Ghosts 'n Ghoblins might just be one of the earliest examples of a video game designed to not respect the player's time. It's the kind of late 80s, early 90s arcade game that gave arcade games today the stigma of being pure quarter munchers, with the pure intent of syphoning as much money out of teenagers as possible, where deaths are common, cheap, and sometimes totally unavoidable.

Ghosts 'n Goblins on its own today would only be a bit offensive when it comes to its core game design and design philosophy, in the light of emulator savestates, rewind, and infinite continues, but this game still manages to take the cake by telling the player, after beating the penultimate level, after climbing this insane vertical shaft of enemy spam and a few totally unavoidable hits, that "THIS WEAPON HAS NOT EFFECT, TRY AGAIN.", and sends you back two fucking stages. I had absolutely no issues getting through the stages using a couple continues, but this really rubbed me the wrong way.

That's right, me, the player, in my infinite wisdom, surely should have known that you had to use the shield against the boss. Silly me.

So I reluctantly did stage 4 again, farmed enemy drops until I got the shield, beat stage 5 and subsequently the game. I actually knew about the two loops required to get the true ending in advance, so I was satisfied with the final boss beaten one time. Never again, though.