The Haunted Hoard: Ghost House (Master System)

Ghost House is a simple game the delivers on the two promises its title makes. It takes place in a house, and there are some ghosts, although the game manual gives them wear the oddly ominous name of Death despite being blue bedsheet ghosts who are sticking their tongues out. This is hardly the oddest thing about a title that sounded like it described the whole of the game, as the ghosts in this particular house aren’t even the focus of the gameplay or really all too important to it. Instead, the focus is on the Draculas, that indeed being a deliberate pluralization of what is normally a single defined character. While many games include the Dracula character as a major threat, Ghost House takes things a step further by having the player take down not one, but five Draculas per level across six rounds of play.

 

Admittedly, the manual does say that of the five Draculas, only one is the authentic vampire lord, but even if you find him first, you must defeat the pretenders as well to complete a stage. Taking on the role of Mick, a pointy-eared boy with a giant fist that might just be a reskinned version of Sega’s old mascot Alex Kidd, you must reclaim the family jewels you’re meant to inherit that somehow ended up in Dracula’s mansion, which seems to be the titular Ghost House. The house is a three story building, each floor changing its visuals but having a consistent design across the six possible rounds of play. Each floor wraps around itself to essentially make the house a large ring, but this makes for better navigation as you can quickly and easily search an entire floor for Draculas just by walking in a direction. Moving between floors usually requires connective ladders, but the player can also enter doors that connect to odd spots around the mansion, making for easy getaways from danger or as a way to quickly jump between areas in your search for the vampires.

The ghost house is inhabited by many enemies that will try and get in your way, with bats being the most plentiful. They fly in from one side of the screen and will disappear once they’ve reached the other side, but since movement in Ghost House is often done on different layers of a two-dimensional screen, and the different floors of each individual story of the house are often filled by the flight patterns of this particular foe, the bats can be decent obstacles just by flying along and trying to bonk into you. They are certainly the most plentiful foe, but they can be beaten quite easily with your punch or by jumping on them. Oddly enough, the manual constructs some nonsense idea these are “baseball bats gone bad”, which seems to be a pun just made for the sake of it. Deaths, which are the oddly named blue ghosts, just move about, usually trying to approach you but much easier to deal with than bats since they’re more predictable. Most of the time, if a Death is causing trouble, it is because it’s body-blocking a ladder from above, meaning you can’t kill it but instead have to trick it into moving away far enough to give you an opening. The game’s most original and cutest enemy are strange fire breathing monsters that hop around and can deal incredible damage with their fiery attacks, and they have a special edge in that you can’t punch them. Jumping on them is the only way to hurt them, and the good news is, save the Draculas, every enemy dies in one hit if they’re hit in the right manner. The mummies are the hardest regular enemies, saved for Round 2 and onward, with the unique ability to climb ladders as they actively pursue the player at a much better speed than the Deaths. To hurt them, you need to acquire a special dagger item that gives you stronger attacks to replace your fist with, but it can only be used a few times before its gone. The enemies fulfill their individual roles well enough, that being to mill about and cause trouble as you explore the mansion in search of the way to actually complete the level.

 

Interestingly enough, the ghost house is a bit hostile to the player itself. Besides the obvious danger of the burning ground found in the basement level, touching certain environmental objects will cause attacks to fly in from off-screen. The tables with oil lamps on them will always trigger an arrow to fire at Mick when he touches them, but Mick can jump on the arrow to defeat it safely or simply crouch under it to let it pass. There are spider-webs in the air that Mick will have to shake free from if he touches them, leaving him open most often to the bats flying about the house. A more interesting danger in the house occurs if you touch a candelabra, as a dagger flies in to strike you instead of an arrow and, if you jump on this projectile, you can pick it up for use as a stronger attack method. Perhaps the most powerful aid the house can give you though are special light fixtures that, when touched, will briefly freeze time for everyone but Mick. This is perfect for setting up enemies for easy kills, and it’s especially helpful when the time comes to take down a Dracula.

