Mr. Ghost – aka “Yuureikun” – is an interesting flick-screen action game, published by System Sacom for the MSX2 in 1989. In it you play a ghost who must make his way through a series of levels, knocking out enemies along the way. An English fan translation makes the game playable outside of its native Japan.
The unusual thing about Mr. Ghost is that you ram into enemies backwards. To do that you must face away from your intended target and press the A button. Doing so launches the ghost backwards, horizontally, and will knock out anything that is hit. Enemies will usually drop coins when hit and you only have a very short amount of time to swoop down and grab them. Stone blocks sometimes block the way and can be smashed with two hits. These sometimes hide goodies too. You can also fire out a small spirit by pressing the B button.
At the top of the screen is your health bar, and also a meter that shows your attack power. When the attack power drops to zero, you can no longer do those backward shunts and are left without means of attack. Waiting a while will allow the meter to gradually re-fill and you’ll be back in business again.
As you progress left to right you’ll notice that you cannot go back a screen if you move ahead, which is a little frustrating, but you have to learn that you should only press forward when you’re ready to do so. You must also learn that you cannot go whacking stone blocks willy nilly – you need to conserve your attack power for enemies predominantly, and trying to hit every stone block will just leave your attack bar empty.
At the end of each level is a boss fight. There are in fact TWO boss battles at the end of level one – one after the other. Now that’s what I call a fight!
Stage two is a vertically-scrolling continuous level, with you moving downwards, and from there the game gets really challenging, mostly due to the insane amount of bullets flying around. Mr. Ghost may look cute, but it sure as hell ain’t to be trifled with!
It takes a little while to get used to the control method, but it’s worth persevering with because the game is lush, visually, and is one of those weird Japanese hidden gems that is a lot of fun to play. I highly recommend giving it a go if you’ve never played Mr. Ghost before.
More: Mr. Ghost on romhacking.net
