Grabbed by the Ghoulies is the first game made by Rare after they were purchased by Microsoft. It’s not really remembered all that fondly, but I have a feeling that that reputation is caused by the buyout because I like it a lot and there’s been a bit of an anti-Rare sentiment about since then.

The story follows two teenagers called Cooper and Amber who enter an old mansion after they got lost on a dark and stormy night. The mansion is owned by Baron Von Ghoul and is full of ghouls. The pair of them keep falling into more and more problematic situations and as Cooper you have to fight through the ghouls to find the secrets of the house.

The story is quite simple but it leads in to a very fun game. Each level has you getting through a different room in the mansion and to do that you have to fight and defeat ghouls in different ways and within different limitations. You punch and kick and you use items in the room as weapons and it’s all very enjoyable: it’s also very simple and easy to get into the swing of. Other fighting-based games have very complex control schemes, but this one literally just has you pointing the right stick in the direction you want to attack. Simple and endlessly fun.

What makes this game especially entertaining is that all of the ghouls have tonnes of personality. They all interact with each other in funny ways, they all make silly noises and they all have funny reactions to being attacked by you. My personal favourites were the skeletons, which just so happen to be the ones you see most often. Those skeletons were downright hilarious.

Plus, on the subject of tone and charm, the game is full of references to other Rare games. You’ll find Banjo-Tooie character portraits up on the walls, pictures of Mr. Pants and Captain Blackeye, Sabre Wulf posters and much more too. They even fitted in a Donkey Kong Country reference and Banjo’s pet goldfish Roysten is actually in the game himself! It feels very much in-line with the world created in the Banjo-Kazooie series and I liked it a lot.

Overall, this is an amazing game. It’s enormously fun, has excellent graphics, a great spooky soundtrack and is deeply charming. History is unfair in how it remembers Grabbed by the Ghoulies and you should definitely give it a try.

Rating: 9.5/10

Buy it here.

(Don’t miss today’s Finger Puppet Show!)

I’m up pretty late right now because I was trying to win an especially long boss fight in a game. The same thing happened last night. The boss isn’t hard, just really long. I know how to dodge all of its attacks and harm it as much as possible. What, artistically, do I actually gain by going through the same little process over and over again? It’s repetitive, boring and mundane.

When I was thinking about how bad this particular boss is, I reflected that I don’t really like boss battles in general. Why do video games always need to have bosses? Boss battles are frequently repetitive, they break your immersion (buy killing you a lot) and are often quite forced. It’s such a deeply ingrained part of video game culture that all games have them (pretty much) but why? I can’t really think of any thing like it in different mediums.

Having said that, I do have to admit that there are one or two boss battles which I really loved, but not many. When I like a boss, it’s because it feels like a natural part of the narrative or the journey which the game is trying to take me on – I feel like a good 90% of boss battles are just thrown in because the creators feel like bosses are an essential. But why does nobody ever question this? Video games do not need boss battles to be good and, in fact, some might even be improved by their removal!

Donkey Kong: Jungle Climber features the same sort of gameplay as DK: King of Swing, but has really refined the formula in many ways.  It was the main Donkey Kong game for the DS and is a solid game all round.

The story has the Kongs enjoying a holiday on Sun Sun Island, only to spot a banana shaped spacecraft which starts to attack them. Before long they find themselves caught up in an adventure involving an alien called Xananab and the latest plan of K. Rool and a few of his Kremling underlings. There are quite a few scenes of the Kongs chatting together and even talking with K. Rool and I appreciated the fact that there was quite a lot of dialogue.

Just like King of Swing, every level is based around climbing. The good thing is though that many of the levels feature things to climb on which are perfectly natural. I like levels to feel like places and not levels and this game achieves that (most of the time.) Donkey Kong and Diddy now both go along through levels together like they did in older games and when you have Diddy he can be used as a projectile. The climbing feels very intuitive and it’s really fun to build up momentum while doing it and to speed through a level.

What I also liked a lot about Jungle Climber is that the art style is quite similar to that of the Donkey Kong Country games. I love the Donkey Kong Country games and in the especially well designed levels, I could imagine that I was playing another of them. It was lovely. They have these spooky swamp levels and some beach levels which I thought looked very nice.

There were only one or two things I didn’t like about it. Firstly, Cranky Kong stops to talk to you all the time, but he’s now a helpful mentor instead of a bitter old man, making him boring and a bit annoying. Secondly, Dixie Kong is in the game, but for some reason not involved in the Kongs’ adventure, which doesn’t make sense to me. It would have been nice if she’d had a key role. Finally, at times the difficulty could be rather frustrating and when it is it’s usually down to things which are out of your control. Thankfully, this problem isn’t too regular

But on the whole, this is  a very solid entry in the Donkey Kong series and one which I enjoyed very much. It’s very fun and definitely worth a try. Rating: 9/10

Buy it here.

(Don’t miss today’s Finger Puppet Show!)