Ghost House (Master System) Playthrough - NintendoComplete

A playthrough of Sega's 1986 platformer game for the Sega Master System, Ghost House.

Ghost House was an early Sega Master System release, and was one of the handful of games released originally on the Sega Card, a low-memory, relatively cheap storage medium mainly used on earlier Sega consoles. The Sega Cards looked like thick credit cards, similar in appearance to the TurboGrafx 16 HuCards. Apparently it later on got a standard cartridge release, but I've never seen that version - my personal copy of the game is the card version. It also saw a Brazil-only release in the form of Champolim X Dracula: Um Duelo Assustador (translates to English as "The Scary Duel"), in which many of the game's sprites were replaced with the character El Chapulín Colorado from the Mexican TV show - you know, the guy that Bumblebee Man from The Simpsons was based on? There's a fun bit of random Master System trivia for you.

Ghost House somewhat resembles the older Sega arcade title, Monster Bash, and has you playing a kid with funky black hair running around a haunted house killing Dracula over and over again. There are six stages, and each requires that you find a key, find Dracula's coffin, let him out, and kill him - five times - before allowing you to move on to the next stage. There are a few items to grab, with the most useful being a knife that deals much more damage than the standard punch does. You can also jump into lights to freeze the bad guys for a limited period of time, which is all but required in the later stages if you don't want Dracula wailing on you until you fall into a hazard that you can't escape from. There isn't much variation between stages: the location of things, the color scheme, and the background changes, but the main difference between each is the difficulty level.

And oh boy, does this game get hard. Painfully so by the final house. The controls are just fine, but if you thought Castlevania was bad for knocking you backwards into hazatds, just wait until you play Ghost House. If you're not paying attention, it's quite likely that you'll end up being pinned between two enemies that will trap you and drain your life bar in a flash. There's no brief period of invincibility after you take a hit, so you will end up in situations where you can't do anything but standby and helplessly watch yourself get completely shredded. It can be frustrating, to say the least.

For the first four or five areas, though, Ghost House is a really fun, old-school arcade style platformer that's hard to fault. If only Sega hadn't decided that it had to torture you again and again before you got to the thoroughly unsatisfying ending screen, the game would be just that much better.

As it is, I'd recommend it for a fun bit of stabbing at evil stuff, but if you plan to actually beat it, be prepared to rage. It's one of the hardest games of its type to beat that I've ever played, and it took me quite a long time before I was able to beat it. Quite nostalgic, though.

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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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