Ghost Busters: The Game: The Thoughts

A Game has a few aspects to take into consideration when deciding on whether it's good, great, or just barely playable. Ghost busters does things rarely accomplished in gaming; it has great writing, excellent voice acting, and interesting (if not derivative) gameplay, the pacing was even pretty good if a bit rushed. The dialouge, mostly consisting of the banter between Harold Ramis, Ernie Hudson, Dan Akroyd, Bill Murray, and your character (a young and doofy looking new recruit who in the classical gaming fashion does not speak) as they go about not being afraid of no ghosts is actually very funny in a saturday morning cartoons version of ghost busters kind of way. The opening of the game, which delivers the intro in a format that stays faithful to its 1991 cinematic setting, says that it was written by Harold Ramis and Dan Akroyd, and I believe it. The music is also awesome, because the music from the movies was awesome, and it replays them all very appropriately. Even the environments were rendered very believably, and familiar locations, like hotels, the public library, and timesquare, become labyrinths filled with ectoplasm.

However, there's only one aspect that bugged the shit out of me; it doesn't explain the game mechanics very well at all. The game is pretty simple, so maybe too much instruction would destroy the movie vibe it tries to gain by having no in game gui and generally going all dead space on us [not a bad game to rip off of]. However, the dialouge of your fellow ghost busters is entertaining, like when Dan Akroyd's character explains your gear in an overly complicated way, as he does in the movie, throwing around scientific mumbo jumbo that noone else understands, but when this is supposed to substitute a tutorial on game mechanics, it pretty much fails. It could have benefitted from pop up screens that quickly summarize the game world in text. I got this new blue version of the plasma stream blaster and I had it for half an hour and had no idea what it did or why I needed it.

either way, it kicks the shit out of the original game.