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It's close to midnight and the shivers are running up and down my spine - which wouldn't be so bad only they're wearing spiked running shoes!
The reason for my terrible state is that the living dead are out to get me and I don't mean the staff of YS - they're just brain dead! Instead we're talking about the abduction of my beloved (not Gwyn - you're welcome to him) by a gargoyle, and if that leaves a nasty taste in your mouth then gargoyle with antiseptic.
Being a noble noble it's all in a knight's work to nobble the forces of evil instead of snaring another bird. So hi-ho, hi-ho, it's gravely to the cemetery we go, where all manner of unmannerly man-monsters are massing for a massacre. It's a clear case of never mind the warlocks, here's the six six six pistols.
When you face these felons you must be feline happy because you get nine lives, that're effectively doubled because when you're first grazed by a whisker you leap out of your armour but not your skin. Be glad the Spectrum isn't hi-res when you run around in your undies or everybody would be able to see if you're wearing clean combies!
If the ghouls grab you, the raven swoops down or the punk plants gob on you in this state of undress you're a gonner, taking the Z(ombie)-Plan diet and becoming a bag of bones in a trice. It's also back to the start of the section, so watch it!
After you've conquered another gargoyle (it'll take several hits) you're in for a little island hopping on a moving island before you're ready to face the frights of the second sector. How I wish I could report on these terrors but I'm still battling the guardian of the gates. Apparently next up are lifts and the game goes platform, so look before you leap because the sky is alive with the sound of monsters.
This is another superb arcade conversion from Elite who's really doing great things in this field - or should that be graveyard? It's very difficult, but also highly addictive. There are slight graphics problems with a little flicker in the graveyard and sometimes the sprite collisions aren't as accurate as they might be - though as this is in your favour I wouldn't complain.
Your monochromatic noble is also indistinct at times when he's against a dark background but at least there are no attribute clashes to brighten the sombre mood and if the front end seems bare as bones that's surely because the memory is all used up for gameplay.
In short, play Ghosts'n'Goblins and you'll be grabbed by the ghoulies. And as a non-sexist note for that half of the population without ghoulies, don't worry - it'll give you the willies!

Verdict: 9/10
Review by Rachel Smith

Shoot a gravestone over and over again enough times in Ghosts and Goblins and a wizard appears and turns you into a frog.

Ste worked as a freelancer on a number of 8-bit and 16-bit home computer conversions of the classic Capcom coin-op when he first started in the games industry.

The Amstrad CPC version was very ugly because the programmer had worked out that the only way to get CPC to handle full screen scrolling *and* sprites was to use a 16 colour screen mode (4 bits per pixel), but only use 4 colours each (2 bits) for background and sprites, in order to avoid having to do any masking of sprites. The result was a very ugly game as the number of colours was so massively restricted, even though it ran fairly fast.

The 8-bit versions appear to have been re-released on Elite's budget label 'Encore', as was the fashion towards the end of the 8-bit home computer days.



Ste Pickford writes "The Amstrad version was my very first "professional" work. I was only 15 and still at school at the time, and I think how it happened was that the programmer, Nigel Alderton (who had just finished the excellent Commando conversion for the Spectrum) needed an artist and got my name through his friend Mike Webb, who was my brother's boss at Binary Design.

Nigel lived locally near my home in Stockport, and came round to my house one evening in his flash Escort XR3i and offered me £50 to do all the graphics for the game. I probably would have paid him £50 for the privilege if I'd had the money, but although he was paying me absolutely peanuts, £50 was still more money than I'd ever had in my life at that time.

This was a freelance job of course, to work on at home, so there was no way I would have access to the coin-op machine itself.

He gave me a pile of photographs he'd taken of the game being played through as a starting point, and these gave me good enough images of the sprites and backgrounds to copy, but there was no way I could work out the layouts of the levels themselves. Taking my job ever-so-seriously I took a trip down to Stockport arcade one afternoon with a notepad and pencil with the intention of watching people play the game and drawing out the map layouts as they played. A couple of players were a bit puzzled by this, and I quietly (and proudly) explained I was making a computer game version of the game, but I think somebody must have complained because after about 20 minutes the owner of the arcade came over and threw me out for trying to rip off his machines!

