alt Hacker News> excruciatingly difficult
As the author of the article notes, the NES was not popular in the UK or Europe as a whole, and indeed, I've still never seen one in the flesh, so to speak.
But we did have arcades in the town I grew up in, and when Ghosts n' Goblins was current, I can remember discussing it with another kid in our schoolyard. He told me that someone he knew had made it all the way to the end of the game. Totally agog, I asked what happened when you completed it, and he told me, "There's a message that says, "This was all an illusion created by Satan." And then you have to do it all over again."
I was privately skeptical that this could be true, because I couldn't believe that the programmers would be that mean, but also because the game was so bloody difficult. I didn't believe that anyone actually could make it all the way through, unless they had a six foot-high pile of ten pence pieces.
But about fifteen years later, I discovered MAME and ROM repositories, and with the aid of its cheat system, I pushed through to the bitter end of Ghosts n' Goblins. And damned if I wasn't rewarded with the message, "This was all an illusion created by Satan."
Tokuro Fujiwara, j'accuse.
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> I pushed through to the bitter end of Ghosts n' Goblins. And damned if I wasn't rewarded with the message, "This was all an illusion created by Satan."
Weeell...here's the thing. Erm. You didn't push through to the end. You just got the "bad" ending.
The game does very much have a proper ending, and reaching it is surprisingly straightforward.
You just have to beat it twice.
To be fair, we are talking about arcade games. You were not supposed to finish them, but to finish your money before that :-) [].
You are paying for a game, so you have the right to continue playing until you die. In that context, restarting the game (hopefully with an higher difficulty level) is the proper course of actoin
[] The authors of Pacman probably didn't even think you would be able to reach level 256 and overflow the variable. That's how you get to a kill screen that corrupts memory.
The NES is historically amongst the most popular consoles sold in Europe, but with huge differences between countries. In some countries, every kid either had or wanted one, while in others, micros and/or Sega were dominant.
I was on the other side of this, playing Castlevania Symphony of the Night in elementary school. One day I discover something that my friend never found, even though I looked up him, since he completed the whole game.
Well what I discovered was the reverse castle and another 50% of the game he never played. I called him on the landline and started telling him about it and he was saying "what are you even talking about", he thought I was lying until he followed my instructions.
That thing settled exploration as one if my favorite thing in videogames, the discovery was amazing
The NES was pretty popular in the UK, wasn’t it? In our solidly working-class home, we had a NES. I remember getting Super Mario Bros 3 for christmas one year and so did many of my friends at school, who all lived in semi-detached two-bedroom homes or masonettes. So, we weren’t in a wealthy bubble or anything. I’m sure it sold multiple millions of copies in the UK and TV shows like GamesMaster were popular and had NES games on a show watched by a pretty big audience. How old were you when it released that you’ve never seen one in the flesh?
Whenever a friend complains about how much they hate games with boss rushes (a mechanic to artificially inflate the length of a game by forcing the player to re-fight all the previous bosses from previous levels in order) - I refer them to the "illusion moment" in Ghosts 'n Goblins.