Best Games - Golly! Ghost!
You have played lightgun shooting gallery games before, and you have played ticket redemption games, and you have played pinball games full of electromechanical toys. You just might not have played them all at once.
Golly! Ghost! Is a strange animal. As far as the gameplay goes, it is very simple. It’s a precise and responsive, but fairly average shooting gallery. A wide variety of ghosts pop out of different spots on the playfield and your job is to zap them with your legally distinct ghost catching gun. It’s so average and basic that there is only one level. Only one background. And there is a very good reason for that.
Where most video games would have pixel painted and animated artwork for their backgrounds, Golly! Ghost! has a real dollhouse-like diorama back there. With a door, fridge, chest, and even a toilet seat that fling open to spew out ghosts.
The game uses the Pepper’s ghost effect to project both the ghosts (rendered conventionally on a screen) and the diorama background into the same space. The result is actually pretty convincing. Lots of little animated special effects flicker and sparkle at the edges of objects, but the objects themselves are real. It looks amazing.
Of course, looks help, but if the game isn’t fun no one will want to play it more than a couple of times. I said earlier that it’s a fairly average shooting gallery. So why would average gameplay be noteworthy? Well, Golly! Ghost! isn’t like most video games. It isn’t intended to be a thrill ride of ramping challenge. As a game, Golly! Ghost! has more in common with skeeball than House of the Dead. It’s a game that you play multiple times just to slightly improve your scores and consistency. And, like skeeball, the game will reward your high scores with tickets you can redeem at the arcade shop for an eraser or whatever.
If you plunked Golly! Ghost! between a hoop shot and a beanbag toss, maybe people would be likely to play it. Unfortunately it looks a lot more like a conventional light gun games and tends to get lumped in with those, and, like I have said twice now, it’s only an average light gun game. But it is a stellar ticket redemption game.
So yeah, Golly! Ghost! might be a strange one, but it’s still one of the Best Games.