Hands on with Ghosts 'n Goblins Gold on mobile

Unless you're an autistic savant, you probably never saw beyond the first level of Ghosts 'n Goblins, Capcom's classic arcade platform squelch-'em-up. It was great, but too damn hard. All arcade games were. They wanted your money.

That's why arcade conversions can jar a bit with modern audiences. Games these days are liberal, supportive, caring affairs in which player deaths are eminently avoidable and, when they occur, only vaguely inconvenient. You just brush yourself down at the most recent checkpoint and carry on.

Ghosts 'n Goblins threw enemies at you, gave you a pathetically limited range of movement with which to avoid them, and killed you entirely, by way of partial nudity, after just two knocks, sending you back to checkpoints that were unconscionably distant by today's standards.

That's why Capcom Mobile is bringing us Ghosts 'n Goblins Gold, a modern remake, largely true to the arcade original but for one detail: you have two layers of armour, rather than just one. Gold, Silver, naked, dead.

I had the opportunity to play it at the Games Convention a couple of weeks ago, and it makes a difference. You can relax slightly, knowing that you're 50 per cent more likely to survive any given encounter than in previous versions. It doesn't sound like a lot, and it isn't. Ghosts 'n Goblins Gold isn't a pushover. But it's enough to make it accessible, rather than downright frustrating.

You control it in the usual way, with '2' to jump and '4', '6', '8', and '5' letting you go left, right, duck, and fire respectively. It's true to the arcade original in terms of sound and vision, with the same squat sprites and melodramatic 8-bit bleeps. It tugs on the nostalgia strings, which is a good things or a bad thing, depending on how you feel about originality.

For a video game to survive the evolutionary race it has to do something right, however, and this one's been around for decades. Originality notwithstanding, Ghosts 'n Goblins Gold is a solid, legitiate classic, perfectly entitled to claim alpha status over the vast majority of platformers on mobile. We're expecting good things.

It's out in October, so click 'Track It!' to catch the review.