Ghostbusters

"Who ya gonna call? Not these guys!"

Who didn't love Ghostbusters? As soon as I saw it at a mere three years of age, I knew what i wanted to be when I grew up. Unfortunately, the bottom dropped out of the market, and my youthful imagination and a few scattered video game adaptations were as close as I ever managed to come to being a licensed spook exterminator. Playing this game cooled me on the idea faster than you can say "back off man, I'm a scientist."

Gameplay-3/10
You're the Ghostbusters, and you have to save New York from an outbreak of ghosts and ultimately the uber-demon Zuul. At the beginning of the game, though, all you've got to run your business is your snazzy Ecto-1. Fortunately, there's a store on the other side of town that sells everything and anything you need (and a lot of things you don't) to run your own ghost-catching business. So, obviously, the first thing you have to do is drive over there and empty your bank account. Doesn't sound so bad so far, right? Let me continue.

For some reason, the longer you're on the city map screen, the farther you have to drive to get to the building you want to get to. And since the fuel-restoring cans occur randomly, it's largely up to fate whether you can make it or not. If you run out of gas, you have to push your car to the nearest gas station to fill up, and you really, really don't want to have to do this: a tank of gas in this game costs more than it does in real life as I revise this review in early 2006. If by some miracle you reach your destination, you'll see four identical ghosts floating around outside a building--saves the programmers a lot of work if you never go inside, you know. Then you have about thirty seconds to try to catch them, leaving you to awkwardly get to work. First off you have to drop the trap, and once you've done that it's there for good, and until you get the hang of it this often means trapping your second guy in a corner of the screen. After that you need to snag ghosts in your proton beams and then suck them into the trap, but, like in the movie, crossing the streams is bad, and will automatically get you kicked back to the map screen.

Eventually you'll be told ''Enter Zuul Building!'' Which is fine, but there's equipment for sale specifically for when you enter Zuul to take on the boss ghost, and the offer to enter is good only for a short time. By the time you get it, drive to the store, trade in your ghost alarm and traps for stuff like ghost suits and a sound generator, since you can only have four items at a time, you probably won't be able to enter Zuul anymore. And the only way to get the opportunity to enter again is to bust more ghosts, and that means going back and getting all the conventional gear you need again.

Once you finally get in, you have to press the button to make your gang of Ghostbusters take a single step forward, while the ghosts (whose touch is deadly) are zipping around like they just drank pure caffeine. You'll never get to the top. I'm sorry, it's a scientific fact.

Graphics-2/10
The ghosts look exactly the same no matter where you go, from on the streets to the buildings to inside of Zuul to the map.

Everything has a lifeless blocky look, so you'll see the exact same streets and buildings over and over. It's all pretty monotonous.

Sound-1/10
The only music that plays during the entire game is a lifeless beepy version of the Ghostbusters theme song, and it NEVER, EVER, STOPS. From the time you hit the start button to the time you see the game over screen, that dang song will be looped infinitely. That by itself will probably get you to turn off the game and throw it way.

Overall-3/10
Ghostbusters is an anemic work to get money off a popular name. It's monotonous, and nobody wants to play a game that endlessly and constantly repeats itself. I can't recommend this even to Ghostbuster fans.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 02/03/04, Updated 02/07/06