Rampart on Super Nintendo is worth setting up your cannons for

destructoid.com:

I don’t have a great many video game-related stories to tell of my dad. He took the time to join in with the rest of the family back in the day, but he was (and basically still is) the primary breadwinner. So, I don’t have any stories of getting deep into co-op or trying to topple a game together, he just didn’t have as much time as my mother did to spend with my sister and me.

I still have some great memories with him, like when mom went out of town and we rented Super Dodge Ball back in the depths of my long-term storage. There was also the time that he was playing Super Pinball: Behind the Mask, and I caught a recording of his losing profanity on my Yak Bak. The swear drop stayed on that little device until time and a finite battery erased it.

But my favorite is his brief addiction to 1992’s Rampart on the SNES. My parents had a TV in their room (which wasn’t common in the ‘90s), and he hooked the SNES up to it so he could play it at night. I’d find myself falling asleep to the sound of him furiously mashing buttons in the next room. He could never beat that Kraken. Well, all these years later, I beat the Kraken, so this one’s for you, dad.

Rampart was a 1991 Atari arcade game. In something that feels like a precursor to the tower defense genre, it was your goal to keep your castle walls maintained using blocks while also fending off invading ships. You kept going until your base was finally overrun, at which point it was time to feed the machine another quarter.

The multi-player was particularly interesting, however. Up to three players blast at each other’s castles, then try to repair before time runs out each turn. Whoever can’t put a complete wall up around the citadel loses. Only a few ports preserved the