I agree 100% on Night Creatures (sorry steve, I know you had your eye on my copy).
I was really prepared for the worst, but it's actually a halfway decent game. The graphics are average to good (nothing spectacular) and there are some cool parallax scrolling backgrounds, especially in the graveyard. I also like the non-linear design of the game.
Control really isn't all that bad, I can think of a shitload of games with far worse control than Night Creatres. *cough*...Altered Beast...*cough* Actually it controls just fine after playing it, like, once.
There is a good variety in the gameplay in that there are lots of different types of items, in addition to the normal "weapon" arsenal, plus a cool metamorphosis dynamic.
Where Night Creatures really falls down is in the sound department. The music composition is fairly lame, and technically sounds primitive. The tunes are not unpleasant, and some are halfway decent, but they mostly really sound mediocre and haven't stood the test of time. At all.
If I had bought this game in 1991 or 1992 in the middle of my Turbo-gaming heydey I probably wouldn't have been disappointed with it. As it is, it's a halfway decent platformer to offer me some mid-afternoon distraction after work.