This initial offering from Rare for the Xbox Zero left a rough first impression, but it’s pretty alright.

Originally planned for the Gamecube, Ghoulies was one of the many casualties of the buyout. In this case, it flopped on release, potentially due to its typically Rare cartoony style not fitting the demographic that Microsoft had initially courted. As a result it’s become a cult classic, beloved by some Rare fans but overlooked by many. Rare Replay gave it a second chance; it was the only game in the collection to actually have been remastered rather than just emulated! Of course, I played it on my old reliable doorstop, the enormous classic Xbox. But it was the first test of my newly acquired third-party component output cables, which (after having to turn off PAL-60 mode for some reason) resulted in a clear and high-quality image! Wahey!

Anyway, Ghoulies is an odd sort of game. In some ways it seems to call back to games of Rare’s past such as Nightshade or Atic Atac as you go from room to room in a vast haunted mansion, beating up beasties and knocking around nasties, although such connection is claimed to be coincidental. (In other ways, it directly calls back to many Rare and Ultimate classics through copious easter eggs and references that are tremendous fun to spot, mostly paintings hanging on the walls.) Either way, the game as it is is a twin-stick beat-em-up through a linear series of enclosed challenge rooms.

Each room has its own decor, from cluttered attics to chaotic kitchens, stables to ballrooms, all swarming with a variety of Ghoulies with monstrously fun designs. As you’re locked in each time, a different scenario is presented to the dreadfully boring teen hero type Cooper: survive for X time, defeat Y Ghoulies but not Z, don’t damage anything, etc. Break one of the rules of Baron von Ghoul’s mischievous game, and the Reaper appears to try and insta-kill faint you (although he can sometimes help you clear a tricky task by zapping your enemies instead!). By enclosing each room and tailoring a task, each one is a fun self-contained bite-sized chunk. There’s 100 in all, with a hidden book collectible in each that unlock 20 extra challenges in the menu.

When I got into the groove of playing, I enjoyed Ghoulies most of the time. The awkward thumbstick-based auto-attack system isn’t great and is certainly not helped by the awful camera, and the weapon system where you can pick up assorted household objects around the mansion to whale on the zombies, imps, vampire chickens, etc. is a cool idea but imperfect in practice, particularly in the more chaotic rooms. You can find various nice powerups lying around or by slowly destroying environmental objects, but they also mix in more handicaps as you progress.

It’s worth mentioning the sometimes questionable treatment of the female characters. Cooper is such a dull protagonist, and his girlfriend Amber is a damsel in distress for about half the plot, and transformed into a monster who must be beaten up. She becomes playable in some of the bonus challenges, performing identically to Cooper, so it’s a shame she wasn’t integrated into the story better. It seems that much like Berri in Conker’s Quest and Krystal in Dinosaur Planet, she was intended to have a larger co-leading role in earlier versions of the game which was reduced by the final build… an unfortunate and frustrating trend with Rare games in this era. Sigh.

After playing it I could maybe understand why it failed to make a huge splash. It was clearly rushed in parts due to development being moved to a new console under a new publisher, with ample evidence of cut content (for example, secondary antagonist Dr. Krackpot is built up but dispatched in a cutscene… he’s kind of the General Scales of this game). The game’s scope may reflect this too: it’s not very long. Perhaps in later generations it may even have been a downloadable game. The fighting engine feels underdeveloped too; you don’t really have any actions apart from “hit in this direction”. With no dodge or block it’s easy to get crowded and knocked over, your weapons smashed as you fumble through tight choke points.

The chaos of fights can work in your favour though, and it’s fun to see Ghoulies hitting each other by mistake and then retaliating, or knocking them into scenery that breaks beneath them, even if the damage is a little limited and contextual. The cartoony look of the game may not have fit the zeitgeist of the time, but I appreciated it, along with Grant Kirkhope’s characteristic soundtrack. There’s also lots of fun dialogue from the silly characters between rooms or in the motion comic-style cutscenes, even if it’s a bit heavy-handed on the “cheeky” innuendo sometimes. Anyway, Ghoulies isn’t my new favourite Rare game but I’m glad I gave it a chance… I just wish it had had more dev time to realise its potential and its planned concepts!