NINJA GAIDEN SHADOW (GAME BOY)

So, “gaiden” means “side-story,” right? Well, here’s a Ninja Gaiden game that actually feels like a side-story and not the main event: it’s Tecmo and Natsume’s 1991 Game Boy ninpo-em-up Ninja Gaiden Shadow! It was released as Shadow Warrior in Europe and Ninja Ryukenden GB in Japan, if you feel like you’ve played it before but don’t recognise the name. It was also apparently renamed “Ninja’s Skyscraper Fight” for the Asian market. It does include a skyscraper, and that definitely wants you dead.

Here’s the title screen. It’s certainly a title screen. A screen with a title on it. That title is Ninja Gaiden Shadow, the title of this game. Bonus points for being concise, Tecmo.

Set three years before the events of the NES Ninja Gaiden, NGS begins in traditional Ninja Gaiden style with a cinematic cut-scene, or at least as cinematic as the Game Boy can handle. A villainous force has risen in New York, and I don’t mean Vigo the Carpathian: It’s Garuda, a dark overlord with the kind of incredibly vague but definitely evil plan you often get with videogame antagonists. He tells us “my power is the fear of mankind,” whatever that means. Maybe his muscles get bigger every time he jumps out in front of someone and shouts “boo!”

There’s despair in the skyscraper. Full of people in tedious cubicle farm jobs, is it?

A man appears from the darkness. Well, he is a ninja. That’s how ninjas are supposed to work.

That makes sense. This is a Ninja Gaiden game, after all. I wasn’t expecting Bob Ross, put it that way. So here he is, Ryu Hayabusa, one of gaming’s most famous ninjas – which is odd, because after the NES Ninja Gaiden games he disappeared for a while before returning on the Xbox in 2004. I guess Ryu is just so cool that people couldn’t forget him. I know I can’t – childhood years spent being unable to beat the NES Ninja Gaiden have seen to that - which is why I always play as him in Warriors Orochi 3. That, and you can replace his sword with a baseball bat.

The action begins with Ryu outside the despair-filled skyscraper, fighting his way through legions of American football players who can command these mounted rocket turrets to discharge their deadly payload at Ryu. That’s what the enemies look like they’re doing, anyway, as they perform their little hand motions. That said, the turrets are happy to fire at Ryu without any input from their comrades, so maybe the footballer players are just making the hand signals for whatever gridiron play they want to do next. That’s a thing that happens in American football, right?

As I saw this scene, with Ryu caught between the moon and New York City, I immediately thought of the song “The Best That You Can Do” by Christopher Cross. You know, the theme from the movie Arthur. Except the weird thing is that I did know – I remembered most of the lyrics and everything – and that’s strange because I’m sure I’ve only heard that song in passing a handful of times and I’ve never seen the movie it comes from. The other day I forgot the area code for my phone number, but this sing is wedged firmly in the old memory banks. How do these things happen? Has someone been piping soft-rock movie themes into my room while I sleep? Here’s my review of “The Best That You Can Do:” super cheesy, rocking saxophone solo, I kind of love it. Obviously I had to listen to it on YouTube to make sure I had remembered the lyrics right, but I left YouTube open, forgetting that it automatically moves on to the next video. I came back an hour later to find all my recommended videos are now tracks by Foreigner and Phil Collins. These are the sacrifices I make to run VGJunk.

Ryu moves into the under-construction parts of the skyscraper – nobody having any windows in their office is probably contributing to all the despair – and hangs from a beam while he waits for that bad guy to make his move. You’ll be hanging from beams a lot in this game. The gameplay is extremely similar to the NES Ninja Gaiden games, with a lot of running around and slashing with the short-range horizontal attacks of your sword. However, things have been scaled back for this Game Boy iteration, and the most obvious casualty is Ryu’s ability to cling to walls. Yes, sadly Ryu can’t hang from or climb up vertical surfaces in this game. No wall-jumping here, then, but the ability to hang from beams – and the gameplay challenges that are based around this mechanic – make up for the loss somewhat. The other thing is that Ryu’s arsenal of ninja magic (his subweapons, basically) have been reduced to just one: the fire wheel, which launches a circle of fire along an upwards diagonal in whichever direction Ryu is facing. The fire wheels are powered by the collectibles you can find by smashing open crystal balls dotted through the stages, and the fire wheels are extremely useful (if not mandatory) in the later stages, so make sure you grab as many as Ryu can fit into his ninja backpack. No, you can’t see Ryu’s ninja backpack. Of course you can't, it’s a ninja backpack.

