"Sooner or later, somebody was going to name a game that"

Ghoul School was one of the dumbest games I ever played. It's sort of like the 2D version of Zombies Ate my Neighbors because you're a teenage slacker with a variety of unorthodox weapons at your disposal beating up monsters to rescue a cheerleader.

I usually start my reviews by talking about the plot, so here it is: You're Spike (see it's funny because his hair is spikey) who finds a big skull outside the graveyard and takes it to anatomy class. A couple days later the skull comes to life and calls up all his monster buddies to have a big party and take over the school, and kidnap the head cheerleader in the process. The entire football team and the local Ghostbusters ripoff team couldn't save her, so of course it's up to you to set everything right.

Pretty elaborate set up for a pretty ho-hum game. So you're Spike, walking around what kind of looks like a high school, whacking monsters with your baseball bat until they fall off the screen and die. Spike can barely jump (which is probably because you can find special spring shoes and ones with suction cups to walk on the ceiling) and can't kneel, which is incredibly annoying when you're facing the quick little red monsters who are about a fourth of Spike's height.

The halls do look like high school locales, with lockers that Spike can duck into to avoid monsters (presumably because he's so slow and can't jump that well or duck at all, as said), but the classrooms are ridiculous. The desks and chairs are so small this must actually be a preschool instead of a high school you're trying to rid of monsters.

The music is bad and forgettable. I think if the game is about you being all alone in a high school that's infested with creatures from beyond the grave, they would make more of an effort to make it scary. None of the tunes, no matter where I went, had me on the edge of my seat. There are a variety of ray guns and such you can find to bust the ghosts with, but that's if you have the patience to find them and beat the game. I was getting bored after the first few rooms.

And the thing I absolutely have to extended to the game is the ''most useless manual for a NES game'' award. For some reason, it doesn't tell you how to perform important operations, leaving you to figure them out for yourself. Like, ''we can't tell you how to work the elevators, it's secret,'' or ''we can't tell you how to get items, that's a secret.'' And perhaps the most laughable of all the advice the manual DOES give you is ''don't pick up skulls and take them to anatomy class. This monster invasion might happen to you.'' If it did, I hope it'd be more interesting than Ghoul School.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 01/09/04