Rampart (arcade, Atari Games 1989), full game on Medium difficulty (5 credits)

Rampart was designed by the team of John Salwitz and Dave Ralston, who also made Cyberball, and published by Atari Games right at the tail end of their third classic period, that I tend to call their "silver age."* I think it's among Atari Games' finest work, and it got over a dozen ports to various platforms, some of them very strange (Famicom and Gameboy), some of them classics in their own right (especially the SNES version).


(* Their early "bronze" age contained classics like Pong, Sprint and Tank; their heyday was their "golden" age, which was Asteroids through to just before Marble Madness; their "silver" age was Marble Madness to Rampart or thereabouts.)



I previously posted a full game on Easy, which is still a challenge, although one I can win more often than I lose. Medium, however, is much harder. You only get five or six credits to finish the game (details below).


When you continue in arcade Rampart, the game gets easier in a number of ways:
Your cannons get a permanent powerup that lasts the rest of the game. The first two continues increase cannonball speed and change cannon appearance. The fourth and fifth decrease the number of shots it takes to sink ships by one each. (Important caveat: if you make it to the final level with max strength cannons, the game will actually downgrade your cannons by one level, but will also grant you one additional continue chance--if you can pay for it.)
The number of ships in the first round are less (how much less depends, oddly, on how quickly you select your starting castle!)
And, importantly, fiery craters will disappear after two round instead of three for a while.


I do not know the exact criteria to advance a level, but most of the time it seems to be something like: if you can destroy half of the remaining fleet (including those waiting in reserve) in one round, the enemy will give up. Meaning, if you only have a few ships left to sink, but can't capture enough cannons to score a decisive round against them, you can find yourself in a death struggle, as you sink only one or two each round, but the stragglers refuse to give up. I've lost more than one game due to this. You can take advantage of it too though. In this game at the very end, one of my remaining castles has become unsaveble, so I build a couple of extra cannons that I wouldn't ordinarily, and wipe out the double-sailed ships at the opposite end of the island to push past the finish line.


Shoutout to Alex Rudis, aka LX Rudis, who did the music for the SNES port of Rampart and several other classic video game scores.