Ghosts'n Goblins is my all-time favourite arcade game, full stop. So of course the Elite conversion went straight into my collection. Sir Arthur, the armour that lasts one hit, the graveyard, the zombies that will not stay down: the C64 version kept the shape of it, and Mark Cooksey's music is genuinely one of the great SID soundtracks, better than the arcade's to my ears.
But honesty first: the conversion could not live up to the real thing. The arcade board runs two processors and dedicated sprite and scroll hardware with three background layers, and no 1MHz home computer was ever going to match that. Which is why this one misses my C64 top three while the arcade version owns my heart. The ending of that story is on this very site: the real Ghosts'n Goblins PCB sits on my bench, repaired and running. Have a look in the Arcades section.
