REVIEW: Ghosts 'n' Goblins (NES)

CAPCOM sent me a review copy of GHOSTS 'N' GOBLINS in 1986, when I was about a year old. I'm a stickler for Videogames Journalism Ethics, so I decided not to run a full review until 1) I had learned to read, 2) blogging had been invented and 3) I had completely finished the game. Amazingly, all three of those criteria were met last month when I completed both playthroughs required to achieve the "real" ending to the game. The gulf between that time and the publication of this review can be attributed to slackerism.

I've been playing GHOSTS 'N' GOBLINS ever since I was able to sneak into my sister's room when she wasn't home and operate the NES on my own. It's probably a testament to CAPCOM's amazing arcade sense that I never felt the need to quit forever after dying countless times on the first level for most of my life. I was twenty-two years old the first time I beat the first level. It was one of those moments that just felt like magic. I wracked my brain for half an hour trying to come up with the name of someone that I knew who could possibly care about this achievement, so that I might tell them about it. Sadly, this mental exercise proved fruitless.

It's not that I'm bad at games, necessarily, but I've never really been drawn to challenge. In video games, or in life. I play RPGs that don't require much of me, Adventure games that I already know I'll be good at, and an endless line of AAA titles that have smoothed out the learning curve so well that there's really no hope of frustration. I've kind of been floating around for the last few years, afraid to really pick up anything if it's outside of my immediate comfort zone. Since I moved to Charlotte a year ago, I've been applying to crappy little jobs because I'm afraid of failing if I try anything really difficult.

I'm twenty-seven years old now and, spurred on by a smattering of recent professional failures, I decided to sit down and actually complete GHOSTS 'N' GOBLINS for the first time in my life, hopefully to simulate the feeling of actually being good at something in this dark, indifferent world.

The first thing you'll notice about GHOSTS 'N' GOBLINS is its delightfully retro 8-bit pixel art style. That seems to be the trend these days in the Indie Games Scene (of which, as a Games Journalist, I am an intrinsic part). This game has hipster cred up the wazoo, in fact. It's a sidescoller where you fight zombies. You play as a white guy with a beard and ironic heart-pattern boxers who must go out and gentrify the land of the dead to find your girlfriend with spears, knives, and fireballs (it kind of breaks down by the end there).

I will never forget the first time I watched the opening cinematic to this game over two decades ago. Arthur and his as-far-as-I-know unnamed girlfriend are having a picnic in a cemetery because they're a bunch of godless liberals with no reverence for the sanctity of life.

So, when an evil flying demon straight out of my tiny child nightmares swoops down and steals his lady friend, I'm thinking to myself, "justice has been served!" Also: "Am I too old to be shitting my pants in terror right now?" At the age of four, this is what I was lead to believe would happen if you were to spend significant time with the dead at night time with an evil castle in the background. I watched this segment countless times in my life, and it's done me no small amount of psychological damage. I could talk about it for days. But no, there's a whole game after that point.

Which is fine. I will love this game forever for one reason and one reason only:

This is one of the top five compositions in the history of music (among such giants as Mozart and the Bubble Bobble theme). I recommend you listen to it for about five hours at a time like I do. It creates a feeling that simulates the true madness that must have been required to compose it in the first place.

The Controls

If there is one aspect of the game that people have a right to complain about, it's everything about what the controller buttons do when you press them. There are two types of jumping: jumping straight up in the air, and jumping slightly to the left or right. Other sidescrolling games of this time period will generally give you a wider range of movement options, such as a running jump, variable-height jump, or after-jump controlling. These little touches can do a lot to give the player a sense of control, in that they allow the player to have the on-screen character move to the place that they need to be in, rather than a totally fixed place on either side. 

This is actually not that big of a deal in the first level, which is probably why I didn't notice it for about twenty years.

As you can see, Level One is mostly just a flat surface with a couple dual-level ladder sections where you can choose to go to a higher level for a minute, having zero effect on the actual gameplay except for one or two enemy placements. I think there's one tricky jump, but it's onto a static platform and it's no big deal.

