Reviews
Game
Gauntlet started in the arcade and was ported to several systems including the NES. It was one of Tengen's early games, back when they were still making them illegally with their NES lockout chip work-around. You and a friend are able to choose a hero (barbarian, valkyrie, elf, or wizard) to recover the sacred orb that was stolen by Morak the Outsmarter, thus saving all of Rendar.
To do this, you control your character through 100 maze-like stages full of ghosts, grunts, demons, sorcerers, and various other nasties. The top-down view does make it easier to navigate the stages, but your life is constantly ticking away and each time an enemy hits you it drains even more. Food can be collected to recover life and potions can be used to wipe out entire screens worth of monsters. As you the game progresses the enemies get harder and the mazes become more devious.
If you play the game enough you'll be able to figure out the secrets of making it to the final level. Of course, doing this is a serious chore. You need to memorize all the hidden exits to get to the secret rooms, and the secret rooms have hidden clues for the vault combination. If you missed any of the secret rooms or their clues on your voyage to stage 100 you may as well give up because you can't beat the game without them all. If you've played long enough and memorized all the game's secrets then you just may make it into the vault where you will be faced with a terrible beast of a boss.
Music
Hal Conan created a very nice soundtrack for Gauntlet. The music labeled Stages 1 and Title are both based on classical organ music. The other tracks may be as well, but that needs to be verified. There aren't that many songs, but they're still fun to listen to. Also, there is a short fanfare that doesn't seem to be played anywhere in the game.
Ripping
Ripping NES music is a very arduous process that is beyond the scope of this site.
Links
Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauntlet_%28arcade_game%29
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