I like good alliteration, and I like this game too.

Where’s the rest of the title?

To Beat: Score 10,000 points in the Total Game Mode
To Complete: Score 15,000 points in the Total Game Mode
What I Did: Scored 16,460 points
Played: 10/9/18
Difficulty: 2/10
My Difficulty: 2/10
My Video: Snoopy’s Silly Sports Spectacular Longplay

Today we have a sports game that doesn’t feel like one. I remember one time when I was browsing through game lots on eBay. I was looking into one where the seller highlighted that there were all good games in the lot and no sports titles. Just about the first game I saw in there was this Snoopy game. I just rolled my eyes and said, “oh come on, the word sports is right there in the title!” Sports games have this negative stigma with them, particularly in collector mindsets for older systems. Games like this will blur the lines and somehow avoid all that negativity. I can see why Snoopy’s Silly Sports Spectacular would fit that mold with its cartoon events that don’t always make sense but are pretty fun to play.

Snoopy’s Silly Sports Spectacular was released on the NES in April 1990 in North America only. Kemco both developed and published the game. This is another game with an interesting background. It is a loose port of the game Alternative World Games created by Gremlin Graphics in 1987 for Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, and Amstrad CPC. Kemco adapted the game for the Famicom in September 1988. In Japan, they had the licensing rights for Disney, so they made Donald Duck the main character and named the game Donald Duck. Capcom held the rights for making Disney games in the US, so when Kemco brought the game over, they licensed the Peanuts characters and changed the game into Snoopy’s Silly Sports Spectacular.

Try to keep up, Spike.

The game is an Olympic-style contest. These are Snoopy’s International Games consisting of six different events: Sack Race, Boot Throwing, Pogo, Overboard, Pile of Pizza, and River Jump. You can play the game with either one or two players. Should you choose two-player mode, two events are simultaneous play and the rest are alternating play. The games are set in Italy and Greece so you have nice architectural backdrops to go along with the silly games. You can play events individually for fun or practice, but the main mode is the Total Game mode where you play all six events in a row. In this mode, you want to break the world record of 10,000 points to win 1st place and beat the game.

The Sack Race takes place on a city street. You control Snoopy and either the second player or computer controls his brother, Spike. You begin waiting behind the starting line waiting for a balloon to pop to signal the start of the race. Press and release the A button to jump forward. Just tapping A will only perform a tiny hop. You’ll have to learn the rhythm to go as fast as possible. Use the D-pad to adjust your position on the street. There are manholes littered around the course that open at random, and if you get caught up in one you will trip and fall behind. You can’t interfere with your opponent at all, so you only need to worry about the manholes. If one player falls too far behind, Woodstock will push that player up to close the gap so that both characters remain on screen. You have 50 seconds to reach the end of the course. In the Total Game mode, you earn 40 points for every second remaining on the timer, minus some points if you need a Woodstock push.

Weeeee!

In the Boot Throwing competition, you want to throw your boot as far as possible. Begin by pressing Down, then rotate your thumb around the D-pad in a counter-clockwise motion. It turns out you only need to alternate between pressing Down and Right, but doing the rotation helps greatly. This will wind up your throw, and then you press A to let it loose. With good timing you will throw it far ahead, but you can also throw it straight up, straight into the ground, or even backwards for no distance. On a forward throw, Woodstock will go out and tell you how far you threw. You get two separate throws. The best throw I could do was 30 feet which was worth 500 points. The scoring is prorated for shorter distances, and both throws are scored separately and added together for the event.

The Pogo event is a simple obstacle course. Press Right to move Snoopy forward and press and hold A to bounce high. Snoopy will do small bounces automatically. He also cannot move backward. There are four tall walls of equal height that Snoopy must jump over to get all the points. If you crash into the wall, the event ends right there. This event takes a lot of practice to get the timing and button presses right. For the Total Game mode, each wall cleared is worth 250 points.

Looks like I will just barely clear the wall.

Overboard is a two-player pushing game. You are on a boat in a canal, and as Snoopy you try and push Spike off the boat. Use the D-pad to walk around and tap the A button quickly to push. This is kind of a button masher, at least in my experience. The boat also rocks side to side, which from your view is in and out of the screen. You can use Up and Down on the D-pad to favor either side of the boat, and you want to be on the high side of the boat as much as possible. You can get knocked off the back of the boat or fall off the sides in the middle of the boat if you don’t adjust your position. You are trying to push Spike off the right side of the boat. The scoring in this game is a little different. If you fall then you get no points. The base score is 1000 points, and you lose 20 points for every second of the match, rounded up. For example, if you win in five seconds, take 100 points off the base score for a total of 900 points for the event.

