MAME -> Gauntlet II

Welp, now that I've conquered Gauntlet 1 on Mame... and with a rather low per-coin average to show for it... there's clearly only one thing to do: move on to the sequel, Gauntlet II!  But I can tell you right now that this outing is by far much less fun than the original.  It's kind of like what happened to Farmville.  Too many new features, and plus they went all corporate when Lady Gaga got on board.  Reminds me!  I need to harvest my metallic unicorns in Gagaville.  Plus, there's a lot less of the potions.  And rightfully so, in a way, because being able to kill all those angry Grunts in one fell swoop is so much easier than slowly marching through them.
There's all kinds of new features, so the game makers did their homework.  Fake exits, moving exits... a big dragon that shoots fire at you.  All kinds of stuff.  The thief is trickier, and he has a new counterpart: a mugger.  I don't think I'll be able to survive 1,000 levels of this one.
Now, for those of you who don't know, the Gauntlet games are based on an old game for the Atari 8-bit computers called Dandy by... Pale Face Johnson?  I'm sorry, it's John Palevich.  John Howard Palevich...  or Jack, either one.  He had to sue Atari for copyright infringement due to the wildly popular success of the Gauntlet series.  But I think I understand the mentality behind Gauntlet.  The guys at Atari, well, some of them wanted to bring Palevich in as a partner, but the other side won out, of course, saying "So you're telling me, that we're going to let this guy... he's not in the Coin-Op division.  He's NOT EVEN AN ATARI EMPLOYEE... and we're just going to let this guy just kind of... breeze on in here into the halls of Atari.  This n00b, this wide-eyed innocent is just going to waltz on in here and grab the keys to the kingdom?  I don't think so!  How's he going to handle all these new features we're going to put into Gauntlet?  He'll go into sensory overload!  He won't be able to handle it!  SCREW him!  Plus, he'll probably say at every turn, 'This is MY baby, and you're not going to change ONE THING to it.'  So, I reiterate: S C R E W him!"  That's according to the court transcripts, anywho.