It has to be said that the Amiga port of Capcom‘s classic Ghosts ‘N Goblins is a damn sight better than the Atari ST version, or any of the other conversions from the 16-bit era. It was developed and published by Elite Systems in 1990 and is as close to the arcade parent as is possible on the Amiga.

The screen ratio is correct; the graphics are spot-on (other than lacking a few colours from the original); the music is authentic, and the gameplay is pretty much identical to the original arcade game. Which means that it’s mind-bendingly difficult…

Also: reading about the history of the release of the Amiga version, it seems that many (if not all) past releases of the game have had issues. Apparently the duplication of the original release had some data corruption that made levels five and six unplayable. Elite did remedy that with a re-mastering of the game, but by that point the damage had been done and crackers who tried to distribute the game did so with the initial version, knowing that it wasn’t complete. The original release also wouldn’t work on AGA chipsets, and had some sound issues, which further muddied the waters. What this led to was a mess of broken versions of the game released onto the scene – none of which worked properly. It took over twenty years for a fixed version of this great port to finally surface, thanks to persistent hackers in the Amiga community.

There’s no doubt that Ghosts ‘N Goblins on the Amiga is the best home computer version available. Maybe even the best port of the game out there. That said: I’d still rather play Ghouls ‘N Ghosts – or Super Ghouls ‘N Ghosts – the much better sequel, than this game, because it’s too hard to be enjoyable. Of course that is just an opinion – there are plenty of people out there who might disagree.

If you want to play Ghosts ‘N Goblins on the Amiga now: be aware that almost all archived versions of the game on the internet are bugged and incomplete. You’ll have to find the fixed version to experience the full game as it was originally intended. That said: the chances of you getting to levels five and six are very slim, unless you cheat. The fixed version – like many of the previous releases – does have a built-in trainer, so it does allow you to cheat your way through the game if you want to. The fixed version also supports WHDLoad for installation to a hard drive, and now supports AGA chipsets, making the game much more accessible than it was previously.

More: Ghosts ‘N Goblins on Wikipedia