The five Draculas you must defeat each round start off inside their coffins, the player needing to kill enemies to find a key they can use to open the coffins. The keys aren’t hidden in a specific enemy though, instead popping up randomly after a kill, and they aren’t very hard to get since they spawn so easily, so getting to the coffin is often the bigger challenge than finding the key for it. Once you crack a coffin open and are prepared to fight the vampire within… you encounter the game’s biggest flaw. Despite being the focus of your adventure and something you will have to do 30 times to beat the game, the Dracula fights are just not enjoyable. Dracula tends to spend most of his time in bat form flying about in a frenzy, trying to ram into you for easy damage. You can punch him while he’s in this form, but not only are your punches short range and hard to hit such a fast moving target with, you will take damage if you do land that punch. While the vampires in the first few rounds can be defeated with such a self-sacrificing tactic easily enough, each round they get more durable, meaning you risk a lot of your health trying to attack them while they’ve got such a huge movement advantage. Dracula will eventually settle down on the ground and turn into his human form, slowly drifting towards you to attack that way instead, and here you can score some easy hits and take less in return. However, Dracula does not like to spend time in this mode, quickly going back to bat form to harass you more while he has a clear advantage. You can wait for him to shift back, but this slows down the fight and involves you being in danger for a lot of the time unless you are near a light fixture or brought a knife to speed up the battle some.

 

There are some mercies to be found to make the Dracula battles slightly more palatable. The house contains question mark pick-ups that restore your health so that you can usually heal up any small damage enemies have caused to be on full health for the big fight, and after a Dracula battle, they drop a heart that will return you to full health, but there is something incredibly devious about that heart. Each round there is one True Dracula and he has a unique trait of needing to be fought twice in a row. After seemingly dying, as in he dissolves into a pile of bones and dust and leaves his heart floating in the air, the real Dracula will revive and begin attacking in his bat form immediately. If you don’t pick up the heart, any Dracula can revive, so you often have to run in and grab it and take a first hit in the rematch with the real one with no sign it’s the real one beforehand or any good way to avoid it. Over the course of the game, Dracula battles not only get longer, but Dracula gets faster, and since regular enemies save the likes of the fire breather stick around to bother you during the Dracula fights, late game battles can be particularly annoying. Once you do overcome all the Draculas and have your jewels though, the last task to a round is finding a special exit door that appears, which is quite the relief. You do have limited lives in Ghost House, but the round structure and ability to earn more lives makes it possible to get to the end after a few tries to learn the ropes of the game and which strategies work well on your flighty main foe.

THE VERDICT: The oddness of Ghost House’s manual is perhaps the most interesting thing about the game. Setting you up to fight five Draculas, bats who supposedly like baseball, and blue ghost wearing the heavy moniker of Death, it sounds like a fun bit of absurdity, but the gameplay doesn’t have much to it. The area design and enemies work well enough together, making moving about the mansion a bit of a challenge, but the battles with the vampires, the most important part of your quest, are mostly manic attempts to land a hit on a foe who moves around too freely and too quickly to really react to well, making it hard to approach the battles with reliable strategies. Fighting five Draculas sounds like silly fun, but across six rounds, that makes for thirty Dracula battles that wear down the simple design into a tedious one.

 

And so, I give Ghost House for the Sega Master System…

A BAD rating. The Dracula battles are the focal point of the experience, but they aren’t so unforgivable as to drag it down into deeper depths. Moving about the ghost house is a fine enough challenge due to little factors like finding the coffins and things that could help in the Dracula fight like daggers and light fixtures, but the battles drag things out as the vampires get too strong later in the game, meaning you have to spend more time dealing with a poor battle design that could almost be tolerated otherwise. Less time in the bat form and less tricks like the True Dracula’s revive would help the encounters be less of a nuisance, but as is they are too erratic in a game that otherwise follows some defined movement and attack rules. Regular bats fly in a small selection of consistent paths, you can learn which parts of the environment cause the projectile attacks, and all other enemies have to walk or hop across the floor just like you do… but the vampires in their bat form fly about freely and you don’t really have the movement options to keep up well. Ghost House’s design isn’t too complex and certainly wouldn’t have impressed much even with better Dracula battles, but it ends up disappointing with what little it has for failing with one of its most important components.

 

When you beat a level in Ghost House, it usually has a small sentence congratulating you, but the final one is at least a somewhat silly goodbye from a game that could have almost been oddly charming. “Now you cannot live without this game!” it boasts, right before it changes to its Game Over screen, cutting you off from continued play. Sadly, this ghost house isn’t even worth a short visit.