Back again for our regular Sunday roundup of quick-fire reviews and impressions of everything under the spotlight at Retro Arcadia this week, old and new and a bit of both… It’s our annual Halloween Special too, so let’s get spooky! 

Before jumping into the third of the Nintendo DS games included on the recent Castlevania Dominus Collection, I thought I’d give Haunted Castle Revisited a proper go, which is a brand new M2 remake and remaster and reimagining or whatever of the Haunted Castle arcade game by Konami in 1987, also included on there in its Japanese form, which is one of the more forgiving variants, by which I mean marginally less brutally unfair than some! What we have here, though, is a complete overhaul of what’s otherwise also a conceptually scaled-back, toned-down and relatively primitive game of Castlevania, which, it turns out, could have been a really fun one too! The difference in control is like night and day, and your sprite is no longer an oversized bat-magnet, while said bats and other meanies and bosses too have been completely rebalanced, to the point of total removal where necessary, and similar for the various hazards in your path. Some of the arcade set-pieces have also been refocussed, while the visuals have been redesigned and redrawn but stay authentic to the original – like how you might remember it looking versus reality if you’d played it at the time – and all of that makes for a far more atmospheric (and Castlevania-like) experience too… Which reminds me, I’m not sure what they’ve done to the music but Bloody Tears has never sounded better either! 

I didn’t know anything about Yumeme Mystery Mansion when I first fired it up while I was having a quick go at everything on the Sega Mega Drive Mini 2 when that arrived a couple of years ago but I knew I liked what I saw! It’s a very cinematic point-and-click-style horror adventure from 1993 for the Mega-CD (or Sega-CD) add-on, where it was also known as Mansion of Hidden Souls in America and Tale of the Dream Mansion in Japan. Whichever way, you and your sister were playing in the fields when she ran off after a butterfly, despite your gran’s warnings about local ghosts turning people into butterflies! And after following her to a creepy old mansion, you discover that’s what’s just happened in there, so you need to solve the mystery and free her. Interactions as you do so are generally semi-automatic, using the directional controls plus a minimal, contextual inventory system. Directions themselves are semi-guided too, rather than simple left, right, forward and back, although there is plenty of jarringly binary movement as well! And it all combines brilliantly to keep things immersive and focussed on leading you through what would be an equally minimal narrative if the puzzles weren’t sometimes quite so cryptic and obtuse! Progress is reasonably well guided if you make sure you look at everything though, and puzzles mostly involve finding an object and using it in the right place, rewarding you with further objects and further places to explore. There’s some wonderfully disconcerting music to help keep things otherworldly throughout, and although unintentional, some of the hammy voice acting even more so! And while what I’m sure were “Hollywood” visuals at the time haven’t aged great, they don’t stop it being a rewarding and creepy not-quite-point-and-click adventure! 

Olli and Lissa: The Ghost of Shilmoore Castle on the ZX Spectrum was a £1.99 budget platformer from 1987 that’s also one of my top ten favourite games of all time! It has just eight screens (and good luck seeing even half of those!) containing the ingredients you need to collect for a ghost spell to scare off the nasty Americans wanting to buy the titular castle and ship it over the sea. Considering how much yellow there was on the first couple of screens (where you’ll spend most of your time), the creepy atmosphere was incredible, with detail everywhere – in the backgrounds, the character animation and everything else. And yes, it was brutal, but I loved it from the minute I set eyes on it on Christmas Eve that year… Which is why I was both overjoyed to see its reemergence but also extremely hesitant when I recently came across its brand new remake on PC! It’s a passion-project homebrew by Sunteam, who’ve completely remastered the visuals and taken the liberty of making it a little more welcoming, and while you’ll certainly get to see a bit more of it this time, don’t expect a walk in the park because it’s also very respectful of its typically brutal 8-bit roots! The same goes for the colouring, which might always look strange to my eyes but is absolutely stunning – totally authentic but quite the opposite of the original’s mostly monochrome, and to wonderful effect. I’m not sure about the whimsical new soundtrack but the sound effects are perfectly recognisable behind it, just like the gameplay itself. Obviously, it will never replace the original for me but I love that it exists, and it’s exactly what it should be, and it’s available to download for free right here: https://sunteam.itch.io/olliandlissa

Ghost Manor on the Atari 2600 from 1983 might not have a lot to it but it has a lot of it! Five scenes to work your way through to rescue your boyfriend or girlfriend, as you wish, from the clutches of Dracula in his castle before the timer counts down to dawn… Which is surely a better time to be fighting vampires but we’ll go with it! It starts out friendly, with you playing tag with a rainbow ghost or a jolly skeleton, and every time you touch them, you’ll be rewarded with a spear, which you’ll use on the far less friendly second stage, where you’re at the foot of the castle and need to throw the spears at the spooks patrolling the entrance, before taking down their leader, the evil Chopping Mummy, who’ll put an axe in your head if your timing is even slightly off as you dodge beneath him. And you’ve only got as many spears as you collected in the first bit, so you’d better time your shots right too or it’s game over either way! Once you’re in though, you need to make your way up through the castle, with the next two screens featuring simple maze layouts but a screen-length moving wall on top that will kill if it touches you. As well as the next set of stairs to negotiate your way to on these levels, you also need to stop and search the various coffins lying around for bonus points and crosses, which you’ll need to repel Dracula if you make it to the top for the final scene. The second you emerge, he’s chasing you down and there’s no escape so you need to wave your crosses and hope you can grab your friend while he’s otherwise engaged, then make a run for the stairs out of there. Game won! There are four difficulty levels but with no second chances as well as the timer, you’ll be lucky to beat the default one. Everything else about it is as simple and atmospherically primitive as could be, and that all works in its favour, so although it won’t keep you coming back for long, you’ll have some spooky old fun while it does!  

I think that’s more that’s enough things that go bump in the night for this week, although I am fully aware that could also be said of most of my Weekly Spotlights! Anyway, in case you missed it last Wednesday, I put together a brand new feature for you! There are a handful of games I looked here at a very long time ago when things were done differently and for various reasons I think deserve another look now. And the very first one I wanted to go back to is a pioneering game with the most disappointing conversion ever… Revisiting Kung-Fu Master – Arcade & ZX Spectrum! Then next Wednesday, check back again for more Halloween shenanigans with a deep-dive into actual Halloween for the Atari 2600, as well as a look at every single one of the movies! Hopefully see you then!

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