Ghost House
Sega Master System
Nostalgia Factor:
When I was a kid I had exactly one friend who owned a Sega Master System - Patrick Kirschbaum (if you are reading this, Patrick, hi!). I used to visit his house quite frequently and every time I’d come over I’d want to play his “Sega”, which is what we called the Master System. I had an NES and I was super curious what this mysterious other system was all about. Unfortunately, he only owned one game for the Master System, and it was this game: Ghost House. I got the feeling he didn’t like the game very much, because his reaction was always negative whenever I’d want to play it. He always wanted to ride bikes or do something else instead. When we did play, he’d always pause the game after a few minutes of playing it and yell “commercial break!” We’d then run around the house playing with toys and doing other little kid stuff. I’d say cumulatively I only played this game about 20 minutes over the countless number of trips to his house.
As the years have passed, I’ve always wanted to come back and find a way to play that Master System game from Patrick’s house. The only problem was I couldn’t remember its name! I searched through Google. I looked through a countless number of screenshots from Master System games. Nothing looked familiar to me one bit. I’d say I’ve been looking for this game for at least five years now. A couple years ago I thought I lucked out and found it when I played Alex Kidd in Miracle World (you can read the review at the bottom of this page) but it turns out that wasn’t the right game.
Well, just a few days ago I accidentally stumbled upon a screenshot of Ghost House. As soon as I saw that blue background and the vampire coffin and the protagonist with the emo haircut, I knew this was the game I’d been looking for all these years. I immediately made it a goal to play Ghost House and review it for this blog. So here we are.
Would the game actually be any good, or should I have listened to Patrick all those years ago? Let’s find out.
Story:
You play as Mick, a vampire hunter out to wipe the vampire scourge from the face of the planet. Throughout the course of the game you visit six houses, each of which contains five vampires. Destroy all the vampires in each house, you win the game.
That’s really all there is to this game’s story. I don’t have its instruction manual, so maybe there are more details in there. But that’s all I got and that’s all that is explained in-game. So you’re just going to have to deal with it!
Gameplay:
This game has a bit of a learning curve. Nothing is explained, you’re just dropped straight into the action. It can be very confusing if you don’t know what your goal is. Here’s what happened the first time I played.
I started the game in a house. I could go left and right or use ladders to go up and down to different levels in the house. In this house were standard enemies that I killed by punching or jumping on them. The first enemy I killed dropped a key. At this point I didn’t know what the key was for but I remember thinking: “oh, that was easy.” Every once in a while as I explored this house, swords and arrows would come flying from off the screen in the direction of my character. I just jumped over them or avoided them.
Every once in a while, I’d encounter a box lying on the ground. Sometimes when I’d walk by them, a vampire would pop out and attack me. Other times, nothing happened. I quickly learned to avoid these boxes because I was no match for the vampires. They killed me pretty easily.
As I explored and explored this house, I started to think to myself: “okay, now what?” There seemed to be no exit to the house. No obvious destination. If I walked far enough in one direction, things started to loop over again. I explored every inch of that first stage and could not for the life of me figure out what I was supposed to do. I don’t know how it happened but suddenly I noticed that my character had a sword in his hand. Did I get it from jumping and landing on the sword that came flying across the screen? I must have!
With this sword in my possession, I wondered if I could kill one of those vampires now that I had a sword. So I tracked down the nearest coffin, the vampire popped out, and…. bam. I was killed again. The vampire moved too quickly for me, and I could not hit it with the sword no matter how hard I tried.
But now I was on to something. Maybe I had to kill all the vampires in the house before I could move on. I started wandering around the house, waiting for a sword to come flying across the screen so I could jump on it and collect it for my own. But they just weren’t coming. I explored three levels of the house and couldn’t collect a single sword. They just weren’t appearing for me, and when they did appear I wasn’t ready to jump on them and collect them.
It was around this time I discovered that if I jumped into a hanging ceiling light, it would freeze all enemies on screen for a few seconds. I decided to test something out and see if this trick would on a vampire. And it did! When the vamp was frozen I ran up and punched it a bunch of times before it broke apart and died.
I did it! I killed a vampire!
I went around the house and killed a couple other vampires in a similar fashion. All right. I was getting the hang of the game. I went to track down and kill another vampire when all of a sudden the “light trick” wasn’t working anymore. I had a limited number of times I could use this in one stage. Of course. I knew it was too easy!
After dying, I knew that the only way I could kill the remaining two vampires in the stage would be if I could get my hands on a sword. I ran around the house a few more times, but there seemed to be no rhyme or reason as to what triggered these swords to come whipping across the screen. That’s when I broke down and finally turned to the internet for help. Apparently walking in front of a fireplace triggered the appearance of these swords, for some reason. So I sought out the nearest fireplace, walked past it, and lo and behold a sword came flying across the room.
