Ghostbusters: The Video Game
I was a bit of a Ghostbusters fan in my younger days, so I was fairly excited for this game. Written by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, featuring the voice talents of the original cast, utilizing the authentic sound effects, considered to be the unofficial third film in the trilogy, this game is the closest you can get to being a Ghostbuster.
Turns out, being a Ghostbuster just isn’t all that fun.
Oh, there’s an initial thrill when you first fire your proton pack and hear that familiar energy crackle, watch your beam tear a burning trail up the wall. It’s enjoyable to wrangle a ghost over a trap and hold him in place long enough for him to be sucked down in a swirl of color and light. But the novelty soon wears off and you find yourself lumbering down corridor after corridor on your way to the next scripted event, where you’ll zap ghosts for a l-o-n-g time to wear them down before you can wrangle them into a trap. Along the way you’ll blast dozens of low-level ghosts who don’t require trapping, just shooting. In fact, there’s only a small handful of ghosts that you actually have to trap. The rest you shoot a few times with one of your specialized energy rays and they simply evaporate. It’s probably for the best that you don’t have to trap every single ghost in the game, as that would get tedious, but the developers have used the blast mechanic as an excuse to swarm you with smaller spirits.
Hold still while I shoot you for several minutes.
Make no mistake, you will get swarmed, you will get hit with lots of cheap shots from behind and off-screen, and you and your teammates will go down. Often. Now I know the Ghostbusters aren’t superheroes. They’re just regular guys with unlicensed nuclear accelerators strapped to their backs. But these creampuffs get knocked flat at the drop of a hat, leaving it up to you to run over and revive them. And you’ll be doing that over and over. There was one frantic battle where I had to completely ignore the attacking spirits and merely ran back and forth across the room, reviving the team one after the other. As soon as one got up, one of the others would drop again. I considered just leaving them, but if you all go down, it’s Mission Failed and you have to sit through a twenty- to thirty-second reload to restart from the last (usually distant) checkpoint. Not a lot of fun.
Guys? Can I get a little help? Oh, you're all down. Again.
Adding to the ease of getting knocked down are the canned animations in the game. If your pack starts to overheat, you need to vent it to keep it from locking up for several seconds. If a ghost attacks you, you need to dodge out of the way to avoid taking damage. These two events are mutually exclusive. Once you start venting your pack, the animation of you fiddling with the gun has to complete before another animation can start, so you can’t do a dodge until the venting is complete. I took a lot of shots on the chin because of that. Likewise, I’d dodge with a hot pack, try to vent along the way, open fire on the attacking ghost and instantly overheat because the venting couldn’t happen with the dodge animation underway. Same for switching between energy beam types, which you do often to attack different types of spooks. There’s even a full-second delay between the time you hit the sprint button and you actually start running, which is less than helpful when trying to get out of the way of Class V Possessor.
Still, I was willing to overlook a fair amount of this just for the fun of being a Ghostbuster—even a nameless, mute one—for a while. A short while. A very short while. I wound up finishing the game on next-to-hardest difficulty in under seven hours, and I’m pretty sure that time total included replaying areas after a mission fail. There’s a little bit of replay value in the game in the form of hidden spirit artifacts to find, plus an online mode that I must admit that I haven’t tried, but if you just want to play through the story, you can pretty much do it over a long weekend rental and save yourself the sixty bucks.
Talk slower. It'll add to the total game time.
I think I’m willing to cut the game more slack than I should just because of my old fondness for the franchise. Even with the cheap hits, the slow pace, and the questionable game mechanics, it’s worth playing just to hear Venkman fire off one-liners, to listen to Stantz and Spengler speculate in their quasi-scientific tecnobabble, to watch the Ghostbusters face off once again against malevolent spirits bent on tearing apart the fabric of reality. Maybe it would have actually made for a good third movie.
It’s just not that great of a game.
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Tags: Game Reviews, Xbox 360
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4 Responses to “Ghostbusters: The Video Game”
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June 21st, 2009 at 12:06 am
I played for an hour on the night I picked it up and it seemed fun, though glaring off the bat the things you mentioned, almost all the damage shots you take are from out of your field of vision and your AI teammates are constantly down. Helluva bug on level one in the slimer hotel where the one of the “main” baddies you have to fight on the stairwell comes in. He keeps popping out of the room and you use your meter to track him. The meter led me over to my 3 AI teammates, and there were Ramis, Aykroyd and Murray moving thier feet walking all into the same spot against a wall while “smoke” was coming out of the wall and the meter was reading the ghost right where they were. Screwed with this for 20 minutes, cant remember how I broke the bug loop, but after I did, I beat the ghost and gave up after the next scene. I went to work the next morning. By the time I got home the following evening around 7PM my son had already beaten it on casual by late afternoon and was getting ready to pump it to the hardest level to start over. Damn short, though he did say the online play was really fun. I’ll probably pick it back up again this week. Agreed though there is some strong grin-inducing nostalgia value in having the original cast voicing and acting the game. In retro, I wished I had saved 20 bucks and bought the Wii version even if the GFX were several pay grades lower.
June 21st, 2009 at 9:15 am
While I didn’t get the bug you’re talking about, I did have one in Times Square where the Ecto-1 got a chunk of broken fence under its tire and couldn’t move forward. Took a fair amount of shooting to break the wood enough so the car could advance. Several times I thought the PKE meter was leading me astray before I realized that it was often giving me a strong signal off something on the opposite side of the wall. I’d have to hunt around for a path to get into an adjacent hallway to actually get the ghost.
And if you want to talk bizarre teammate AI, I was knocked flat on a 4-man mission, one of the ‘busters ran over to revive me and just stood there, not healing me. In fact, he just kept standing there while the rest of the team went down, and finally he dropped, too. I think I took a short break after that.
June 28th, 2009 at 4:07 am
I noticed the other day that the back of the Ghostbusters BluRay that the picture on the back is NOT in the film, nor does it look like anything approaching something similar to the film. Is it from the game? It’s the guys standing in the street looking at a massive demon ghost that is straight out of the Ark opening scene from RAIDERS? Huh? I’ve seen this movie at least two dozen times. Could I have possibly missed that scene?
June 28th, 2009 at 7:08 pm
No, you’ve seen the scene in the movie, but it looked a lot different. The image of the three Ghostbusters ((Zeddemore has been cut out of the shot) is taken from the very end of the film where they’re crossing the streams. Cue up your DVD to that scene and look right before the temple explodes. Not sure about the origin of the street scene and the ghost (I’m squinting at the back cover image on Amazon) but the thing’s definitely a Photoshop composite they slapped together for promotional artwork.