[HN Gopher] Ghosts'n Goblins - "Worse danger is ahead"
___________________________________________________________________
Ghosts'n Goblins - "Worse danger is ahead"
Author : elvis70
Score : 53 points
Date : 2026-02-25 18:07 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (superchartisland.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (superchartisland.com)
| taeric wrote:
| The PSP version of this game was a lot of fun, if frustrating in
| how the "random spawn" of enemies really cut against some of the
| difficulty. In particular, it would really suck to have a random
| spawn come in where your jump was taking you.
| vunderba wrote:
| Speaking of Ghosts n' Goblins - there was a discussion on HN not
| too long ago about platformer controls in old video games (air
| control vs. non-air control), and how being able to control your
| character in the air mostly won out.
|
| As someone who grew up playing the excruciatingly difficult NES
| version of _Ghouls 'n Ghosts_ , can't say I'm sorry to see that
| mechanic go the way of the Atari Jaguar.
| Loughla wrote:
| I have been playing that game since I was like 10 and I've
| never gotten past the fucking ghost ship.
|
| I think anyone who says they've beat it is a dirty filthy liar.
| It cannot be bested.
|
| And I'm with you, the one chance to point your jump in the
| right direction was INFURIATING.
| Supernaut wrote:
| > excruciatingly difficult
|
| As the author of the article notes, the NES was not popular in
| the UK or Europe as a whole, and indeed, I've still never seen
| one in the flesh, so to speak.
|
| But we did have arcades in the town I grew up in, and when
| Ghosts n' Goblins was current, I can remember discussing it
| with another kid in our schoolyard. He told me that someone he
| knew had made it all the way to the end of the game. Totally
| agog, I asked what happened when you completed it, and he told
| me, "There's a message that says, "This was all an illusion
| created by Satan." And then you have to do it all over again."
|
| I was privately skeptical that this could be true, because I
| couldn't believe that the programmers would be that mean, but
| also because the game was so bloody difficult. I didn't believe
| that anyone actually could make it all the way through, unless
| they had a six foot-high pile of ten pence pieces.
|
| But about fifteen years later, I discovered MAME and ROM
| repositories, and with the aid of its cheat system, I pushed
| through to the bitter end of Ghosts n' Goblins. And damned if I
| wasn't rewarded with the message, "This was all an illusion
| created by Satan."
|
| Tokuro Fujiwara, _j 'accuse_.
| kennyadam wrote:
| The NES was pretty popular in the UK, wasn't it? In our
| solidly working-class home, we had a NES. I remember getting
| Super Mario Bros 3 for christmas one year and so did many of
| my friends at school, who all lived in semi-detached two-
| bedroom homes or masonettes. So, we weren't in a wealthy
| bubble or anything. I'm sure it sold multiple millions of
| copies in the UK and TV shows like GamesMaster were popular
| and had NES games on a show watched by a pretty big audience.
| How old were you when it released that you've never seen one
| in the flesh?
| Supernaut wrote:
| Okay, that's interesting. I was in my early teens when it
| was released. Absolutely everyone I knew had either a
| Spectrum or a C64, aside from the one rich kid who owned a
| BBC Micro.
|
| I just had a look at Wikipedia, which says, "the NES
| performed less well in Europe, where it faced strong
| competition from the Master System and home computers such
| as the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum."
| superchartisle wrote:
| This is a interesting long read on the subject:
| https://fatnickindustries.com/Blog/2019/07/03/8-bit-
| showdown...
|
| The NES did get past a million sales in the UK, but a lot
| of them seem to have been at a cheap price late in its
| life once the SNES and (more so) the Mega Drive had
| established a popular market for consoles in the UK.
|
| An indicative fact on consoles vs computers that the
| article highlights: in 1991, Sonic the Hedgehog on Mega
| Drive reached #11 in the UK charts on its release, and it
| was considered a remarkable and unusual achievement for a
| console game to do so well.
| Supernaut wrote:
| Just want to say, I hadn't encountered your website
| before, but it's an absolute treat.
|
| I'll be working my way through your Timeline over the
| next while!
| superchartisle wrote:
| Thank you! I hope you enjoy
| pipes wrote:
| I got one about 1992ish I think. I had a Gameboy before
| that. And a spectrum before that. To be honest the game boy
| was a revelation, smooth fun polished games. My spectrum
| crashed all the time (thanks Alan sugar and your cheaper
| manufacturering). Nintendo games had multi person dev teams
| instead of some poor guy looking at a video of an arcade
| machine and trying to recreate at on a spectrum.
|
| Though everyone I knew got a snes and street fighter 2 for
| Xmas one year. I only knew one other nes owner
| vunderba wrote:
| Whenever a friend complains about how much they hate games
| with boss rushes (a mechanic to artificially inflate the
| length of a game by forcing the player to re-fight all the
| previous bosses from previous levels in order) - I refer them
| to the _" illusion moment"_ in Ghosts 'n Goblins.
