Trigger Happy
Shoot first, ask questions later
Can you resurrect Ghosts ’n Goblins? Steven Poole reburies it
Like all artforms, videogames can transport us back to happier and more innocent times. The effect is the stronger, of course, if they do so in a self-consciously neo-retro way. Just as a modern writer might choose to compose a historical novel in a pastiche of 18th-century prose style, a modern videogame might employ and play with tropes from 1970s and 1980s classics for purposes both straightforwardly nostalgic and ludically paratextual. All of which, impatient reader, is one “Parklife”-worthy way of saying: look, they rebooted Ghosts ’n Goblins!
As someone old enough to have actually played Capcom’s arcade classic in the chip shop, as well as the ZX Spectrum port and the much better (it pained me to accept it) C64 port as a friend’s house, I am also old enough to have forgotten just how viciously hard it was – something new Switch shiverer Ghosts ’n Goblins Resurrection wastes no time in gleefully reminding me. At least it has selectable difficulty levels besides the rockhard original. But a lot of the challenge comes from the particular choices the developers made as to what to update and what to keep.
The art is quite glorious, as each monstrous level comes to life from a watercolour sketch, and you might notice subtle brush-marks on grey stone battlements if you are not too busy evading lurching zombies, massive pigs, or on-fire pink wolves – you know the kind of thing. Individual blades of grass blow in the demonic wind. The music, too, is high-definition, chamberorchestra comedy horror. In all respects it looks and sounds like a polished modern game. But it doesn’t feel like one at all.
“Just like its predecessors,” Capcom promises in its promotional blurb, “Ghosts ‘n Goblins Resurrection makes use of simple controls that anyone can enjoy.” This is true, but also false, for what Resurrection keeps from the original is a control-and-feedback system that, in 2021, feels horribly and unfairly janky. Your knight’s lurching, panicky jumpfeel and inability to shoot on the diagonal, limiting him only to horizontal and vertical firing, make him seem like a 1980s videogame hero trapped in a 2020s environment for which he is sorely illequipped. Sure, that may be how we all feel trying to navigate the real world from time to time, but this is a peculiarly disempowering design decision. And because Resurrection is not a literal remake of the original but simply a spiritual successor, changing the jump mechanics would not have caused the storm of controversy that surrounded the apparently borked jump distance and collision detection of the 2017 Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy.
Jumpfeel, after all, is the single most important aspect of how any platform game feels to play, and those games that have got it right through the ages – from Manic Miner and Super Mario Bros through to the likes of the Rayman series – can still be felt in the fingers and the little lift of the spirits that we feel even when remembering them. And there is a modern jumpfeel in the best of those games that is more physics-informed, with a sense of weight and air and drift, even though it is a fantastical physics. In his pathetically quick descent back to earth, indeed, the knight of Ghosts ’n Goblins has a more disappointingly realistic jump than we have become entitled to.
The jumpfeel of the titular robot in Paul Helman and Sean Scaplehorn’s Horace, also recently released on Switch, is by contrast a thing of beauty, a joyful momentary defeat of gravity; and by comparison to Ghosts ’n Goblins Resurrection, Horace as a game represents almost the opposite attitude to past glories. It plays on nostalgia much harder than Capcom’s game – right from the opening screen that mimics the old Thames Television logo, and through its loving recreations of bygone classics such as Pong and OutRun – but our hero is very much a 2020s protagonist in a 1980s environment. And with 2020s powers over it, exemplified as the world rotates through 90 degrees in a flash when you walk up a wall.
It is still fundamentally old-school platforming, of course, but the difference is stark: Horace is very much a modern videogame inspired by past glories, while if Ghosts ’n Goblins Resurrection were not trading on the name and character of its illustrious forebear it would hardly merit a modern release at all. Perhaps you feel that is unkind, but as our robot friend Horace says, “for me, videogames really were the highest artform”. And with great height, as all platforming heroes know, comes great responsibility.
In all respects it looks and sounds like a polished modern game. But it doesn’t feel like one at all