one of my biggest internal conflicts. Pacman and Galaga are the same 2 minute loop on repeat, but they feature some of the best 2 minutes in gaming. I just don’t think that this is super fun.

You get to choose one of three monsters (George, Lizzie, or Ralph) and then you are sent to different cities and you need to destroy every building in order to pass the level. It is usually pretty easy to destroy a building. You just need to climb up 1 side, punch out a section of every floor, and ground pound the rooftop. The conflict arises when you are trying to do that while helicopters are shooting, tanks are launching missiles, random citizens are throwing bombs, jetpack dudes have flamethrowers, and giant robots mowing you down. As I am writing this it sounds pretty chaotic and fun! Its just that it isn’t done very well.

The controls are stiff, sluggish, and somewhat unresponsive. There were many times where I wanted to jump to another building, but the controls failed and I had to fall all the way to ground level. The game also doesn’t tell you ANYTHING about what you are doing or what is happening around you. I spent my first 10 minutes just figuring out how to destroy my first building. It wasn’t until 20ish levels in that I discovered a significant amount of game mechanics. Here’s some stuff I figured out:

STUFF I FIGURED OUT ABOUT THIS GAME:

• You can start climbing a building while in the air by pressing up at the normal location
• The signs that block your path will electrocute you if they are lit up, wait until they are dark
• Once the jetpack guys start shooting they will not move (so make them shoot where you don’t need to be)
• You can go back down a building from the top
• Buildings 3 wide and more than 6 floors tall need 1 floor hit from the second side. (it does not matter which floor)
• Destroy the stupid tanks. Drop what you are doing and kill them before they kill you.
• Get the powerup that looks like the mathematical symbol for a line segment. It lets you destroy buildings super fast.

Honestly, it felt like I was in the wild west here. I definitely did enjoy learning the game. I just wish the levels were more varied and that the controls were better. Also, apparently the different monsters are supposed to have different stats, but they all felt the same. That may just be me though.

Overall, no do not play this on the Gameboy Color. Please play this game in the arcade or on the PS1. This is really a washed down version of the classic and isn’t worth your time. (2/10)

Lol wow… crazy that I think Barbie’s Ocean Discovery is a better game than this.

I ended up playing 50 levels across all 3 characters and it took me 1 hour 46 minutes and 22 seconds.