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.