Ghosts ‘N Goblins, PC

The 1987 PC MS-DOS version of Ghosts ‘N Goblins, I’m sorry to say, is a bit of a travesty. It looks terrible, and also plays like a lame duck. In fact, unless you can get the game set up properly in DOSBox (which took me some time to do), then it’s pretty much unplayable*.

The port was developed by Pacific Dataworks International and published by Capcom in North America only. It features flick-screen progress (no scrolling); enemies that appear out of nowhere; bosses that die quickly, then re-appear; time that counts up instead of down; weapons that fire backwards; glitches; instant death bugs, and crude, inauthentic levels. It does have the recognisable Ghosts ‘N Goblins tune while playing, but even that is a weedy rendition that does little to enhance the game.

*= To make the game playable in DOSbox you should set “cpu” to “386_slow” and “cycles” to “600” in the configuration file, and make sure to set up the joystick in the keymapper config (press CTRL+F1 to enter the config when DOSBox is running). If you’re using the NUMPAD keys as a joystick be sure to turn off “Num Lock” otherwise the screens will jump ahead confusingly.

All this faffing around to get Ghosts ‘N Goblins running properly in DOSBox isn’t really worth it. If you want to play Ghosts ‘N Goblins now, play the arcade original in MAME, or the Amiga version. The DOS version really isn’t worth wasting any time on. It’s dreadful. Easily the worst version of Ghosts ‘N Goblins out there!