Ghouls and Ghosts on Genesis
The original game was of course Ghosts and Goblins on the NES and his title was essentially the same game. However, there were a lot of modifications and of course the game was 16-bit and had much better graphics and sound. This title was an immediate addiction for me, because it was considerably less impossible than the first installment as well.
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Just so you know, the Mega Drive and Genesis are the same machine. They just had different names for the North American and European markets.
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The game functioned in almost exactly the same fashion as Ghosts and Goblins but it had some wonderful improvements in addition to the obvious stuff like improved graphics. There were new weapons, the jumping dynamics were drastically improved (no more falling to your death all the time), and the armor now had 3 stages, which is where the best improvement came in.
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If you held down the attack button while wearing the gold armor, you could release a super attack of sorts that would fly all over the screen and destroy most anything it touched. This obviously came in really handy. Of course it was a huge disappointment to lose the gold armor (which would happen if you were touched by literally anything) then these techniques were no longer available until you found a treasure box with more gold armor in it.
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The map was relatively huge and as you would expect the levels became progressively harder. However, none of them were anywhere near as difficult as the extremely tricky levels in Ghosts and Goblins on NES. It was a considerably more "user friendly" game in that regard.
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Once you knew the game really well the game would still take a normal mortal game over half and hour to do a full run. Those crazy speedrunning peeps that exist out there are able to accomplish this feat in under 16 minutes but do so by skipping a vast majority of the enemies.
a fun little game that brings back great memories, this title remained fun for a long time after purchase and we don't really see many games like this anymore (with good reason.) If you feel like having a blast from the past you can get the ROM here for free
I played the NES, SEGA and Arcade versions and still yet to get past level 2!
yeah it was pretty darn hard, the one on NES was absurd. I think that might have been one of the first lessons in USA that the Japanese were far more hardcore gamers than Americans were at the time :)