Ghosts 'n Goblins NES so HARD!

[alienform]

This game is so hard ! anyone have any tips on how to have any type
of advantage when playing this game! just discovered it and never new it exsisted for the NES. I played the Genesis verision or sequel called Ghost and Ghouls but this is pretty hard on the NES. All comments welcomed.

Thanks!

[koitsu]

It's hard on every platform. There's no quirks/cheats/etc. you can use, particularly on the NES.

There was an entire episode of Game Center CX dedicated to this game (which isn't anything spectacular, except that the dude playing it was *incredibly* frustrated by how hard it was). ;-)

[tokumaru]

Yeah, I suck at this game. I've beaten Ghouls and Ghosts once, but can't get past the first level of Ghosts and Goblins (on various platforms) or Super Ghouls and Ghosts on the Super NES. I just can't, no matter how hard I try.

[miau]

For some reason I always found this game to be fascinating. It's all about memorizing quirky enemy behavior... or finding the least dangerous way to get past things and hope nothing unexpected happens.

Imagine if in SMB you've killed Goombas with the same strategy several dozen times, but one day one of those pesky creatures dodges your attack and jumps straight into your face.

[Dwedit]

The best part is that the NES version wasn't even made by Capcom.

[MottZilla]

Who was it made by then?

[Dwedit]

Micronics. Same company also made the NES versions of Athena, 1942, Tiger Heli, Ikari Warriors, Kaiketsu Yanchamaru 3 - Taiketsu! Zouringen, Mottomo Abunai Deka, and others. They almost never put their name on the game (except in Mottomo Abunai Deka), and their games were identified by code signature and the pause sound effect.

[cd_vision]

Whaaaaaat? Ghosts N Goblins is super easy. Just watch this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kvx3FKHj_x4

[tepples]

Whaaaaaat? Ghosts N Goblins is super easy.

Any game is super easy to beat on your 7,991st try.

[tokumaru]

Whaaaaaat? Ghosts N Goblins is super easy. Just watch this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kvx3FKHj_x4

Well, there is at least one nerd for every game in the world. Even the crappy ones. Plus, this is tool-assisted, so it really doesn't count. =)

I just noticed how much of the music in this game is interrupted by the sound effects. People should never let sound effects interrupt the primary melody like that!

EDIT: Now that I look at it again, this game isn't very well programmed at all. Look at the BAD scrolling artifacts (which look even worse on a black background) on the second level. Also, the sprites seem to constantly get misaligned with the background as the camera moves... it's like they only compute the positions of things every other frame.

[tepples]

I just noticed how much of the music in this game is interrupted by the sound effects. People should never let sound effects interrupt the primary melody like that!

Super Mario 3 interrupts the primary melody too. I think a lot of games from the NES's commercial era didn't automatically assign square wave sound effects between channels $4000 and $4004 like Tetramino does. Instead, they just hardcoded a channel for each sound effect, and if you wanted to play two sound effects at the same time, they had to be hardcoded for different channels, so one of them was more likely to interrupt the primary melody.

Now that I look at it again, this game isn't very well programmed at all. Look at the BAD scrolling artifacts (which look even worse on a black background) on the second level. Also, the sprites seem to constantly get misaligned with the background as the camera moves... it's like they only compute the positions of things every other frame.

Running at less than 60 fps was typical of Micronics. But ghost-writer developers like Micronics and TOSE aren't the only guilty parties. Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 for Game Boy had serious sync problems between sprite scrolling and background scrolling, but nobody noticed it on the Game Boy's motion-blurry screen until Super Game Boy came out.

[Bregalad]

Super Mario 3 interrupts the primary melody too.

So does Secret of Mana, even tough the SNES has 2 times more sound channels as the NES.

I guess to have this less noticeable, you must make the sound effects louder than music, and make a system that re-trigger the music notes after the SFX is teminated until some conditions.

Any game is super easy to beat on your 7,991st try.

Including the later stages of Battletoads ?

[miau]

An impressive non-tool-assisted speedrun of Ghosts 'n Goblins can be found on speeddemosarchive.com. Be sure to read the author's comments if you watch it, they give an interesting insight into the weird mechanics (and bugs) of the game.

Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 for Game Boy had serious sync problems between sprite scrolling and background scrolling, but nobody noticed it on the Game Boy's motion-blurry screen until Super Game Boy came out.

Heh, I was just playing this game on my SGB to bring back memories and analyze its gameplay/graphics and wondered what the hell was going on.

[cd_vision]

I think it's kind of neat how that trick where he takes damage to launch himself over the wall, that works in the arcade version too.

[HappehLemons]

I love hard games. I was watching GTs top 10 hardest games list and saw this game and was curious about it. Once you play it enough you learn lots of little tricks that make the game easy especially after you figure out how to kill a red demon correctly the games difficulty level spikes down. Almost every monster in the game has a very predictable pattern that can be countered once you know it. I can't even really look at this game as hard anymore though because after playing it for 2 days non stop I found that it's not actually that hard as most people make it out to be..