Reviews

It is another one of those collecting-the-keys puzzle games that I love so much, but with a difference - here you are a ball, and you roll around this great ball park with pipes, arrows, teleports, and hazards which guide your movement between the different bounded sections of the arena. As well as these features, there are also the dreaded black/gold pitholes rendered in parallax that must be avoided. The game is very colourful and the graphics is very good considering it is only 16 colours. The scrolling animation is super smooth, and the ball's dynamics are realistic with a definite sense of momentum and inertia, although with joystick tic-tacking it doesn't behave all that well. The game window occupies only 1/2 of the screen but you tend not to realise this during play and it certainly doesn't feel like you're looking at a half sized window. the bottom of the screen contains useful details about what things you have picked up, game-time and things like that. This information is well presented.
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I love this game - I have loads of games on my original 1988 STFM of which only a few get dragged out for a nostalgia fest every now and then - this is still one of them. Original concept, thoughtful gameplay, good graphics for the time, excellent soundtrack.
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When you've produced the best game of its kind, it doesn't make sense to produce another, in the same mold, but which seems a few generations behind both in terms of design and gameplay, but this is exactly what's been done here. It's impossible to review Chubby Gristle without comparisons to the previous hit, and these comparisons are not favourable.
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The ST version of Ghouls 'n' Ghosts is, bluntly, full of faults. From the "Continue" screen that mis-reports the number of credits remaining and eventually displays a corrupted graphical blob, to the wide variety of gamplay glitches. One level contains a group of enemies that simply can't kill you, while the next randomly spawns monsters ON TOP of the player with no warning and no way to avoid them. The collision detection is varied, overly forgiving in some cases and massively unfair in others. There's a great many "What killed me?!" moments and there are quite a few graphical problems which shall be covered later. Yes, it seems this title was rushed out of the US Gold gates with little real testing, and it has a number of problems high enough to kill most games dead. Somehow, though, they don't.
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Something about Terramex screams "Budget game". The presentation is typically adequate and no more, and the gameplay, while entertaining enough, isn't particularly epic. The selection of five characters more or less serves as a gimmick, the choice affecting nothing other than the player sprite and the solution to a single room in the game.
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