It doesn’t take long to reach the first boss, a mechanical menace that crawls around on the floor as though it’s searching for a lost contact lens. That’s why Ryu’s on tiptoes in the screenshot above, he doesn’t want to tread on it.

The boss can also scuttle around on the ceiling. His contact lens is unlikely to be up there. I tried to encourage him back to Earth with a couple of fire wheels, but the boss would not be hurried. He’ll fall back down in his own time. In fact, that’s all he’ll do, and the boss’ only attack is to try and fall on Ryu’s head. It sounds kinda lame, and admittedly it doesn’t make for the most exciting boss battle ever, but when you weigh half a ton gravity becomes a perfectly acceptable murder weapon. Still, as long as Ryu keeps moving and gets his hits in when the opportunity arises, you should have no trouble beating the boss.

Your reward for doing so is a brief scene showing Ryu slicing the boss into strips (Nanto Suicho Ken style, for the three of you that might get that reference.) It’s a fun interlude because a) you get to see Ryu being a badass, something that doesn’t always come across in the gameplay and b) you get a more detailed look at the boss you just fought. I mean, you don’t in this instance because I chose the “please help I fell in a very large paper shredder” screenshot, but you get the idea.

I would be filled with despair if I lived in a skyscraper built from gravel, yes. I’m beginning to suspect this isn’t a high-rise at all. Where the stages in the NES Ninja Gaidens (especially the first one) were mostly horizontal, Ninja Gaiden Shadow has a lot more vertically-oriented sections. The result of this is that it almost feels like a Mega Man game in terms of level design. The developers have done an excellent job of cramming the NES game’s action into the Game Boy, and while there are some concessions – Ryu moves a little slower and there’s the aforementioned lack of some of his ninja skills – this feel one hundred percent like a “real” Ninja Gaiden game.

Part of the reason for this is that the game was actually scaled down for the smaller screen rather than simply forcing NES-sized sprites into a system that couldn’t really handle them. You can see by the comparison above that Game Boy Ryu is a few pixels smaller than NES Ryu while still looking very much like Ryu Hayabusa, meaning he’s got more room to move around the screen. I probably wouldn’t have noticed this had I not been watching the excellent Game Boy World series of videos, which you should absolutely watch if you want to hear someone who knows what they’re talking about discuss Game Boy games.

Ryu has one final and very important tool at his disposal – a grappling hook. It can only be fired straight upwards and will only connect to ceilings and platforms that Ryu can hang from, so there’s no Bionic Commando-style swinging antics, but it’s incorporated nicely into a few puzzle-ish sections. It’s not as fun as being able to climb on walls, but I’ll take it.

The grappling hook sometimes allows you to reach places you might not otherwise be able to explore. Usually there are power-ups in these hard-to-reach spots, but in this instance I appear to have found a Ryu Hayabusa commemorative plate. Each Ryu Hayabusa commemorative plate comes complete with 9-carat gold trim and a hand-calligraphed message on the reverse that captures the famous moment when Ryu wondered with whom his father had a duel and lost. Available now for only $99.95, stocks are limited!

There’s a new enemy type in stage two: these large chaps with shields. If they’ve got their shield up, there’s very little you can do to hurt them, and at first I had some trouble getting past them. Getting past them without just running through them and losing some health, I mean. The trick is to turn your back on them, at which point they drop their shields and walk towards you as though they think Ryu has simply gone into a sulk and they want to to reconcile with him. Then you can quickly turn around and stab them while they’re not defending themselves. That’s the real ninja magic right there.

