The Haunted Hoard: Run Ghost Run (PSP)

Plenty of early arcade hits have seen numerous imitators, the likes of Pong, Space Invaders, and Pac-Man having many copycats that most people could identify easily enough as clones. However, there is a lesser known old game that has had it’s gameplay repackaged by other game designers a few times over the years. Pang, also known as Buster Bros., is the clear inspiration for Run Ghost Run, to the point it wouldn’t be too inaccurate to say that Run Ghost Run is essentially just Pang with a Halloween-appropriate coat of paint.

 

In Run Ghost Run, players play as some poor fellow who finds himself in a haunted castle while trying to escape a storm, although the backgrounds featured during play seem to say this castle has an Egyptian desert and snowy area very close to its battlements. To clear a level, you need to eliminate every ghost in that stage within the time limit. Even people unfamiliar with Buster Bros. should be able to easily pick up on how they’re meant to go about doing this. Wielding a vertically firing weapon, the player character launches a squiggly line upwards that disappears when it makes contact with an object, enemy, or the top of the screen. If the shot hits one of the ghosts, they’ll split into smaller ghosts that must now be shot, the ghosts splitting into smaller and smaller ghosts until finally the smallest form will be properly eliminated. On its own it is a fairly simple task, the player only really needing to worry about their positioning in the 2D plane to avoid the one hit kill that is touching one of the spirits they’re hunting, but there are a few things that keep it from being entirely basic.

There are three types of ghosts you’ll need to eliminate, the most common one being a classic bedsheet ghost that bounces around in arcs. The game eventually introduces pumpkin ghosts to the mix, the gourds flying in complete disregard to gravity and only changing course when they make contact with something in the environment. Lastly, a spirit in a cloak that behaves quite similarly to the bedsheet ghost reveals it has a trick up its nonexistent sleeve, splitting into six smaller ghosts when hit instead of two. The challenge of popping the ghosts doesn’t really come from their unique tricks though. The play area in Run Ghost Run is the size of the PSP screen, meaning that if you don’t pop the ghosts intelligently, you can quickly have a play field overrun with tiny bouncing ghosts that will be difficult to dodge. On top of this, there are two more enemy types that exist not as targets necessarily but more as further complications. Bats will fly back and forth in some levels dropping rocks to try and hurt you, and if you don’t pop a large ghost quickly enough, they might drop a snail that will begin to patrol the platform its own, the mustachioed mollusks showing one of the first small cracks in an otherwise competent Buster Bros. clone. Sometimes, approaching a snail from the side will kill it, as will jumping on top of it, but other times, you’ll die while trying these methods instead, the detection for hurting them imprecise and thus risky for the wrong reasons.

 

The game divides its 36 levels into groups of four where the player needs to make a few lives last until the end or risk a restart, but levels are pretty short due to the limited screen real estate meaning the ghosts can never get too far away. A few ghosts will be placed down per stage that you need to eliminate, along with platforms that make that task much less straightforward. Area configurations with moving platforms, rows of spikes, slippery ice, and close quarters all ask the player to jump around and try to find where they can fire their shots to split the ghosts safely, with the many barriers providing more surfaces the ghosts can bounce off of to be more difficult to predict. While a few of these can certainly be incredibly generic in design like just having a few floating floors, the game does shift the layouts around enough to make the levels feel and function differently enough throughout, but there are a few clunky designs along the way as well. For example, one area features a symmetrical design where each half has two icy ramps leading down to some spikes. Due to the way the ghosts bounce, they’ll inevitably get trapped bouncing at the bottom of these ramps above the spikes, meaning the task of trying to slip into the small space needed to catch them is quite tedious and very dangerous because you can only just get beneath them to fire your weapon. If a level has a lot of walls or floors it can also be difficult to squeeze in and shoot ghosts, but most of the levels allow the player some freedom of movement to enjoy the easier spirit hunts before being hit by one of the more challenging designs.

There are some power-ups that can help the player out though. These are pretty much the exact ones found in Pang, like the ability to fire multiple lines instead of just one at a time and the shot style where it will linger for a few seconds so ghosts can bounce into it. The lingering variation actually has a few designated levels for it where the tight spaces you need to navigate have the ghost busting made possible by these trap-like shots, although the randomness of item drops can make this shot style unavailable even when it’s practically required. Other than the food items that provide point bonuses for getting high scores on levels though, every power up provides a strong benefit if you grab it. A forcefield item that lets you take an extra hit before dying, a dynamite bundle that will split almost any type of ghost on screen, and an hourglass that freezes foes for a bit all help to deal with a game area that can become crowded with quick enemies, but again a small issue crops up. The timer will freeze enemies but not the environment, and some levels clearly didn’t consider this aspect like the one with rising and falling platforms. You can’t get beneath those platforms, but if the time freeze activates, the ghosts can end up stuck in place as a platform rises above them, the spirits trapped when they return to real time. Much like the lingering shot, some stages have items that are practically guaranteed, and for some reason the timer power-up seems almost assured in that stage.

 

There is one mode that seems free of the small problems Run Ghost Run’s story levels face though, and that’s the endless mode. On a flat stretch of ground with no hazards or other surfaces, ghosts will spawn in gradually, the player needing to score as much as they can with only three lives to do it. Things start easy and slow but pick up the pace to a considerable degree, but being able to grab multiple power-ups from the abundant ghosts means it is possible to get a pretty deep run. While the story mode provides a structured experience with unique stages to ensure the game isn’t too shallow, this survival mode provides the easy-to-return-to style of play that makes it a decent fixture on your PSP, especially since the Buster Bros. Collection isn’t available for download on the system in the U.S.

THE VERDICT: Run Ghost Run takes the enemy-splitting action of Buster Bros. and gives it a spooky makeover, but there isn’t much else setting it apart from its ancestor. That does mean it is built off a decent action base however, the constant splitting of the ghosts keeping things kinetic and enjoyably hectic, but there are quirks to its design like the snails and some level design that can hamper play. There is just enough to the power ups and 36 curated levels to make a playthrough alright, but this average Pang clone lacks anything substantial enough to elevate it above borrowed ideas.

 

And so, I give Run Ghost Run for PSP…

An OKAY rating. I consider it a disservice to label a game as just a clone of someone else’s work, but Run Ghost Run really doesn’t try to do much more than copy the games that inspired it. It plays in that space well enough, its level designs mostly up to the task of making the ghost popping play enjoyable, but nothing really makes it more than slightly amusing, and little quibbles like the hit detection on the snails stick out when there’s very few enemies or obstacles in total. It’s got arcade style action and the shift from a few large bouncing enemies to a swarm of smaller foes as they split makes each small level have a gradual speed and difficulty increase, but its limited and derivative content never tries to break the mold. Whether it be the structured levels or the endless mode, Run Ghost Run is best played in short bursts since it doesn’t really have the hooks or complexity progression needed to evolve it beyond the baseline of mild fun its small batch of elements can provide.

 

When a developer does draw so heavily from another game’s design, it is a chance to add an interesting twist, but Run Ghost Run only really adds its Halloween style to the skeleton of Buster Bros. and thus just feels like a retread of an enjoyable but simple gameplay style. While I have drawn many comparisons here, I still judged it on its own merits rather than condemning it for being unoriginal, and considering Pang isn’t copied as often as other old arcade games and isn’t as well known either, Run Ghost Run really does little harm with trying to share this less traveled game style but with a spooky twist.