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Something Old turned into something New
By Rockwaldo
Ah….an old favourite. When I say "old favourite" I of course mean one of the major frustrations of my younger days seen through lovely nostalgia goggles. Ghosts 'n Goblins and its sequel Ghouls 'n Ghosts may as well be called "Rock fucking hard game, we laugh at how crap you are - HAHAHAHA - see? Hear us laugh" In fact, I am convinced that the English translation of the original Japanese title Makaimura says exactly that.
So here we are. A PSP version - an ultimate version no less.
First thing you notice is that it looks bloody lovely. Nice sharp widescreen graphics with bold vivid colours - exactly as you'd expect a forest full of foul monsters not to be. Next thing you notice is that they've gone and made all of the sprites into polygon thingies. This is good and bad. Good in that you can now have some jazzy 3D effects, which are nice and all that I guess. Bad in that it just doesn't seem right. There is something to be said for the charm of a well drawn sprite based game - just look at the metal slug games to know what I mean. All in all though, doesn't really matter - they look pretty good regardless.
How Pixels and Vectors used to compare
So, now down to the playing. First of all, as with most Capcom games, this game is pretty import friendly as there isn't much Japanese text to speak of, and what there is can be worked out pretty easily - very nice of them I thought.As for the game itself, it feels great. The old man in armour moves and jumps just as you'd expect him to and it's a joy to shoot beasties and jump over headstones like the old days. And then you die. And then you die again. Ok, now I'm beginning to think that choosing "normal" difficulty was a mistake. One more death and I've lost 3 lives in the first 10 seconds of the game. Back to the menu methinks, start again at an easier level.
So this time I choose "I am a big poof, please don't hurt me" (kindly labelled as "beginner"). Here we go; I can actually start walking about without being swarmed by zombies and flying zombies and big fucking stretchy blue hands. And then it dawns on me. This is a bloody good game. Capcom have obviously put a lot of love into this ultimate version, and it really does feel like a modernised tribute to the older greats. The old trusty weapons are all there (including that shitting god awful blue potion thing), along with some nice new ones such as the Castlevania style whip. Very nice.
Oh, hello there!
One thing bugs me though, where's the bloody double jump? Admittedly in the older versions I mostly used it like a retard to jump back into danger, but it feels a bit odd without it. As I reach the end of the first level I realise that it hasn't been left out, it has just become part of a bigger feature - this game has an almost RPG style inventory system, which my double jump boots duly slips into. Throughout the game you are given all manner of different armour types and trinkets to play with, all of which live in the nice new shiny inventory. Nice.
And so the game goes on. The next few levels start getting bloody hard (even on baby level), but they are an absolute joy to play. The wizard chap from Ghouls and Ghosts is back and now in addition to turning you into a duck (the cad) he can turn you into an old lady (with magical fat floaty jumps), a frog and even a butterfly if he deems it necessary. Also there are some strange big pools of liquid in cups that you can jump into to be turned giant or mini at various places for reasons that didn't strike me as particularly obvious. These crazy knight chaps eh?
In short it's a great game, even better for being on a handheld - lending itself to the occasional game very well indeed. In fact, if you're a fan of the older games (you masochist you) then it's pretty much essential.
Oh, and I took the liberty of translating the Japanese cover for this new version as well. It reads: "STILL Rock fucking hard game. We laugh at how crap you are, but this time we made sure you'd love it enough that you'd keep coming back for more"
September 2006
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