Here are the bosses of stage two, a large man and a much smaller man joining forces to create a boss fight with echoes of the Frankenstein battle from the original Castlevania. Big Man tries to shoulder-barge Ryu, while Small Man cartwheels around the room in a desperate attempt to receive the attention he was denied as a child. Not an especially memorable fight, this one, and the key to success is staying out of the bosses’ way and not being too greedy when you get the chance to land a few hits.

Given the original Ninja Gaiden’s reputation for brutal difficulty, I was surprised by how easily I sailed through the first two stages… but then I remembered the NES version doesn’t really get going until stage three, and the same is true of Ninja Gaiden Shadow. It’s difficult in a slightly different way – the lesser focus on jumping over bottomless pits meant far fewer deaths caused by being knocked into said pits by belligerent birds – but here’s where NGS starts ramping up the difficulty. Rotating jets of fire demand accurate movement, and the enemies are more densely packed and fiendishly placed. The saving grace is that there’s no time limit, so you can calmly survey the scene and plan your route before charging into the fray. This is also a very short game, and while there are no passwords the stages are small enough that once you’ve mastered them you can blast through them in no time.

Yes, it’s definitely easier than the NES games. I know this because not once did I fall down a hole during this stage, despite not being able to cling onto walls. NGS is very forgiving when it comes to horizontal jumps, to the point that sometimes you’ll swear you’ve cocked up your jump and are about to experience five hundred acupuncture sessions all at once, only to somehow pop onto the platform you were aiming for.

As the spiked ceiling comes crashing down, I regret making Ryu stop to pick up another Ryu Hayabusa commemorative plate. I don’t know what I was thinking. What am I going to do with two Ryu Hayabusa commemorative plates? That’s just an extra thing to hide when people whose opinions I care about come to my house.

This stage’s boss is a man with a gun. A very heavy gun, apparently: he can’t lift it any higher than a thirty degree angle, which means he spends the entire fight shooting the floor a few feet in front of him. If he’d invested in a tripod then this boss fight would have ended up looking Murphy’s death scene in RoboCop, but as it stands Ryu simply has to keep his distance. That’s where the problems start, because Ryu’s fabled Dragon Sword is not all that long, and it’s difficult to get close to the boss while he’s spraying bullets all over his feet like a drunk at a urinal. Once again it’s a matter of patience – a vital ninja skill – as you wait for a break in his attacks. That, or you can try to get behind him and stab him in the back. That’s also a vital ninja skill.

Stage four’s most fearsome foes are these ceiling-dwelling ninjas who can put out a prodigious amount of shurikens. For some reason, Ryu cannot deflect these shurikens with his sword. What kind of a ninja can’t deflect shurikens with their sword!? Yet another example of supposedly mighty  videogame ninjas not actually being very good at ninjitsu. Would it have killed Ryu to lean a move where he stabs downwards while jumping, for instance? I could have gotten a lot of mileage out of that.

Halfway through the stage there’s a fun section where the lights intermittently turn on and off. Makes sense to me, evil overlords probably don’t have “get a full check of the electrical system” at the top of their list when they’re building an evil skyscraper. The gimmick of the dark sections is that occasionally a honking great laser beam will appear, but the laser beam can’t pass through platforms. Thus, Ryu must remember where the platforms are during the brief illuminated sections and then use them as cover when things go dark. It’s a well-implemented section, to the point that I was disappointed it didn’t last longer

Not quite as much fun, owing to me not performing well under pressure as much in videogames as in real life, was this area where Ryu must climb up through a cavern while being pursued by a rising  tide of lava. Please understand that limitations of the Game Boy’s graphics means that in this case “lava” is simply a placeholder and the deadly liquid could equally be scalding hot chocolate or untreated sewage. Whatever it is, here you can see Ryu about to engulfed by it thanks to me having trouble grappling up the ledges quickly enough. This is not a fault of the game, by the way, just me.