Spike is having a rough day.

The Pile of Pizza event asks you to carefully carry a large stack of pizzas across the finish line. Similar to the Sack Race, you press and release Right on the D-pad to move forward. You can hold right to keep walking, but you are going to drop a bunch of pizzas. If you walk too fast or too erratically, the stack will shake enough to drop pizzas. This is a tortoise and the hare situation where slow and steady wins the race. Tap out Right a little at a time to inch forward and keep your pizza stack nice and tall. Your stack is displayed as ten pizzas high, however the game counts each one as two pizzas for a total of twenty pizzas. This game has another interesting scoring setup. You get 80 seconds to complete the event, but you can get a perfect score of 1000 by carrying all pizzas past the finish line with at least 20 seconds remaining. You lose points for every second taken beyond 20 seconds remaining, and you also lose points proportionally to every pizza dropped.

The River Jump is straightforward. This is kind of like a pole vaulting event, only you are using the pole to jump over a river instead of clearing the high bar. Press A rapidly to run. When you get to the river, press B to stick your pole in the water. This is an all or nothing event. You get 1000 points if you make it across and nothing if you don’t. This event seems to give people a lot of trouble, and the reason is the manual doesn’t make it clear exactly how this event works. What you are supposed to do is press A quickly to run, then press and hold B at the river’s edge for a while before letting go of the button to dismount. When you learn the timing, it becomes the easiest event.

No leaning for this tower.

In the Total Game mode, when all events are completed, the scores are added together to give you a sub total. The scoring screen has a field called Clear Point which starts at 2000 points. If your total is more than that, you get to compete in the same six events again. If your cumulative score after two rounds is more than 5000, you get to do all the events again the third time around. Your final score is the sum of the score in all six events played three times.

I spent a week in 2017 playing Snoopy’s Silly Sports Spectacular for the NintendoAge contest. I managed a score of 16,930 and placed 4th that week. I could have sworn I’ve played this game for points before that, but it didn’t show up in the contests before then and I’m pretty sure I didn’t play it on my own. In a different contest year, I won a copy of this game and that’s the copy I kept for my collection. It’s slightly less than common but one I’ve owned a couple copies off. It sells for around $8 or so.

It’s not as tough as it seems.

I think this is a game that many players could do well enough to beat after a couple hours of practice. The events are all small and you can practice them quickly to get the hang of them. If you are pretty good at about half of the events, that can earn you enough points to clear the game. When you beat the game, you get a medal depending on your score. Just beating the game gets you the bronze medal. You need at least, I believe, 12,500 points to get the silver medal and 15,000 points to get the gold medal. While optional, I knew I wanted to get 15,000 again. It took me about half a dozen tries to get a run I was happy with. I struggled with the timing on the Pogo event and Boot Throwing was inconsistent. I’ve never been great at Overboard either. Most of my attempts would have ended in the 13K-16K range. I didn’t want to just barely get 15K, rather I wanted a run with few mistakes. I’m happy with my longplay video with a score of 16,460. The only thing keeping me from 17K were some bad boot throws. It’s possible to get over 18K by playing near perfectly on all events.

Snoopy’s Silly Sports Spectacular delivers all that the title describes. The graphics are nice and Snoopy is a good fit for the game, even though that wasn’t how it was imagined originally. The music is decent as well. The controls all work like they are supposed to. A mini-game compilation may not appeal to everyone, but as these kinds of games go I think this is a good one. There is a good variety of events and they all perform well with no obvious glitches or exploits. The only downside is that it’s a short game and there’s not much lasting appeal beyond beating the game. It’s a fun game to try out, but maybe not one you need to own unless you are a collector.

#102 – Snoopy’s Silly Sports Spectacular

#102 – Snoopy’s Silly Sports Spectacular (16,460 points)

I’m willing to bet the name of the game was thought of first.

A nicely detailed title screen!

