Ultimate Ghosts 'n Goblins

"Classic rehash, stupidly difficult."

Ultimate Ghosts & Goblins is a Modernised version of an 8 to 16bit era arcade classic. Originally named Ghosts & Goblins, it also had a sequel called Ghouls & Ghosts, followed by Super Ghouls & Ghosts on the Super Nintendo. The series is known as Makaimura or "Demon World Village". These games were also known for their insanely high difficulty and the frustration of beating the game only to find that you need to rerun the entire game to find a certain weapon or item.

Anyway, back to the PSP game. You play as Arthur, a knight who must run through the demon world in order to save the princess. This is pretty much a remake or reprisal of the original games. It does, though, have a lot of new bosses, weapons, armours and minor enemies. The level structure is simple, you run through a stage, fight a midboss, play through more of the level or the next level and you'll face a larger boss at a Chaos Gate.

Being a knight, you get a slew of medieval weapons, starting out with a lance. Other weapons include; Crossbows, Daggers, A super Lance and a Swallow Blade, which homes in on enemies weak points for minor damage.

Along with weapons, you also have armour. In the older games, you had basic armour as an extra life point of sorts; later in the series they added golden armour. In Ultimate Ghosts & Goblins, you have golden armour along with, warrior armour, cursed armour and special winged armour which allows you to hover until hit. Shields are now equipment, rather than a weapon. You'll find a number of shields along the way; one even allows you to ride it like a hover board for a limited amount of time.

A new addition to this game is magic, you'll find spells hidden in certain levels, these range from an X-Men vs. Street Fighter style beam fire spell which Arthur shoots out of his hands, hadoken style to a time spell which slows everything down but you. Cursed armour changes how the magic's work and dark armour doesn't allow you to use the magic at all. Arthur must be in armour to use magic, though.

There are also new POW items that will increase your attack damage or speed & combo. Another new feature is warp staffs, which allow you to warp back and forth through the levels, but only if you have the staff for that level. There are a lot of other special equipment items that you'll receive along the way; one in particular is a special set of boots which allow you to double jump.

The graphics are pretty amazing for the PSP, although you will come across slowdown from time to time, but this is very minor. The level design is a lot similar to the previous games, where each level has a theme, ranging from a swamp to a tower. There are 5 stages in all, but you'll need to find special ring items scattered around every level to get into the last area.

The game also gives you 3 difficulties; Novice, standard & Ultimate. Novice is not so easy, though; this is one thing I really didn't like about the game. Sure, it's an old series which was originally hard, but it's 2006 and you'd expect an easy mode to cater to new players and people who don't enjoy dodging 500 enemies on a screen at once. You do get about 10 lives or so, which means you WILL be dying A LOT, get used to it. This game is fiendishly hard and you'll find yourself cursing or getting frustrated during certain levels.

Another thing I didn't like was the fact that a lot of the special items were in really stupid places, like under a platform, where you'd need to do a double jump, use the hover board to get back up to higher ground, but it'd run out of juice and you'd die. Of course, you could use the winged armour, but chances are, you would have lost it by the time you got to the area with the item in it.

Now for the low-down, I'm going to give this game 6 out of 10. Why? It's hard, like NES game "hard". Even on the easiest level of difficulty, it's too hard. Sure, the graphics and basic game play is nice, but that doesn't save it from getting a mediocre score. I know it sounds really lame for me to score it based on its difficulty, but try the game before you spend your hard earned money on it, it could save you from buying a much harder game than you'd like to play.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 11/08/06