Ghosts 'N Goblins

The Good
Everyone knows arcade Ghosts 'N Goblins. If for nothing else, then the legendary difficulty - despite being a good game, it was deliberately designed to mess with the player!

The port done by Elite in 1986, is a classic on its own right for C64 users. While it is a very cut back version, I'd say it is neatly compact. Still, very fun to play.

What especially deserves highlight is the soundtrack. Mark Cooksey put just one tune in the game, an original composition that wasn't in the arcade, but what a spooky and cool tune it is! Can't get enough of it!

The Bad
The jumping physics is very wonky. Plus the platform ledges are very sharply and suddenly cut off - you don't even step onto the last pixel and you already fall. Lots of cheap deaths because of these.

There is only the first 4 levels in here. The 3rd and 4th levels are mixed up compared to the arcade. At the end of the 4th level, you just find the princess, and that's it, happy ending.

The Bottom Line
This was the C64 game we probably played the most back in the day, despite barely ever getting trough the first half of the first level. It just kept making us try again and again. Since then, I managed to play trough the entirety of this port, without cheating. It was a very good challenge.

It's bit of a shame that this version is so cut back (even if we couldn't know it). Realistically, it's neat what they could cram into just a 64 kilobytes single-load game on cassette tape.

But that is only true to the 1986 classic version. In 2015, a group of C64 enthusiasts did a makeover of this port. It was polished and reworked, and got all the levels from the arcade. That is the version to play nowadays.

The Good
This port of the game has almost everything the Arcade game had to offer. The sounds are spot on. The graphics are not too bad. There's less colour variety but better use of colour and smoother textures. And there's no censorship, seeing as the developers chose to keep the Crucifix from the Japanese version. The instrumentation of the music is pretty different yet very eerie sounding to add to that hellish atmosphere Arthur goes through.

Gameplay carries a similar yet slightly less difficulty than the arcade version does. It is reassuring that you can get the Crucifix halfway through the game. If you don't have it, you automatically get it upon reaching the final stage. The biggest advantage is that you only need to beat the six stages once. Better yet, there is a proper ending to the game and no infinite looping. Huzzah!

The Bad
This game does carry the same clunky jumping as the arcade game, but that is to be expected. The only problem with the music is that it is lacking the boss themes. Also for some weird reason, the music track from the 3rd and 4th stage is also in the 5th one. Lastly despite the game having a proper ending, we never actually see Princess Guinevere reunited with Arthur, so it is a little anticlimactic. At least the text has correct spelling.

The Bottom Line
This conversion almost captures the look and features of the original arcade, so you can almost think of it as your own home-from-arcade game. I'd like to think that some of the proper ending and easiness of the game was made to compensate for the unfair difficulty of the arcade version, but it's more likely that those adjustments were due to software limitations. Anyhow, great port, great game and one of the very few fantastic Capcom Amiga games available.

The Good
This game is a classic because its immense difficulty can bring extraordinary payoffs. Arthur, the hero of the game, seems to be designed to give the player an idea of what it is like to be one of the weak, fragile enemies in other platform games. One hit will knock Arthur backwards and strip him of his armor, leaving him in his red skivvies. Another will reduce him to a pathetic-looking pile of bones. The more difficult enemies require from four to a dozen hits to kill, and, while you are facing these, innumerable weaker enemies that die with one hit are flying all around waiting to catch you at an awkward moment. Also, at the same time you must jump from platform to treacherous platform, face boss enemies that have immunity to certain weapons, and oh yes, there is a strict time limit.

Few games have ever asked so much of the player. Few games have unapologetically stacked the odds so much on the side of the enemy hordes. And this difficulty is there from the beginning. About a quarter through the very first level, one of the most devious foes in video game history appears--the red demon. This menace, once roused, will proceed to run back and forth hurling fireballs at the player. If the player shoots, the demon will fly up, again shooting fireballs, and perform a death swoop that is almost impossible to dodge. If you attempt to jump it, the demon will fly upwards into you. If you stand still or duck, the demon will still hit you solidly. The only viable option is to run like hell, jumping backwards and chucking javelins until the monster swoops. Then the player must flee in earnest, cowering in fear at the last moment as the thing rushes by overhead. The red demon takes four hits to kill, and very likely will take your first life if it hasn't been taken already. And this is just the first of his many, many appearances.

There are brown ogres that vomit purplish projectiles at you both horizontally and vertically. These can withstand over twelve hits from any weapon, and will continue to gain ground on you even if you fire your weapon as quickly as you can--if you catch them too late with your first shot and they get to you, it's all over.

Two of the boss opponents have immunities to a different particular weapon, and the last boss has immunity to all weapons but one of limited range. Two of the weapons are worse than useless--the axe is slow-moving and cannot be rapid fired while the fire shoots in an arc, has no range, and if the player misses twice, takes precious time before it can be fired again. The shield blocks projectiles but has limited range and cannot damage the cyclops, while the javelin is moderately fast and long range but cannot damage the dragon. The sword is an excellent weapon because it kills all but the last boss and is very fast-firing. If you lose one of the good weapons and receive a bad one, you will have very few opportunities to correct this mistake. Going through the game with a lousy weapon makes things even more difficult, and in some situations it will make the game impossible. When you finally beat the game the first time, you are greeted to poorly translated text saying everything was an illusion, and now you must beat it from scratch, only with faster moving enemies.

Sound impossible? Sound like it couldn't be any fun? Well, not so fast. The reason this never gets too frustrating lies in how good the play control is. Controlling Arthur is intuitive, simple, and always precise. While Castlevania fans might relive nightmares during this game when Arthur is knocked back in a most inconvenient spot, there usually isn't anyone to blame for a truly impossible situation but the player. When an ogre is hurling purple death at you and simultaneously a blue bird flies across the screen ready to knock you backward to allow the ogre an opening to finish you, Arthur is capable of dealing with the situation so long as you know what to tell him to do.

This is where the payoff comes in. When you waltz into one of the last stages and see the terrifying image of a red demon and an ogre sitting right next to each other, defeating both and surviving through a mixture of skill and luck is one of the great thrills of gaming. For once in a platform game, it isn't the sheer weight of weak enemies that are designed to wear you down, making it impossible to be skilled enough to escape untouched. In this game it is your own skill level that is most responsible for how you survive--it is possible to go through the whole game without getting touched, although it would take an enormous amount of skill and no small degree of luck. In a platformer like Actraiser 2, this would be impossible.

The Bad
The story is very dull, and the translation and ending are lousy, but that's not what this game is about. The story here becomes surmounting the incredible difficulty of the game, being able to survive video game Hell--if you are skilled enough to beat this game, no modern game should give you trouble.

The Bottom Line
Ghosts 'N Goblins is a great platformer with a horror theme. The knight Arthur has stripped to his underwear while he and his gal are having a pleasant cemetary picnic. Suddenly a mammoth devil steals the girl and vanishes. Art throws on his tinfoil-like armor and charges into the armies of the undead to save his girl. From the dimwitted zombies to the utterly devious and unpredictable red demons, this game will give your platforming skills the ultimate test. You will be intimately familiar with a dying Arthur. You will have the sorrowful pile of bones he forms burned into your retina, and the map theme music that heralds his next attempt wormed deep in your ears. The difficulty is extreme, but the payoffs are worth the trouble.