The Rescue of Pops Ghostly (WOW ActionMax)

The reviews on this site are the text versions of the videos on my YouTube channel. The text based reviews use (if at all) very little pictures. Please follow the link to the corresponding video in order to see in game graphics.

The Rescue of Pops Ghostly was made in 1987 by CCR Video Corporation for the Worlds of Wonder ActionMax. I have covered the system in episode 13. Video on VHS is stored in a s-video like fashion but with much more compression using a color under technique. As such the video quality is not very high.

In the game's story two children follow their dog into a haunted house. There they find a nice ghost family whose house got invaded by other spooky creatures. The children help the ghost family to reclaim their house back.

The player has to shoot the evil creatures while sparing the three members of the family. Shooting the family will yield in a score punishment. From time to time a green creature appears who fires red clouds towards the player. These clouds yield in a score punishment if the creature isn't shot in time.

After the credits some trailers for other ActionMax games are shown. Because of the consoles nature those segment is a collection of playable demos of those games.

Personally I like the game. The enemies are difficult to hit, which increased the replay value for me as I tried to improve my own score multiple times. That the game plays literally the same every time is often criticized, but personally I don't care, as many light gun games rely on memorization anyways.

The cover is held in the same style as the other ActionMax games showing someone playing the system. The screen shows Pops as he fleas from another ghost. The back cover shows screenshots in amazing quality. The footage looked really great before getting compressed on to VHS.