To Beat: Reach the ending
Played: 4/16/16 – 4/22/16
Difficulty: 4/10
My Difficulty: 4/10

With a game library as big as the NES has there are sure to be several interesting games hidden away. Well, interesting is a word that can certainly be used to describe Ghoul School but I’m not sure it’s the best one. There is absolutely an intriguing game here that is pretty creative but ultimately it falls flat in a number of ways. However, just like several other games I’ve covered, it has grown on me and I’m glad to get to share it with you.

Ghoul School was released on the NES in March 1992 and it is exclusive to North America. It was developed by Imagineering and published by Electro Brain. I was surprised to learn that Imagineering developed several games for the NES but having looked at various lists online most if not all of their games are not regarded very well. Their best known games are the three Bart Simpson games on the NES. Electro Brain published six games on the NES and all of them are ones that could be consider obscure.

Ghoul School is a side-scrolling platformer. You play as a high school student Spike who finds a mysterious skull and brings it to school which ends up causing all sorts of nefarious creatures to take over the place. It’s up to you to both rid the school of evil and save the head cheerleader. You start off in the main hallway of the school armed with only a baseball bat, but you can explore the school freely searching for more weapons and items that will help you explore the school. It is very reminiscent of Metroid in this way. Each room is individually numbered and displayed at the top of the screen to help keep track of where you are in the school.

The ghouls look much more terrifying than they actually are.

There are several weapons to find in the school and you can switch to any collected weapon you want. Everything has unlimited use so fire away. One of the first weapons you will find is the towel which has better range and is also somehow more powerful than the bat. There are also a number of guns that let you attack from a distance though they generally deal less damage. Some weapons fire downward to help you attack enemies on the ground. There is usually one weapon best suited for a particular situation so there will be lots of switching weapons around.

There are also a couple of different pairs of shoes you can equip. You start off with basic sneakers but you will also need to find the spring shoes and suction cup shoes. The spring shoes cause you to jump higher and they also make you taller. These are needed to pass by tall obstacles in order to explore further in the school. The suction cup shoes let you walk along the ceiling provided the ceiling is low enough to reach with a jump.

You will also find apples that restore your health. Green apples restore a quarter of your health and red apples fully restore your health. The best of all is the golden apple. There’s only one of these in the game but it is a permanent upgrade that cuts your damage received by half. Enemies don’t drop any health pickups so you will have to seek out these items as you explore the school. If you play the game for a little while you’ll figure out where you can generally find the healing items.

The school map contains a lot of areas that you would expect to find in a school. There’s a gymnasium, cafeteria, office, library, and so on. These one-off locations are the areas you want to search out because they contain the weapons and shoes you need to progress onward. These areas also feature unique ghouls that are tougher than the standard enemies and they often require specific weapons to take them out. Think of them like bosses. There are several of these unique enemies which is a nice touch.

Other than the deep void of darkness in the background, this does resemble a weight room.

Now all of this so far may sound pretty good, but there are a number of things that really hurt the game and make it hard to play. The biggest sticking point is the physics of the character. Spike feels very heavy to control. He takes some time to build momentum and takes even more time to slide to a stop. The jumping is very stiff and doesn’t seem to respect gravity. He falls down just as fast as he jumps, and this makes it very hard to make long-distance jumps. These movement problems are really evident early in the game when you have barely any attack range with the bat. You have to get really close to deal damage and more often than not you will run right into the enemy until you get used to the controls. Some of the early enemies attack really quickly as well leaving you with a small window to get in and hurt them.

The other physics related complication is that colliding with the enemy gives you really severe knockback. Trying to fight enemies with short range attacks is so frustrating in Ghoul School. Either you don’t get close enough to deal any damage or you get too close and get thrown backwards. Now for some reason the developers decided to place enemies right at the entrance to some of the hallways. What happens is that you try to get close enough to attack and if you accidentally touch the enemy then you get thrown back into the previous hallway. Now you have to start all over and try fighting the enemy again. This happens in several locations and it only provides unnecessary frustration. The only solace here is that once an enemy is killed it remains dead. It will only respawn after you travel many rooms away.

I’m pretty sure most of the classrooms are for teaching history.

