Quick Look: Ghosts 'n Goblins Resurrection, Blizzard Arcade Collection, and Capcom Arcade Stadium

Am I weird for loving the way Ghosts 'n Goblins Resurrection looks?

@jacksmedulla: The editor who did the technical review for Eurogamer's Digital Foundry also spoke appreciatively of the remake's looks. You are not alone.

I think it looks okay; there's a fairy tale story book coming to life aspect of it that reminds me of the Good Feel craftworks games of Kirby and Yoshi. It's like paper craft puppets!

The Capcom Arcade Stadium having the free 1943: The Battle of Midway really hit me in the nostalgia bone. All those spent quarters at the laundromat waiting for my dad who is waiting for the drying cycle to finish. This was the first time I used my FlipGrip for my Switch and it was pretty great. I may find myself dropping the US$40-50 Capcom is asking for the whole collection just to play all of the STGs in it.

Jeff is there a problem with your capture card or something? There's weird video artifacting almost like the video loses a frame and then smears the screen until it catches up.

@mechanized: That's been a problem with their Parsec solution if I'm not wrong. Not too much they can do about it.

@impati3nt said:

I think they determined it was an issue with the latency settings, but the whole multi-stream thing sounds like somewhere between a zero-sum game and a balancing act.

If Capcom could guarantee they won't continue dropping $15 packs that only include one game I'm interested in, I would buy the whole Arcade Stadium without hesitating. I also might need to get it just for that Credits Movie alone...

How crazy is it that this collection won't let you listen to Rock and Roll Racing's licensed music in their music player...but the menu screen plays a cover of "Peter Gunn" on a loop?

EDIT: Also, I totally agree with Jeff that having Larry Huffman reprise his role as the announcer and ALSO add entirely new voice lines is fucking nuts. Good for them!

If it wasn't Ghosts n' Goblins, it would be a funky, weirdly animated game. I think the name is coloring just about everyone's feeling about it.

True but if it wasn't Ghosts n' Goblins the main character probably wouldnt have a head thats smaller than his biceps and hands

@jacksmedulla: I think it looks amazing. I'm also surprised at Brad's reaction. All those games are hateful fucking pricks when it comes to difficulty. Probably don't judge the arcade game off the first stage?

No, but I am disappointed there is no double jump.

Jeff murdering everyone in Blackthorn is great.

Edit: Brad asked why the Capcom song isn't on Spotify but it totally is. https://open.spotify.com/album/693UZvbz1xYuPT7EqNZSyB

I think we found the game for more Breaking Brad.

Points to the devs for trying something, but when you make a game that trades very specifically on nostalgia, you should probably be fairly conservative with your choices.

I like the art direction quite a bit, I think it is the animation that needs work. They either need to go further into making it look like a pop-up book fairy tale or they need to dial back the overblown animations to look more natural. That type of craft book look can be really cool but here it just seems like it is mixing a water color aesthetic with pop-up book animation and it just isn't working. Plus some the enemy art feels almost comic book inspired and less like what you would find in a traditional fairy tale. The environment art is great. But the character work, especially the animation is what lets it down in my mind.

Clicked on this video like "Oh cool! New ghosts 'n goblins"

Oh no, new ghosts 'n goblins...

Blackthorne proves that Jeff Gerstmann is still a threat.

Is the YouTube version glitchy for anyone ? Like a lotta video corruption

I know they were under time constraint, but I'm sad they didn't go through every game in Capcom Arcade Stadium. Long exhaustive quick looks of old game collections are some of my favourite content on this website (game room, arcade archives, atari flashback, rare replay etc etc etc)

Bit of dead air at the start here boys.

Actual video starts at 1.14

Caspo? The trumpet player?

I like the way Ghosts 'n Goblins looks, but holy crap do I have no interest in playing it.

I have no problem with how the game looks, but I'm with Jeff in that Brad convinced me the game is not worth playing. The classic games in the series were always challenging, but not completely cheap. This games looks beyond cheap, as if the developers didn't want to make it and intentionally made it unbearably hard out of anger. A games first level should never be that impossible to play through.

I honestly think Jeff is crazy re: the visual design. I like densely textured look of it - though I agree the animation has a certain Plants vs Zombies, flash animation air to it. Kinda gives me Amanita Design vibes, like a Samarost. The critiques seem harsh... but that being said, I don't really like Ghosts and Goblins either way. I find the game design really annoying.

I'm actually really liking Ghosts 'n Goblins Resurrection, art style, controls, level design and all.