Hang on, this game isn’t taking place in a skyscraper at all! Not unless it’s one of those floating naval skyscrapers, because that’s definitely a ship moored in the background. I feel like I’ve been lied to. Yes, okay, this explains the rising “lava” and walls made of rocks, but still. The title “Ninja’s Skyscraper Fight” is looking pretty embarrassing now, guys.
Oh right, the boss. It’s a flying man with wontons for legs. I think he’s supposed to be an ancient nobleman of some kind, although there’s nothing noble about hanging around the dockyards and throwing things at passers-by. All of the bosses in NGS are heavily pattern-based, but this one in particular feels very constrained by the tactics he’s chosen. Move to the far side of the screen to avoid his shurikens, moving to the other side when he floats above you. When he lands, duck under the fan the throws, stab him a few times and then jump over the returning fan. If you can get this pattern down, you’ll be able to beat him without taking any damage. Naturally I got a bit over-exuberant and ran face-first into his throwin’ fan a couple of times, but that’s why I’m not a ninja.

The fifth and final stage now, where the difficulty is ramped up to maximum and NGS takes its first step over the line from “challenging” to “annoying” with these perpetual flamethrowers. They just keep burning and burning, the evil overlord apparently having hooked them directly to a Russian gas pipeline. Normally the advice to fight fire with fire is not to be taken literally – the other fire will beat you with experience – but in this case it’s a totally valid strategy and Ryu’s fire wheel special will get the job done. I hope you’ve collected plenty of them, because by god you’ll need them.

Flamethrowers aside it’s a fun stage, with plenty of challenge and lots of accurate, well-timed movements and attacks required to progress. This is true of Ninja Gaiden Shadow as a whole, and while it’s not quite up to the standards of its NES forebears, Tecmo and Natsume have done just about the best possible job in getting Ninja Gaiden onto the Game Boy mostly intact. It’s a system where action games can suffer, but not in this instance.

At the end of the stage waits Garuda himself, another flying villain with a propensity for airborne attacks. In this case it’s lightning, for the full “evil emperor” experience. Again, he seems to have trouble getting his death-ray right into the corner of the screen, so use that to your advantage. I mock, but the lighting effect looks neat and somehow the Game Boy’s sound chip manages to make it sound dangerous. As always in these situations, for no obvious reason the boss will fly down to street level so you can hit him. He’s simply feeling generous, I suppose.

Okay, now I get it: he just wanted me to do him enough damage so he could transform into a Gundam. A cunning plan to be sure: Ryu was definitely doing better against the lightning. Garuda V. 2 only has one attack, and it’s as rigid a pattern as all the other bosses, but it’s a real pain in the arse to avoid. He spawns three projectiles that hover around for a few seconds before flying towards Ryu. They always come at you in the order middle, bottom, top, so dodging them is as simple as ducking the first and then jumping over the low one but under the high one. It’s simple in theory, anyway, but in practise you’ve got a very narrow window to avoid the attack, plus Garudabot 5000 is zipping around the screen and getting in your way. A tough final boss was always to be expected in a Ninja Gaiden game, though, so it doesn’t feel unduly punishing (and at least it’s easy to figure out what you’re supposed to be doing.)

I got there in the end, though. It turns out Garuda’s biggest weakness was swords. Who knew! The artist here as done a very good job of capturing the surprised expression of a wizard who transformed into a robot, only to be defeated by a man with a bit of sharpened metal.

Skyscraper my arse, that’s clearly one of Bowser’s castles.
As Ryu strides into the sunset (the castle crumbling behind him as they always do, because villains use their own soul for the foundations) I’m left to reflect on what is really a miniature triumph. Ninja Gaiden Shadow might not be the best in the series – partly because it’s a really good series – but it’s one of the best all-out action games on the Game Boy. The developers took the limitations of the hardware into consideration and produced something that might run a little more slowly and be lacking some ninja techniques but which absolutely deserves to be part of the series. It's well-presented, too, with mini cutscenes, crisp, easily readable graphics and an excellent soundtrack. Like Danny DeVito swimming through treacle, it’s short but sweet, and I’d give it my top ninja recommendation of five shurikens out of five. No, wait four and a half shurikens. It loses half a point because Ryu can’t knock shurikens out of the air with his sword. He must have been pulling a sickie when they covered that at Ninja Tech.