 Uh, but then shit like this happens. Imagine being twenty-two and realizing for the first time that your favorite impossible game has shitty jumping mechanics and a LOT of mind-numbing moving platform sections that require precise timing and placement or you get sent back to like five minutes ago. It was kind of heartbreaking. Level after level, I was struck dumb by the sheer gall CAPCOM displayed creating more and more situations where Arthur had to do any jumping, at all, ever.With jumping that terrible, you'd think they'd want to hide it. But no. It's there, prettymuch on every level.

The Levels

There are levels in this game. It's not just that first level. I was as surprised as you.

And, it turns out, these levels correspond to that pre-gameplay screen that shows up every time you die! Every number represents a boss character that you have to fight.

 

I know I keep harping on this, but there really are different levels to this game. And this is proof!

Bosses

So, some of the bosses are annoyingly easy.

Sometimes they just give you two of the same boss. I didn't get a screenshot of that but it was basically the same as above except there were two of them. Uhm, actually this is super easy with Photoshop

DONE.

Some of the bosses are nightmares of twitch timing with very little strategy involved, but who nevertheless take about half a million tries to defeat because I am a terrible human being and I hate myself why am I playing this game? Why? WHY???

And at the end of the game, you have to fight all the bosses again.

Oh, I forgot to mention, there's a point in the game where I get to fulfill a childhood dream:

I get to kill this son of a bitch.

Twice. 

And, I know what you're thinking: "Not with that Axe, you're not!" And you'd be right. It turns out that, just before your final conflict with Satan (this is apparently CAPCOM's name for this flying demon, which for some reason makes me feel better, and not worse), the game non-randomly drops an Axe in your path, which you may then pick up. That's cool and all, except for the fact that THE AXE DOES NO DAMAGE AGAINST THE SATAN DEMON. THERE IS NO WAY TO LEARN THIS IN THE GAME EXCEPT TO FIGHT SATAN OVER AND OVER FOR A HALF HOUR UNTIL YOU THINK TO JUMP OVER THE AXE THAT WAS PUT RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU. There isn't really any place to learn that different weapons do damage to different enemies with differing values, because it hasn't been an issue up to this point. Apparently you're supposed to fight the dragon with the lance, and fight the Satan with the "shield," and just jump over the axe entirely. And, if you accidentally collide into this non-random item pickup that is placed right where you need to walk in order to beat the game, you have to do a huge, difficult level all over again from the beginning.

Wow.

So, eventually I did it. And I find out that the Satan Brothers are not actually the final bosses of the game, but merely a prelude to...

My battle with Astaroth, the crown prince of Hell, was short and sweet. It's the only point in the game that allows you to walk back and forth while facing the same direction. So, basically, you can spam the shield attack like crazy, dodging his own attacks pretty easily, until he dies almost immediately. I should probably feel less empty after killing this beast, but something's missing. Uhh, it's the Princess. 

When I kill Astaroth, the screen goes black and I get this text:

Not only did no one read that before it was put in a game cartridge and duplicated half a million times, but I don't think anyone wrote it. 

Oh, and then it kicks me back to the beginning of the game. Yeah, to get the "good" ending, you have to beat the game a second, slightly harder time.

So, I did that.

I had to.

There was something I needed from this game that that horrible line of partially translated text on a black background could not give me. I wouldn't call it pride, but there was something.

I'm not going to bore you with the details. I'm going to show you the ending so you don't have to play it. That's where I am in my life right now. I don't have any witty quips or whatever. There is no joy in this. I'm just done with this shit. I can move on and do something else. Focus on something else. That's all I care about right now. I spent my whole life playing this game and this is the ending. That's the joke. That's funnier than anything else I could possibly say. 

But then, the final screen hit me in a way that I didn't predict.

Challenge Again? Maybe that's exactly what I need.