That took longer than expected! After clearing the sequel a few months ago, I turned my attention to its predecessor: the one and only Ghosts 'n Goblins. By all accounts, this game is much more difficult and, well, I certainly can't argue with that.
Ghosts 'n Goblins is a fascinating artifact and a much better designed game than it is often given credit for. An interesting point of comparison is a certain Super Mario Bros., which came out a few months after this game made its debut (probably, arcade release dates are a bit fuzzy). I don't want to write an essay here, but GnG focuses on the balance between limited controls and enemies that challenge the player's mastery of these controls, often forcing improvisation when the game does something unexpected. SMB focuses on player freedom and platforming as its primary challenge, with enemies as effectively static obstacles. It's an interesting contrast, and I wish modern platformers would visit the former side of the coin more often.
Ghosts 'n Goblins needs no introduction as perhaps the gold standard of "unfairly difficult" arcade games. As always, a bit of dedicated practice goes a long way. Studying other replays is also key. Quite often, strategies for the game rely on somewhat subtle manipulation of enemy AI, and that's tough to figure out on your own. I was motivated to beat this game after watching the Awesome Game Replays episode on the game, which taught me several of the key strategies to make the difficult parts of the game more consistent.
I have no real comments on this particular run. I make a few mistakes here and there. Prior to this, I actually had an extremely clean run that choked all my lives on Stage 2-6, which was... entertaining. Unlike its sequels, Ghosts 'n Goblins loops infinitely until the player runs out of lives. My third loop was rather sloppy, but I managed to make it all the way to the sixth stage, which is a lot further than I was expecting.
Disclaimer: Alternating between direction + shoot in order to animation cancel and shoot faster was HELL on my hands, so I set up an input macro to do it at a reasonable pace. Discredit this run as you will.
0:00 Intro
0:17 Stage 1
1:40 Stage 2
3:53 Stage 3
5:48 Stage 4
7:52 Stage 5
9:20 Stage 6
11:32 Stage 7
11:56 Stage 2-1
13:20 Stage 2-2
15:32 Stage 2-3
18:39 Stage 2-4
21:48 Stage 2-5
23:16 Stage 2-6
27:44 Stage 2-7 (Ending)
28:58 Stage 3-1
30:25 Stage 3-2
33:19 Stage 3-3
36:06 Stage 3-4
39:39 Stage 3-5
41:14 Stage 3-6
42:59 Game Over
This is truly the Dark Souls of Platformers.