Along the same lines, there are some enemies that are too low for you to properly attack. One little recurring nuisance of an enemy is called Blinky. They scurry around at ankle level and they run super fast. You can’t duck in this game and the majority of the weapons attack too high for you to deal with these critters. The weapons that do reach down don’t shoot downward quickly enough to be effective. For example, the first weapon you will come across that can reach tiny ground enemies is called the Digestaray. It shoots a straight shot that curves toward the ground. To use it against Blinky, you need to have it already equipped and start firing off shots the moment you see it running on screen. If you wait too long you will shoot right over its head and now you have no chance of killing it. Blinky will never leave the screen instead opting to run around you just outside of attack range and it will bounce you all over the place with the knockback. They don’t do much damage at all, but they make it really tough to make any kind of forward progress in the room.

The whole game really boils down to exploring one giant maze. A large portion of the game map consists of similar looking hallways and similar looking classrooms that for the most part don’t hold anything of interest in advancing your quest. The hallways often have doors that lead to isolated classrooms, and the hallways link together via walkways and stairways at the end of the hall. Each end of the hallway can have up to three exits: Forwards, upstairs, or downstairs. Many of the hallways are just empty dead ends. It is very confusing to make sense of the layout. Having every single room in the game numbered is about the only thing that makes rooms distinguishable.

You will see your health bar on the top of the screen as well as the health bar of the enemy you are fighting. There’s also a scoring system that doesn’t really mean anything since there’s no high score keeping. It doesn’t show up during game play, but Spike has five lives in all and you see how many lives are remaining in between lives. There are no extra lives in this game. It’s not obvious but you do continue when you start over. You start back at the school entrance with all of your collected items intact. There’s no saving in this game and no passwords so you will have to beat it all in one shot.

As expected, the science experiment went wrong!

The graphics in this game are more than adequate. It very clearly looks like a school. There are several interesting setpieces that are unique to the areas they are found in. For instance, the weight room has a huge, detailed exercise machine right in the middle. You can walk behind the bookshelves in the library and see yourself peeking behind the gaps in the books. The graphics may not be super great but they are interesting to look at. The character designs are really strange and creepy. Many of the enemy types look like people and they are generally drawn very tall and lanky. Spike changes visibly when switching weapons and shoes for a nice touch. The music isn’t too bad. Perhaps it might be grating to some but I didn’t really mind it.

I bought my copy of Ghoul School on eBay for $10 a couple of years ago. It was selling for around $15 at the time so it was a nice deal, but I missed that the fold on the label was completely torn off so that the end label and front label are split in two. It’s not awful but I’ll want to upgrade it at some point if I ever run into another copy. My local store had one for $10 for a long time but the end label was faded really badly so I kept passing on it. It eventually got bumped up to $18 and since then someone bought it. It’s not a game I’ve seen around much so I’m not surprised someone else snagged it.

Certainly this is punishment for severe misconduct!

This was my first time beating Ghoul School. I had only tried it when I got the cart and I pretty much dismissed the game as weird right away. When I started out this time, I wandered around and almost instantly got lost. I have a good sense of direction overall but this game made me at least question it a little bit! I realized the only way I was going to make sense of this school was to go old school and draw a map. The art of video game map making goes back a very long way but I believe this is the first time I have ever drawn a map for a game. It turned out to be a very good decision since I only had to hit the unnecessary portions of the map once. Each time I played I got a little bit further and it didn’t take that many attempts to complete the game.

Without spoiling a lot of the game, there’s not much more for me to say about Ghoul School. What I will say is that I found the game got more interesting the farther I went. The last quarter of the game in particular did a few things that I thought were really kind of neat. I believe I have almost all of the game mapped out in my notes. After I finished the game I combed over my map and tried to find all the rooms by number and there were some I did not account for. I’m not sure if these are rooms that I missed or rooms that were not used in the game at all. I think I developed a pretty good route through the school and now I can finish the game relatively quickly. I’m toying with the idea of writing up a more thorough walkthrough. If I ever do that, I’ll host it on the blog and link it here. I’ve peeked at a few walkthroughs online and I’m sure I could do a better job.

UPDATE 7/18/16: Indeed, I did create a Ghoul School Walkthrough. Check it out!

It’s hard for me to recommend playing Ghoul School, but after wading through the control difficulties and getting a handle on the map I really enjoyed this game. Metroid-styled platformers are one of my favorite types of games and so now I have a soft spot for this weird little NES adventure. One final thought: It’s too bad that this game didn’t emerge on my list around Halloween as that would have been most fitting.

#23 – Ghoul School