Blast from the Past: The Rambo Game on MSX
By danderma | May 8, 2012
In the 80’s two things were a big hit: Rambo and the MSX. It is no wonder that MSX had a Rambo game back then and given that I was -and still is- a Rambo fan I loved the game so much. So much in fact that I think the cartridge was fried from being overly used and it stopped working a short while after we bought it. 7safa 3leeh 
The game was so primitive yet so much fun and not that hard to play at all. In fact I think it was one of the shortest MSX games ever! You could finish it in half an hour or so.
Rambo come with a knife by default but goes around killing the blue guys and collecting weaponry. A grenade, a machine gun, a bazooka if I am not mistaken, an arrow with some bows. Then throughout the game he can change between the weapons which back then was something very astonishing.
Rambo also gets bitten by a snake at some point and must rush to the hospital for some medicine or else he’ll die, the ominous and repeptitive soundtrack doesn’t change however throught the ordeal.
Rambo not only walked and killed, he could ride boats and even drove a red jeep. When finally he could free his mentor he even rides a helicopter to take him away for safety, which is the end of the game. But…
You see when we were young we always got to the helicopter part, but then the helicopter gets hit and falls down and we would lose My dad tried everything to move the helicopter out of the firing’s way but it was no use. Then he even went and bought us our first joystick thinking we could use it to steer the helicopter, it was no use, the game was fried, and we gave up.
Twenty years later, I figured out why we didn’t win. We should have bombed the thing that hit, forgot its name in English. In the picture below that fired at the helicopter. A laser beam weapon or something.
I bombed it, I got Rambo into the helicopter, and I finished the game successfully! I almost cried from happiness, it took me 20 long years but I finally did finish the game, lol :p
Do you remember the Rambo game on MSX? It was one of my favorite favorite games ever!
First off all, I would like to thank your for your lovely posts. Your blog to be is a necessary need along with mobiles and coffee. Yes i do remember the Rambo game. I was one of my fav too. Also if i remember clearly in the final bass battle no bazooka or gun will work on him. So we have to simply use the Rambo Knife to kill it and win the battle
Thank you so much for ur kind words regarding my blog! You truly made my day
loooooool sure I remember that game
What’s with the childhood old memories
You can say I am still in touch with my childhood. I tend to escape there when stress is too much to bear.
When we’re young we wish to be old so badly
now we wish for the opposite and to be young again lool
Childhood our main concern is our happiness
Believe it or not I was like Peter Pan, I never wanted to grow up at all
you really make me feel old sometimes :S
If you were around in the 80’s then khala9 you are deemed old :p
get an emulator, you can play it on your computer and relive the memories :))
Just last year I played rambo, el ba6reeq, the castle (princess)
I recommend Blue MSX (emulator)
Where do you think I got those screen shots from 😉 Blue MSX is a memory saver indeedn.
The game actually has 3 endings; 1 good one and 2 bad ones.
If you forget about the cannons, you get gunned down, as is what happened when you first played the game.
However, if you do take out the cannons, but forget about rescuing the ‘V.I.P.’, you’ll still get a bad ending, namely this one: http://www.vgmuseum.com/end/msx/a/ram_2.htm
If you destroy the cannons, *and* rescue the V.I.P., then you get the good ending: http://www.vgmuseum.com/end/msx/a/ram.htm
There is a third ending! Must try that one and see!
It can be finished in less than 2 minutes: http://tasvideos.org/1674M.html
I never really played it much, though.
2 minutes? Nice! But playing it from the very begining while trying to figure out your way around was very exciting. Especially when bitten by the snake and having to run for the hospital, figuring that out took quite sometime!