I don't think that Gn'G looks absolutely horrifick, but generally speaking not the biggest fan of the "Flash-game" look. I also feel like Nidhogg 2 did this look a lot better.

I have been light on GB stuff recently, but I gotta admit, Brad willingly choosing the hardest of four difficulties and then whining about the game being too hard for an entire Quick Look has been a nice shot of nostalgia.

Oh wow, I actually like the look of Ghosts 'n Goblins. Hopefully it's more playable on a lower difficulty ... but I bet I will never play it. Especially because I don't have a switch, but also because aside from it's look I don't like anything about it.

Also, those reapers look great.

Sorry but I do feel Jeff is being unreasonably nitpicky about his precious old games, and Brad being awful at the game, yet playing on the hardest difficulty with apparantly no previous experience in the series, but still managing to blame it on the game itself...all seems a bit dickish to me not to mention unprofessional.

I agree with Jeff and I wish I didn't. One of my favorite games is Ghouls'n Ghosts on the Genesis, and I preordered this immediately after I saw it was a thing, and I'm pretty disappointed. I saw how it looked in the trailers, I was just hoping I'd be swayed somehow or at least they'd have some way to tweak the graphics. No.

They would have been far better off making another Ultimate Ghosts'n Goblins style game or like what they just did with Mega Man in my opinion.

Man, I’m so tired of games with vikings in them. Come up with something new, Blizzard.

Really disappointed Jeff already wrote this off already - but to each their own i guess.

Im digging the art style - it's much better in person.

The difficulty though - OUCH. This is much harder than previous GnG game for sure.

I was unfamiliar with Blackthorne before this, but seems like a cool game.

I still stand by Cursed Castilla EX being the best modern Ghosts 'n Goblins game around. Recommend people check that game out if they want a game in that vein.

Are you not able to move while charging magic in Resurrection? In the previous games I am pretty sure you could.

@pilgrimm1981: Sadly, that's par for the course a lot of the time.

I was trying to place the look of Resurrection, and I decided it reminds me of ads on YouTube that play incessantly for crappy mobile games. That's what it looks like. A cheap mobile game.

These look great. Great QL.

Progear is one of my favorite shooters of all time and it's never received a console port before, so it's amazing to finally see it get one. But this collection seems to have a variety of technical issues that make it a somewhat worse experience than just playing it in MAME, which is...not a great feeling.

Getting this just for RnR Racing, loved it back in the day.

I like that you guys did these all together. Smart.

Is there a reason the song at the Blizzard Arcade Classics title screen is basically the Spy Hunter theme?

Brad was playing on the hardest difficulty. There were 3 lower difficulty settings, but he was complaining how hard it was and then later revealed that he was playing on the hardest setting.

I think he said something about the language of the difficulty insinuating that it was the right way to play, but considering there are 4 difficulty settings, picking the hardest one and they complaining that the game is too hard is a little bit misleading. He later played it on the second-highest and the game seemed much more manageable.

@woodroez said:

The "Spy Hunter theme" is "Peter Gunn" by the band Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Rock and Roll Racing has the rights to use that song in their game. ;)

@milpool

Like Brad said, he didn't pick the hardest difficulty; the hardest difficulty is the Default setting. The description text also states "This is the way Ghost and Goblins is MEANT to be played".

Eh, I dunno. I have no nostalgia for Ghosts 'n' Goblins so I have zero stake in it, but Resurrrection looks fine to me as a modern reimagining of that game (except for how his legs move too quickly for how fast he actually moves so it looks like he's running on the spot). The default difficulty looks face-tearingly punishing, but hasn't that always been what that game is?

We're never getting Alien VS Predator Arcade except in that $200 arcade stick, are we?

Though I've never played Blackthorne, and it looks '90s COMIX as FUCK, so I'll probably check that out.

I honestly love the way Resurrection looks and animates. Plus, if you pick the hardest of 4 difficulty settings in a game belonging to an insanely hard series, you should expect it to be, well, hard.

I do agree that it looks too stiff even by GnG's standards, though.

I usually dislike the "marionette style" animation rotation stuff but in this case it actually looked OK. I think maybe it's because everything in the level is animated that way and it looks like a cute storybook come to life. It was not as jarring as I'm used to from games using similar animation techniques.

That said, it looked a little sluggish controlwise but I'm actually interested now since I kinda loved various versions of Ghouls 'n Ghosts and would maybe like a similar remake to this.

I don't understand why you can't play in fullscreen with the definitive editions. Why not give that option?