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| I was on the other side of this, playing Castlevania Symphony
| of the Night in elementary school. One day I discover
| something that my friend never found, even though I looked up
| him, since he completed the whole game.
|
| Well what I discovered was the reverse castle and another 50%
| of the game he never played. I called him on the landline and
| started telling him about it and he was saying "what are you
| even talking about", he thought I was lying until he followed
| my instructions.
|
| That thing settled exploration as one if my favorite thing in
| videogames, the discovery was amazing
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| The NES is historically amongst the most popular consoles
| sold in Europe, but with huge differences between countries.
| In some countries, every kid either had or wanted one, while
| in others, micros and/or Sega were dominant.
| izacus wrote:
| "Most sold" doesn't really tell much though.
| mrighele wrote:
| To be fair, we are talking about arcade games. You were not
| supposed to finish them, but to finish your money before that
| :-) [ _].
|
| You are paying for a game, so you have the right to continue
| playing until you die. In that context, restarting the game
| (hopefully with an higher difficulty level) is the proper
| course of actoin
|
| [_] The authors of Pacman probably didn't even think you
| would be able to reach level 256 and overflow the variable.
| That's how you get to a kill screen that corrupts memory.
| dahauns wrote:
| > I pushed through to the bitter end of Ghosts n' Goblins.
| And damned if I wasn't rewarded with the message, "This was
| all an illusion created by Satan."
|
| Weeell...here's the thing. Erm. You _didn 't_ push through to
| the end. You just got the "bad" ending.
|
| The game does very much have a proper ending, and reaching it
| is surprisingly straightforward.
|
| You just have to beat it _twice_.
| Supernaut wrote:
| Sure, I get that. I was just aiming for comic effect in
| pointing out that the player's initial reward for having
| made it through all the levels of a very difficult game is
| "lol, do it again".
|
| I did work my way through it a second time to see the
| "proper ending", and what's interesting is that I remember
| nothing about it. There's a moral in there, somewhere.
| miljanm wrote:
| "Cut a stout blackthorn to banish ghosts and goblins"
| bernds74 wrote:
| A brand new pair of brogues, rattlin' o'er the bogs...
| axpy906 wrote:
| suguSi ne Sugu shinu The die quickly game
| paozac wrote:
| As a kid I spent a lot of money with the arcade version, finding
| it very difficult. Reaching the second or third stage was quite
| challenging, I was always hoping to find the knives as a weapon.
| mrighele wrote:
| Some random thoughts...
|
| (I was a kid in the 80s and I played in arcades a lot. I think I
| could still tell in which arcade I played each game).
|
| > There was an economic motivation for this difficulty, in
| getting more coins from players quicker, but Fujiwara would later
| insist that wasn't the primary motivation and that they were
| meeting a demand from strong players for challenge.
|
| Thats' not completely true. If it was that way, players would
| quickly grew fed up and stop playing. You need a balance between
| getting money out of people and people keep playing because they
| have fun.
|
| I think one of the most efficient way to do that is having MOST
| of your players being suckers that keep pouring money, but allow
| a few to get very good at it, and play an inordinate amount of
| time with a single coin. That way the suckers will keep playing
| hoping to do the same. Most people would last 5 level in Bubble
| Bobble, but you had the occasional "genius" that would finish it.
|
| Very difficult games like GnG were well regarded but not as
| played as others, as much as I can remember.
|
| > Fujiwara later responded to a question about SNK's Ikari and
| its resemblance to Commando by saying that was just how things
| were, although he was disappointed that they had got to release
| more sequels than him.
|
| In the 80's there were not many game mechanics available [ _]. I
| dare say that 90% of the games were either
|
| _ vertical shoot 'em ups (think Galaxian) * horizontal shoot 'em
| ups (think Gradius) * beat 'em ups (think Double Dragon) *
| platform (think Mario) * to a lesser extent, racing games (think
| Outrun)
|
| I think mostly due to HW limitations.
|
| So if you are going to have a soldier going around killing
| people, of course it is going to resemble Command in some way.
| Doesn't mean they are the same, in the same way that Poker and
| Bridge are not the same despite using the same set of cards.
|
| [*] There were some outliers, and some of them were great (Tron,
| Star Wars) but they more the exception that the rule.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-02-28 23:00 UTC)