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Ghost House Developer: Sega? Based on: Having the undead come to your house and punch you over and over again until you cough up blood. |
Child: Daddy, why won't my copy of Ghost House work?
Father: (Oh, god...) Well, son, you see... ah... sometimes when a game becomes very, very old, its contacts corrode and it will no longer talk to the console, and, um... it stops working, and all you can see is the game system telling you to put in a different game.
Child: But I want to control the floppy-eared goofball in the ghost house.
Father: Son, remember that day we found Guppie Goldfish floating upside down?
Child: We flushed him down the toilet so he could go to Heaven.
Parent: Uh, right. Well, let's just say that Ghost House is "floating upside down" now.
Child: Is it going to be with Jesus when we flush it, too?
Parent: Well, I think it's a Japanese game, so it probably doesn't believe in Jesus.
Child: Does that mean it's going to go to the H-word place instead of Heaven?
Parent: Well, um, maybe. It wasn't a very good game in life.
Child: Oh. Well, I'll go flush it down the toilet now.
Parent: Wait, don't do that. Ghost House isn't a fish, son, so we can't flush it.
Child: So what do we do?
Parent: There's only one thing to do with a dead video game, son: pawn it off on some unsuspecting sucker on eBay and say it's their fault that it doesn't work any more.
Child: Daddy, I think you're going to the H-word place, too.
PART 4-A: GHOST HOUSE REDUX [ Master System | Sega | 1986 ]
So I actually got my copy of Ghost House working.
Yup, that about sums it up.
Ghost House didn't come with a manual, so I had to sort of figure things out on my own. As best as I can tell, it's the story of some idiot who looks oddly similar to an elven version of Sharkey on a crusade to kill vampires. (Of course, given that Sharkey is as close as you can get to being a vampire without hanging out in graveyards writing bad poetry in which the letter I is frequently replaced by Y, this would seem to be a bit self-defeating.
To which I say, yes, but that's because the game is crap.)
The problem with this brilliant plan is that, whoops, the hero of the game (and I use that term as loosely as written language will allow) isn't exactly Simon Belmont. He's not even Dion and the Belmonts. In fact, of any video game character I've ever seen, he's probably the least qualified vampire hunter ever put into pixels. His weapons consist of a really, really big fist. If you're familiar with vampire lore, you may be aware that vampires are best killed with stakes, swords, holy implements, garlic, or possibly sadness. (The latter only works on the bad poet-type vampires.) "Big fists" are not really Stoker-approved weapons of undead destruction. And not surprisingly, Ghost House Boy is wholly incapable of battling his vampire foes.
The action revolves around exploring a, yes, ghost house in which endlessly respawning bats fly at you. There are also sad fat ghosts and red fire-breathing tubby things that can only be killed by jumping on them. Hero boy walks around taking cheap damage from unavoidable enemies as he searches for vampire caskets. By walking past a casket, he awakens the vampire within, which then flies around and kills him. Theoretically, you're supposed to punch the vampires to death, but that's almost unimaginably difficult -- the vampires move with incredible swiftness in erratic, unpredictable patterns, and the hero boy moves slooooooowly. He's basically a sitting target for the blood-suckers. Apparently you're required to off five of the damn things per stage, but simply escaping from one is an impressive feat.
Oh yeah, I forgot. Sometimes hero boy can use a sword. For some reason someone constantly throws the swords and arrows of outrageous fortune at him from off-screen; by leaping on a sword just so you can cause it clatter to the ground, where it can be picked up and used against foes. But much like the Ultima games, the sword wears out after just a few uses.
I guess those tiny bats are just too much for a fire-forged steel blade to handle.
So, in summary, this game is crap. Don't ever play it or I will laugh at you.
On the other hand, I really, really love the game's American box art. Dave posted the amazing Pro Wrestling box a few days ago, but as unspeakably brilliant as that was, I think Ghost House pretty much tops it all. The box art... is a picture of someone holding a copy of the game itself. Surely I don't need to explain how absolutely sublime that is. And it's in front of that tragically wonderful SMS-standard grid pattern, too.
Of course, it's no secret that I've always loved the SMS style.
One of these days, when everyone least expects it, I'm going to figure out 1UP's backend and quietly replace all the system graphics with the SMS grid pattern and font and totally give the site an 8-bit facelift.