With this knowledge in hand, I was able to defeat the remaining two vampires in the house and move on to the second level of the game.
Phew! That was hard!
You ain’t seen nothing yet, buddy. The next stage was even harder. More enemies, harder to find vampires, fewer opportunities to use the freeze attack or find swords. And the vampires were faster, too! It was a struggle (and yes, I cheated and used save states), but I was able to beat the second level after an hour or so of playing.
And then it was time to move on to the third level. Again, the difficulty ratcheted up. The vampires were super fast now, and all the light fixtures I would use to freeze them were placed in very inconvenient spots. I couldn’t even get TO these light fixtures to activate them without getting killed by a vampire. Some of the vampires even respawned after I killed them, and I’d have to kill them all over again. Whaaaaaattt? At this point, save states became my best friend. I tried, and tried, and tried. Over and over again. Must have died and reloaded a countless number of times. Eventually I was successful.
Then I was on to the fourth stage. And the fifth. And the sixth. After passing the sixth level, the game was officially over. I had done it. I’d beaten Ghost House. Patrick Kirschbaum would have been so proud of me. I wonder if he didn’t like this game because of the difficulty? I think I might be on to something here.
But that’s really the whole point of the game. Explore these six houses and kill all five vampires in each house. If you can do that, you can beat the game. Oh yeah, those keys that I didn’t know what they did? They unlock vampire coffins. That’s why sometimes they’d open when I would walk by and sometimes they wouldn’t. If I had a key, they’d open. If not, well then I would have to find one.
Graphics:
Honestly, this game doesn’t look like much. The characters are detailed enough and some of the background colors are fun, but the game is very simple looking. That said, compare this to literally any NES game and you can see why I was so interested in playing it as a kid. It looks better than most titles that came out around the same time in the 1980s.
Overall the game has a fun, cartoonish vibe to it that I can’t help but appreciate. It can't really say it aged particularly well, but at least it does not look ugly like some other games of its time.
Sound:
The game sounds good overall. The main tune that plays through each stage is catchy, if repetitive and “bleepy and bloopy”. I like how the music takes a dramatic turn each time a vampire comes out of its coffin. Before I knew what I was doing in this game, I used to dread that damn music.
Sound effects are nothing special – pretty much what you’d expect from a game like this. I don’t have much else to say here, so I am going to move on.
Overall:
I’ll admit, I was having a pretty rotten time with this game until I figured out its mechanics. Once I figured out that you had to kill vampires, how to get my hands on swords, and how to kill enemies using the light freeze trick, it was awn! I started to think of this game less of an action/platformer and more like a puzzle game. Figuring out the game and taking advantage of its mechanics is key to your success. If you are like me, you’ll quickly get hooked on this game once you figure out how to play it.
All in all, however – the game is really short. Just six stages that can each be beaten in five or ten minutes once you’ve got the hang of things. The difficulty level makes the game seem longer, however. My major gripe is that the difficulty becomes pretty cheap and unfair the deeper you get into the game. There were several vampires that I simply could not get away from. They home in on you the second they come out of their coffin and just batter you incessantly. I’d get trapped against a wall or a platform and I would not be able to move because they would keep swooping in and hitting me repeatedly until I died. I couldn’t get to a light. My sword would disappear. I couldn’t even freaking move. That’s just poor game design to me. How can you give your player NO chance to get away from the enemy and plan out a proper attack? Thank the lord for save states, because I don’t see how I ever would have been able to beat this game without them. Certain vampires killed me about 30 times before I could take them down. And when they’d respawn and you’d have to kill them again? Fuck no.
How many lives does the game give you per continue? Three.
HOW? How is anyone supposed to be able to beat this game without save states? I’m not sure it is possible. I consider myself to be “decent” at video games, and it would take me weeks and weeks and a lot of really good luck to be able to make it through this game without saving and restarting. That’s if I would even be able to do it at all.
I supposed I’m glad I played this game. Gave me some closure on my childhood. It is a fun game, but the difficulty just really drags it down too much for me to be able to consider it something I would return to again. I doesn’t help that it is repetitive, and there really isn’t much to see or do besides kill vampires. Ghost House is fun for maybe an hour or two, especially after you figure out its mechanics, but then the game quickly wears out its welcome. I can see why Patrick never wanted to play this game with me. On the whole, I liked it. But just barely.
Final Score:
C
If you liked this review, check out some of my other game reviews:
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