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CASPER (GAME BOY)

Today, the philosophical implications of playing as a dead child sadly do little to distract from the gameplay in Casper for the Game Boy, created by Bonsai Entertainment and released in 1996.

That's Casper the Friendly Ghost, of course. I'm sure you all know who Casper is, even if you haven't consumed much media starring the ectoplasmic young lad. If you don't know who he is, Casper is a ghost who is friendly, in contrast to all the other ghosts who each have a personality roughly in line with every Post Office cashier I've ever had to deal with. This posits a universe where the way one becomes a ghost is not by having unfinished business or suffering a violent death but by simply being a proper dick, and Casper is a freakish anomaly that upsets this natural order. That's why all the other ghosts hate him.
Casper the Game Boy game is based loosely on the 1995 movie version of Casper, which I discussed during the article about Casper: Friends Around the World. It's the movie where Casper develops a faintly creepy stalkerish crush on Christina Ricci's character Kat, including a scene where he whispers "can I keep you?" at her as though she were a stray dog. Bill Pullman also falls into a sewer and dies, so it's got some comedy elements. I think the movie is where most British people's knowledge of Casper comes from - it's certainly where I know him from - so hopefully I'll understand what's going on in the game.

The game begins with one vaguely humanoid lump dragging another vaguely humanoid lump towards a spooky mansion. It'd be spookier if the outside wasn't decorated with giant love-hearts, mind you. I have to assume the décor is Casper's doing. Anyway, once you're inside the non-spectral humanoid lump disappears and Casper is presented with four doors, each of them leading to (and take a deep breath now for your upcoming groan) a different minigame. That's right, Casper is yet another Game Boy minigame collection, with the added bonus that the minigames are all ripped off from other games that already exist. I can hardly wait to get started.

Is "ooz" something that really deserves to be protected? It couldn't even be bothered to spell "ooze" properly, and if it cares so little about itself then why should I care about ooz? What has ooz ever done for me?

This is the first minigame, and Casper is off to a bad start in the same way that grabbing your newborn's umbilical cord and using them like a yo-yo is a bad start to parenthood., in that it's much less fun than you'd think it would be. The ooz is at the bottom of the screen and must be protected from the ghosts that fall down from the top of the screen. I think they're supposed to be Casper's uncles, Fatso, Stinky and Stretch, but their sprites are so ill-defined that they could easily be the results of someone filling their nose with cottage cheese and sneezing at the screen. If the ghosts touch the ooz, the ooz is damaged, and if there's too much damage the game is over. So, how does Casper stop the ghosts? By shooting them. You move a crosshair around and shoot the ghosts, thus making a mockery of the "friendly" part of Casper's name. It's hard to imagine a friendly ghost taking control of some ectoplasmic anti-aircraft cannon, but that must be what's happening here.

How does it play? Like a giant sack of arseholes. For starters, it's so visually boring that playing it for too long will cause the kind of hallucinations you get in a sensory deprivation tank, and that makes it hard to shoot the ghosts. Another thing that makes it hard to shoot the ghosts is the collision detection, which is astonishingly bad considering "is crosshair over target y/n" is all it has to figure out - but eighty percent of your shots will pass through the ghosts as if they were, well, ghosts. Eventually I figured out you can increase the odds of landing a hit by aiming somewhere around the ghost's "head," but even that isn't consistent. Oh, and you can't move the crosshair while you're firing and the ghosts move quite fast so if you fire and miss then you might as well give up, because that particular ghost has bested you and your ooz will suffer for it.

