Ghosts 'n Goblins [5 Screw]

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Item Condition

Game + manual: the cartridge and its manual, no box. This is the 5-screw cartridge variant. The manual shows handling wear but has no missing pages. Look over the photos for condition, packaging and details. Every cartridge's shell, label and board are checked for authenticity when it comes into the store, and it's tested before it's listed. It ships in a collector's bag or a hard plastic case.

Item Description

Two hits. That is all Sir Arthur can take, and the first one blasts him clean out of his armor, leaving Capcom's bravest knight to charge through a haunted graveyard in nothing but his boxer shorts. Ghosts 'n Goblins built its whole reputation on moments like that: funny, cruel and impossible to forget. Tokuro Fujiwara's 1985 arcade hit came home to the NES in 1986 in a conversion programmed by Micronics, and it became one of the console's most famous tests of nerve, selling more than a million and a half copies on the system.

The quest is simple. The demon king has carried off Princess Prin Prin, and Arthur has to cut through zombies clawing up out of the soil, swooping demons, lumbering cyclops giants and dragons to win her back. The difficulty comes from every direction at once. Jumps are committed arcs with no steering in midair, a clock of roughly three minutes ticks down on every life, and picking up a new weapon replaces the one you're holding, so a careless grab can swap a trusty lance or rapid-fire dagger for the clumsy torch at the worst possible moment. Then there is Red Arremer, the red gargoyle who hovers, waits and dives the instant you commit to an attack. He is the enemy everyone remembers, and he proved so popular that Capcom later gave him his own spin-off adventures as Firebrand in Gargoyle's Quest.

Reaching the end is a story in itself. Defeat the final demon and the game announces that the whole thing was a trap, then sends you back to the first stage to do it all again on a harder loop before the true ending appears. The final confrontation also refuses to let you in unless you're carrying the right weapon. Through all of it, Ayako Mori's music, carried over from the arcade, keeps the march from graveyard to castle moody and urgent.

Ghosts 'n Goblins launched a series that ran through Ghouls 'n Ghosts, Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts and, decades later, Ghosts 'n Goblins Resurrection, and every one of them still sends Arthur running in his underwear. On the NES it is the original bragging-rights game, the one people still talk about finishing with a little disbelief in their voice. If you want to know where the NES earned its reputation for brutal difficulty, this is the place to start.

Fast factsgame data via IGDB

Released: 1986
Publisher: Capcom
Genre: Platformer, Adventure
Players: Single player

About the game

Ghosts 'n Goblins is a platform game where the player controls a knight, named Sir Arthur, who must defeat zombies, ogres, demons, cyclops, dragons and other monsters in order to rescue Princess Prin Prin, who has been kidnapped by Satan, king of Demon World. Along the way the player can pick up new weapons, bonuses and extra suits of armor that can help in this task. The game is often considered very difficult by arcade standards and is commonly regarded as one of the most difficult games ever released. The player can only be hit twice before losing a life (the first hit takes away Arthur's armor, and the player must continue on in his underwear until completing the level or finding replacement armor). If the player loses a life, he is returned to the start of the level, or the halfway point if he has managed to get that far. Furthermore, each life can only last a certain length of time (generally around three minutes), the clock being reset at the start of a level. If the clock does run out, the player instantly loses that life.

Summary from the IGDB community database — the condition and contents of this listing are described above and in the photos.

Watch gameplayGhosts 'n Goblins [5 Screw] on NES

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