Ghosttown (Commodore 64)

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Ghost Town was made in 1990 by Software Creations for the Commodore 64. It was released by Virgin Mastertronic bundled together with the Magnum Light Phaser and other games. In the game's story the Blackheart gang took the player's three sisters hostage. The gang is hiding in Deadman's Gluch an abandoned town which is haunted by ghosts. The sheriff doesn't dare to enter the town, and therefore the player is without help.

The game consists of solely one level, which is repeated in a loop. The player uses a semi automatic weapon with infinite capacity but limited stock of ammunition. The game is lost if the player runs out of bullets. The ammunition also acts as health in this game. As enemies purple ghosts pop out from cover and gang members wander across the screen. If ghosts are not shot 5 bullets are subtracted from the total and if gang members are spared 10 bullets are lost. Some men are tied to a gibbet. Killing them will yield bonus points. Shooting one of the sisters will subtract 10 bullets as a punishment. Succeeding the level will start it over with 10 bullets less than in the round before. This continues to level 10 which is called level ":" (colon). Beating this level will set the counter back to level 1 and set the ammunition stock back to the amount it was in the actual first level.

The music is great and the presentation is nice. The calibration works well and the aim is accurate. Sadly the hit detection is rather bad. Often enemies are clearly hit, but remain alive. Interestingly this usually occurs at the same particular enemy. The one level plays similarly each time and the enemy placement and timing does vary just very little. Personally I don't particularly like this game. I had fun exploring what happens after the 10th level, but apart from that the game offers me too less to play it again in the near future. The replay value is low for me as the final score is not displayed and the difficulty loops back to easy in a periodic manner.