Having managed to drag myself through this miserable minigame, an experience which reminded me that the English language is sorely lacking in words that mean both "super boring" and "gratingly unpleasant," Casper was rewarded with some points and some ooz. This screen also says mentions that Casper has seven lives, which seems like a cruel thing to say to a dead person.

I'm trying to think of a way to describe the second minigame without mentioning Lode Runner, but I can't because it's just Lode Runner. The aim is to grab enough vials of ooz (the collectible you can see in the corners of the level) to open the exit while avoiding the other ghosts. See the crumbly-looking sections of floor? If you stand on those and press A, Casper uses his magic wand to disintegrate that section of floor. The non-friendly ghosts then all into these holes and are temporarily stunned and did I mention that this is Lode Runner? A lobotomised, low-effort Lode Runner, but still. Most of the stage is spent waiting around for the ghosts to fall into the holes so you can move past, which doesn't exactly make for a thrilling gameplay experience. The boredom I can just about stand - I'd just been thoroughly prepared by the previous minigame, after all - but my bigger problem is this: Casper has to use ladders to move up and down, and the rough sections of floor slow him down, despite being a flying, intangible glob of friendliness. How the hell is he even climbing that ladder? He doesn't have any feet! If you're going to make a game about a ghost, yeah, maybe make some kind of effort to have it be ghost-related? That'd be nice.

If you touch a ghost you lose a life, which results in this scene where one of Casper's uncles literally kicks him out of the house. If you ignore the fact that the sprites look like absolutely nothing at all, this is easily my favourite part of the game and I purposefully lost lives on more than one occasion just to see Casper getting punted into the night like a drunk at closing time.

The next game finally clinches it: the thing that killed Casper was boredom. A ghost (shocking, I know) drops books from the top of the screen with agonising slowness, and Casper must help the books into the helpfully-labelled book return slot. How can he do this?

By transforming into a paddle / trampoline and bouncing the books across the other screen in a shallow rip-off of the old Game & Watch title Fire. However dull you think that sounds, don't forget that this all plays out at a pace most glaciers would find aggravatingly lethargic. Oh, and the collision detection is shit in this game, too, with books frequently passing through the edge of the Casper-paddle. The only other twist is that sometimes collectable bottles of ooz appear but you can only grab them when you're in non-paddle form. If the game wasn't slower than molasses wearing cast-iron socks this might have made for a more engaging experience as you tried to dash between the books and the ooz. I'm not saying it would have been good, but I'd happily take "marginally less awful" at this point.

The final minigame of the four seems designed to remind me of all the shelves I've ever put up. Thanks for that, Casper. At first, I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing here, and all I could do was cycle through a variety of indecipherable sprites, but then I hit the select button.

Oh, I see, so I'm supposed to be setting up an elaborate Heath Robinson machine to... hang on, Kat? Was that supposed to be Christina Ricci?

Of the four colours available to you - a palette that includes black, I hasten to add - you went with white to depict Kat's hair. Good job, team. There's something incredibly depressing about this image, too, a certain dismal air that makes it hard to look at. I think it's her expression. I just cannot imagine what emotion would cause someone's face to look like that, besides the cold embrace of death.

I eventually got everything set up, no thanks to the in-game graphics. I mean, the game tried to tell me that's an egg-laying chicken when it is quite clearly a duck, and I never would have figured out what the "egg-cracker" was without being told - it looks like an "extreme '90s" version of one of those drinking birds. I got there in the end, though. Attach a rope to the chicken, pull the rope to startle it into laying an egg, the egg rolls down the ramps, gets opened by the egg opener and gracefully slides onto Kat's plate.

"Haahaa, I like egg, egg is nice food."

Once you've cleared the four games, Casper floats up some stairs and enters another room... where the same four games await, proving that Casper is trapped in some kind of purgatorial limbo and he's trying to drag us in with him.

There aren't any changes to the gameplay, either. The Lode Runner knock-off has an ever-so-slightly different layout, and the book-bouncing and shooting games are the same only you have to play them for longer before you're granted the mercy of the results screen.