I must have explained my problem to Nigel, because he arranged to take me to Elite's offices in Walsall one evening after school to play the coin-op they had there and work out the maps. My Mum was a bit worried about this I seem to remember, sending her son off with some flash stranger she didn't know, half way down the country to play seedy arcade games, but to her credit she trusted me enough to let me go.

I met the boss guy at Elite (whose name I've forgotten), then we were stationed in a tiny cupboard piled with boxes and a tatty coin-op cabinet with Ghosts n Goblins set to Free Play. FREE PLAY! We could play it as much as we liked and it wouldn't cost us a penny! Its hard to get across what a thrill that was in those days, when home computer games were just pale imitations of the real thing, and every go of an arcade game cost about 5 or 10 percent of my weekly pocket money.

The game was harder than I thought, and it was taking a while for us to get through to the later levels, even with infinite continues. I was pretty rubbish at it, so Nigel played mostly, while I stood by and sketched the map layout if it was a new bit. Eventually everyone else left the office as the night wore on. While Nigel was trying to get to new levels I had a bit of a wander around Elite's scruffy rooms. It was a computer game kid's wonderland - boxes and boxes of cassettes and posters of every Elite game piled everywhere. I asked Nigel if anyone would mind if I took a copy of a couple of games which I didn't already own, and he told me I couldn't - the miserable sod.

By the time we'd finished it was getting light again. I'd never stayed up all night before, but this wasn't just staying awake, this was burning the midnight oil - pulling out all the stops to meet a tough deadline. I felt like a real professional, the kinda guy who gets the job done no matter what it takes, screw the consequences! We stopped at a service station on the way home (another first for me!), and I ate the breakfast Nigel bought me glowing with pride and smug satisfaction.

Of course, it never occurred to me to phone my Mum up and explain that I wouldn't be home the night before. I was too caught up in self importance and the sheer white-hot excitement and of computer game creation. We got back to my house about 8 in the morning and my Mum was livid! She'd been up all night worried sick about me, wondering where I was, why I hadn't come home or rang, and just who these strange people were whom I'd gone off with. She must have known how dozy I was and thankfully was only just on the verge of phoning the police to report me missing.

Sorry Mum!

I did all the Amstrad GnG graphics long before I started work at Binary Design, but it was while I was at there that I found out that my loading screen had been converted to work on the C64 by Mike Webb, one of the bosses at Binary, and used on the C64 version of the game.

Conversions like this were a little tricky as the Amstrad used a straight bitmap screen with 4 bits per pixel (16 colours), but the C64, while allowing a similar number of colours on screen, divided the screen into character blocks each of which could only use 4 colours. Mike wrote a program to convert the bitmap to character format, making the best guesses it could when too many colours existed in one place. The result was probably a screen which was a little bit more detailed and complex than I would have attempted if I was trying to draw with a character based screen in mind. Of course, it uses the awful, washed out C64 colour palette though...

Nobody ever paid me a penny for the C64 screen, although I got plenty of compliments for it at the time.

The ST version was a project that dragged on for years and years, like a kind of living nightmare.

This was a freelance job, and completely unconnected to the other version of Ghosts n Goblins I'd already done the graphics for years earlier, and completely unconnected to the other freelance work I'd done on Elite games. It was just a coincidence that I was back working on the same game in my spare time.

My friend Mike from Binary Design had got himself the gig to write the game freelance (while still in full time employment), and I readily agreed to do the graphics for him on a similar basis.

I think I did a reasonable job on the graphics, and in reasonable time, and the game started off looking pretty good. But it dragged on and on. I think MIke left Binary during this time, and was working full time on the game as a freelancer for a while, but the game looked like it would never come out at one point.

I was owed £500 for the longest time. I can't have done the graphics for nothing, so my fee must have been a bit more than this (although £1k sounds way too high for those days), and I must have got a bit of cash at the beginning. In fact, I have a vague recollection of Mike offering to double my fee if I could hang on a bit for the money, so maybe he paid me £250, out of a total fee of £500, then doubled the remainder he owed me at some point.

