Ghouls n Ghosts

STORY / GAMEPLAY
Arthur, the brave young Knight and the main character in Ghosts n' Goblins fought multiple creatures of the underworld and finally succeeded in rescuing his beautiful princess. But once more, those blood-thirsty creatures have risen again and took his love interest away for a second time. Now Arthur is called again to grab his shiny armor and his lethal daggers and kill enemies, fight with bosses and also avoid traps. The game is played the same way like its predecessor. It is a classic side-scrolling action game with quite a few platform elements that add to its intensity! The main idea is to run, jump and shoot up to the end of all five levels, survive and take out the ferocious end-of-level guardian (boss). On the final level you have to confront the leading Demon and rescue your princess.
Arthur's energy level is not shown anywhere and the programmers had the brilliant (and funny) idea to grant you with a few lives and, each time you get hit, your energy drops by 50% and you lose your armor, continuing your quest wearing nothing but your underwear (just like in Ghosts N' Goblins)! My only complaint here is that the game continues to use one of the most frustrating aspects from its predecessor: When you lose a life, you are thrown back about ten screens and start over again! Other than that, Ghouls N’ Ghost is a great game to play and keeps your interest high to try and try again.

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The Megadrive's version graphics are cool, though a bit inferior to the SNES and -honestly- to the PC Engine version! Actually, the graphics remind me of the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST home computers versions, though they are superior to both. The backgrounds are nicely done but it seems that some of the original details are missing on the 16bits Sega console -and not on the SNES and the PCE. The sprites are awesome and they move pretty fast. And that's bad because sometimes they can kill you equally fast! The Megadrive version offers some nice, eerie tunes and a variety of good sound FX.

OVERALL
Ghouls N' Ghosts is a good action game, a coin-op conversion that could have been better if we consider the Megadrive's gaming power. On the other hand, we must always have in mind that this game is also "frustratingly" hard, a fact that can make many gamers to quit on playing it!