Mother pus-bucket!

Are you troubled by strange noises in the middle of the night?  Do you experience feelings of dread in your basement or attic?  Have your or your family ever seen a spook, specter or ghost?  If the answer is yes, then don’t wait another minute.  Pick up the phone and call the professionals…or know that I’ve just confirmed how big of a loser I am (my sister will love this); read on to find out if the Ghostbusters, twenty five years after the first film set the box office ablaze, FINALLY have a videogame worthy of wearing that unforgettable little logo.

We really shouldn’t have had to wait this long for a competently made Ghostbusters video game.  The movie came out in the summer of 1984, pretty much becoming a phenomenon for the rest of that decade.  This was during the period in which the video game industry was slowly rebuilding itself after the infamous crash of 1983.  Five years after the fact, Ghostbusters II is released during the summer of 1989, when Nintendo-fever was still running hot, and the 90% of gaming households hand a Nintendo Entertainment System hooked up to their TVs.  Regardless of all this, pretty much every attempt at making a passable videogame out of the Ghostbusters franchise has ended in a disaster of biblical proportions.  Dogs and cats, living together, mass hysteria!  This explains why I was a little apprehensive about Ghostbusters: The Video Game.  Despite all the good news I received, the inclusion of all 4 original actors, a script written specifically for the game by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, all the awesome looking game play videos.  None of it mattered to me as I had my doubts that after being dropped by the original publisher, Terminal Reality (the developers of such classic fare as the two BloodRayne games, and 4×4 EVO) had the chops to deliver a game that could undo the stigma of 25 years worth of pure gaming garbage.  Dear readers, I have never been so happy to be wrong.

Ghostbusters: The Video Game is an ice cold beer delivered by the creators of that movie, to everyone of us that grew up loving the adventures of New York’s only paranormal exterminator service.  The game drops players into the shoes of an unnamed new recruit to the team, who after a mornings worth of misadventures, becomes the Ghostbusters’ official Experimental Equipment Technician.  He never utters a single word of dialogue, instead serving as a silent foil to let the player feel like they are truly off saving the day with the rest of the team.
For the most part, the game plays like any post Gears of War third person shooter.  It’s when the shooting actually does start that the game becomes unique.  Instead of merely unloading ammo into enemies until they drop, Ghostbusters works with the affectionately titled Sap’Em, Cap’Em, and Trap’Em  system; which expects players to fulfill the complete ghost busting routine.  Weakening the ghost with a stream of energy from the proton pack, tiring them out with a capture stream, and finally, guiding them into the ghost trap’s cone of doom for containment.  The game controls like a dream, outside of seeming a little on the complex side (there’s a lot of aiming needed for some of the faster, flying ghosts), and despite the amount of time needed to properly vanquish these full roaming vapours, it never once got boring.  I particularly enjoyed parts of the Times Square mission, which has the player battling alongside Peter and Winston, whilst Ray and Egon drive the Ecto-1 with a giant ghost trap mounted on the roof.  The enemies attack in swarms, and it’s a real treat picking them out of the air with the capture stream and tossing them violently toward the Ecto-1.  Other stand out moments included using the slime cannon to “depossess” the arrogant Walter Peck of a hilarious dancing phantasm, a battles which for me involved using a tether of slime to slingshot an active trap into said ghost for an exciting takedown.  The entire game is comprised of moments like this, and I don’t think Ghostbusters fans could’ve asked for anything more when it comes to game play.  There are several variations of the standard ghost catching equipment used in the movies, but all are incorporated so well that there are at least a handful of memorable sections with each, even in the later stages, when the standard proton stream is upgraded enough to take out most threats.  I sat down the other night with a few friends with the intention of playing the multiplayer, and instead we just played through a large chunk of the story campaign, passing the controller back and forth like it was rolled up in a paper.  Ghostbusters is just one of those rare games that simply compels gamers to play for just a few minutes longer, until those few minutes have stretched into hours.  It’s not unlike X-Men Origins: Wolverine, however this time the levels are the perfect length and the game is interesting enough to avoid falling into the pitfalls that Wolverine unfortunately stumbled into at times.

Perhaps the most exciting aspect of Ghostbusters: The Videogame is the inclusion of the original actors.  Outside of the team, which is a given, even William Atherton and Annie Potts returned to respectively portray the unfathomably slimy Walter Peck, and the Ghostbusters beleaguered noo-yawk accented receptionist, Janine.  The voice acting is dead on, though Bill Murray plays Peter Venkman with a lot more quietly sarcastic edge this time out, not really tapping into the manic explosions that he was hilariously known for in the movies, outside of a couple outbursts.  Visually the characters all look good, but there are a few issues with the presentation that really start to drag the game down a bit.  I’m not normally one to complain about graphics when the game plays as well as Ghostbusters, but when levels begin locking up for 10 – 15 seconds at a time every time the player turns to look an a given direction; it becomes an issue.  I’ve heard several reports of the game’s graphics chugging when the action gets heavy, I myself found the library level to be the most infuriating, with my game freezing several times in one particular room.  In short, the game can be an ugly little spud when it wants to be.  Beside that, I noted several instances of texture pop-in.  Some texture effects missing from the PlayStation 3 version, shoddy textures used in the Xbox 360 version, and more than a truckload of scenes where the voices didn’t synch up with the character’s mouths.  It’d be funny…if I was watching old kung-fu movies.

Ghostbusters The Videogame is a shining example of how a licensed game should be made.  It perfectly captures the feel of the movies with game play that compliments the onscreen action quite nicely.  There are more than a few issues with the graphical presentation, some that even affect the overall quality of the game itself.  The audio is outstanding, featuring the cast, and musical score of the beloved movie. The Ghostbusters came, they saw, and they will kick your ass.