At least the contraption-building game is a little different - this time you have to wake Casper up. I thought it'd be as simple as dropping the bowling ball onto his dumb, marshmallowy face - I would feel no remorse in doing this to someone who sleeps in a bed with their own name carved on their headboard, complete with trademark symbol. Your obsession with your personal brand has run amok, Casper! Sadly, just using the bowling ball doesn't work. I forget exactly what the correct set-up was, but looking at this screenshot it seems that a tiny chef's hat and a butterfly-catching net somehow combine to launch a rocket from atop a random collection of pixels. The rocket flies up, nudges the bowling ball, the ball rolls down the ramp and knocks the bucket of water on Casper's face. I still think my "bowling ball meets face" plan was better. It has brevity on its side, that's for damn sure.

Guess what happens when you've finished the minigames for a second time? If you said anything other than "you do them all a third time" then I'm envious of your hopeful, optimistic nature. Yes, you have to play them again, except now they're even longer. I'll spare you from having to see them again, instead using this time to tell you that the description of this item as an "ordinary nail" is making me suspicious that it's actually not ordinary at all.

Finally, something different is happening! Casper pushes Kat down a slope while ghosts try to fly into them, and you've got to avoid the obstacles by laboriously dragging the chair left or right. The ghosts are no threat at all and I think every one of them can be avoided by saying as far to the left of the screen as possible. The real danger comes from the rotating... things. You can just about make one out on the right of the above screenshot, it's the thing that looks like a bunch of squares with a broom attached to the end. They cover a huge portion of the screen as they travel, and if you're not in the right position when they appear then you've got almost no chance of avoiding them. At first this didn't seem to be a problem, and getting hit by them appeared to have no negative consequences. Then I noticed I lost a life every time they hit me, but the game didn't think this information was important enough to bother sharing with the player aside from having the life counter silently decrease.

Ah yes, the Lazuras Machine, a device capable of bringing the dead back to life. It's named, of course, after the biblical figure Lazuras, who was resurrected by Juses.

The graphics have finally achieved a high enough level of fidelity to confirm that Casper's uncles Stinky, Stretch and Fatso are present in the game. Their faces being part of the mechanism for controlling the Lazarus Machine goes without explanation, however. Surely it just needs a big lever that flips between "dead" and "not dead," right? Anyway, this is a simple memory game, where the ghost heads are activated in a certain order, which you must remember and replicate.

But I don't want to get ooz for Casper, he whined. I want Casper to go away.

In a desperate final attempt at padding, Casper makes you go through one more "Ooz Runner" before the game ends, making me wonder what I did wrong to deserve such punishment. It's not any different than the other Ooz Runner stages, either - it's all just standing around until the ghosts move into the right places, and playing it provides the same heady rush as waiting for a bus that's already ten minutes late.

Oh thank god, I made it to the end. It's difficult to tell, but the final scene shows Casper and Kat dancing while a choir sings behind them. I know it looks like Kat is trying to strangle Casper, but don't be silly. That's clearly not what's supposed to be happening. I mean, he's already dead. What you need is an exorcism, friend.

That's Casper, then, but there was nothing friendly about making me suffer through this. It's not just a bad game, it's multiple bad games, all lazily cobbled together from boring gameplay, wonky hit detection and graphics that are sometimes so bad that they hinder your ability to play the bloody game. It's all so incredibly dull, that's the thing. You could forgive a lack of quality to some extent if the game was even the slightest bit interesting, but everything included here had been done before and much, much better. The strange thing is, despite the gameplay being just as bad as Rugrats: Totally Angelica and both games being cynical licensed cash-ins, I don't hate Casper nearly as much as Totally Angelica. I'm not sure why that is, apart from the obvious explanation that Totally Angelica takes longer to play through. Casper doesn't have that faint whiff of sexism to it, either, and as bad as the graphics are at least they're not in the retina-searing colours of Rugrats. I suspect the real answer is that Casper is simply so tedious it's reduced my capacity to feel emotions, including hate. I might have to play God Hand for a while before the next article, so I can learn to love again.

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