PERSPECTIVE
Trigger Happy
Shoot first, ask questions later
STEVEN POOLE
L ike all artforms, videogames can transport us back to happier and more innocent times. The effect is the stronger, of course, if they do so in a self-consciously neo-retro way. Just as a modern writer might choose to compose a historical novel in a pastiche of 18th-century prose style, a modern videogame might employ and play with tropes from 1970s and 1980s classics for purposes both straightforwardly nostalgic and ludically paratextual. All of which, impatient reader, is one “Parklife”-worthy way of saying: look, they rebooted Ghosts ’n Goblins!
As someone old enough to have actually played Capcom’s arcade classic in the chip shop, as well as the ZX Spectrum port and the much better (it pained me to accept it) C64 port as a friend’s house, I am also old enough to have forgotten just how viciously hard it was – something new Switch shiverer Ghosts ’n Goblins Resurrection wastes no time in gleefully reminding me. At least it has selectable difficulty levels besides the rockhard original. But a lot of the challenge comes from the particular choices the developers made as to what to update and what to keep.