At first I was annoyed and tried to chase the money up all the time, but Mike was really hassled, and obviously didn't have it, and we fell out over this for a while. Then, later, it became a bit of a joke - every time I bumped into Mike I'd ask for my £500 and he'd laugh nervously. Still later, after Mike finally got the game finished, we used to see each other socially quite a lot and Mike was flush again, so I started asking for my money more seriously, but by then he'd just laugh at me without any nervousness at all.

When I ended up at Software Creations years later, Mike was working there, and I halfheartedly tried to get him to pay up again, without any luck.

In fact, before I wrote this I'd forgotten all about that money, but I'm a bit skint right now and I could really do with it. So Mike, if you're reading this, send me a cheque!"

A brave knight is just about to propose to his dusky-eyed maiden when out of a dark sky swoops a huge salivating demon. Before the knight can so much as re-buckle his armour, the horrible monster seizes the knight's beloved and sweeps her off to its foul lair.

Thankfully the scene of this Capcom arcade conversion is set in days of old when knights were bold, so the love-lorn hero sets out on a quest, a quest to rescue his damsel. Scampering across a scrolling landscape, he must make his way to the demon king's murky lair. Our hero really has his work cut out for him - the path to the demon king's abode is filled with nasties who are all determined to end the knight's mission of mercy prematurely. To make things even more tricky, each section of the game has to be completed within a time limit.

The knight starts out, resplendent in shiny armour as he scuttles towards the demon king's lair and a romantic reunion. Contact with the monsters in the game results in the knight losing something vital. After his first encounter with a nasty, he is so shocked that his tin suit falls off and he is left scampering around in his undies. Following the second clash he loses a life and his skeleton crumples to the ground. The knight is provided with nine lives, and each time a life is lost he is returned to the start of the current segment of the game.

In the first zone, the gallant knight battles through a graveyard filled with zombies crawling out of the tombs, arms out-stretched to meet him. Unfortunately they're not going to give our hero a sloppy kiss on the cheek. Killing him is more what they have in mind. Apart from the zombies patrolling around the graveyard a number of other nasty creatures hinder his progress. Kamikaze owls swoop down from great heights, and carnivorous plants shoot gobs of acidic digestive juice at the chivalrous crusader.

The knight is not totally defenceless. At the start of the game he is provided with a weapon. This can either be a lance, a sword or a magic fireball - all activated by a press of the fire button. Some weapons are more effective than others: the fire bombs are lobbed into the air and careful timing Is needed to dispose of nasties, while the fire button sends out a stream of daggers at gizzard height if the hero is equipped with the little knife. Points are collected for each nasty killed. Some of the Demon King's minions carry weapons, and when they are killed the knight's weapon changes automatically - care is needed if you are to avoid being lumbered with a weapon you don't want.

Once the knight has managed to get through the perils in the graveyard, there's a rather large overweight demon to destroy. The larger characters in the game take several hits before they are killed. Once the demon is dead, the knight has to cross a lethal lake by using a raft. With or without his armour, the knight sinks without a trace into the lake's murky depths if he misjudges the leap. Swimming is apparently not a skill taught on chivalry courses...

Through a dark wood, avoiding more diving owls and witch creatures, and it's time for a showdown with an ogre, affectionately called Fatty Stomper by his friends. When the knight manages to blast him into little puffs of oxygen and ozone he gains the key to the Ice Palace and a new suit of armour if he happens to be In his undies at the time. This section of the game is played on a backdrop which scrolls in four directions, and the knight must leap from platform to platform killing evil goblins that look rather like winged teddy bears. They are far from cuddly, swooping down from great heights with murder on their minds. Fireball-spitting veggies also inhabit the Ice Palace, and bonus points can be collected by nabbing priceless treasures carried by some of the evil creatures. Mistiming a leap can be fatal - the Ice Palace is build above water, and knights can't swim...

After the Ice Palace comes a ghost town, populated with all manner of weird and wonderful monsters that swoop out of shuttered windows and chase the questing knight. After t