[PC/360/PS3] Ghost Busters the Video Game

[SinisterDeath]

Source: http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/ghostbusters08/review.html

It's good. If you're a fan of Ghostbusters (and maybe even Ghostbusters 2), that's all you needed to know, so you can go out and grab your copy without worrying that you'll have to tread through bad game mechanics just to get a few good laughs. If for some reason you're a newcomer to the franchise, that's OK too. Ghostbusters The Video Game is a humorous and amusing third-person action-adventure with some clever mechanics and loads of personality. It's not all pleasurable, due to some tedious mechanics and other issues, but if what's most important to you is some lighthearted fun, then you'll find enough in this package to keep a smile on your face.

 

Hotels are meant to be trashed.

 

No shocker here, but Ghostbusters The Video Game is funny. The script was penned by original film scribes Harold Ramis and Dan Aykroyd, and while it doesn't quite reach the heights of the 1984 comedy classic, it rides the film's coattails quite comfortably. It's 1991, and you play an unnamed rookie joining the ghostbusting team, the members of which are voiced amiably by the stars of the movies: Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, and Ernie Hudson. There are some moments when the performances sound phoned in (Bill Murray sounds a bit too sleepy even for Bill Murray), but there's no doubting that these are the same characters that delighted us in the '80s. Sigourney Weaver and Rick Moranis don't reprise their roles, but you'll hardly miss them as the plot careens forward, reuniting you with old spectral friends and propelling you through a pleasant variety of earthly and otherworldly locales. Not every joke soars, but you'll find it difficult to stop grinning, and you'll probably let out a few guffaws from time to time. Venkman's laconic womanizing, Egon's deadpan pseudoscientific explanations--there's wit here for fans and newcomers alike.

 

Thus begins a journey through museums, libraries, cemeteries, and even alternate dimensions. As you get to the bottom of the evil powers behind the increasing paranormal activity in and around New York City, you and the AI-controlled 'busters explore a surprising variety of environments and face off against a lot of interesting and creepy apparitions. You'll recognize a few of them, such as the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, though your final face-off against this returning monstrosity is a disappointing letdown. Thankfully, you'll meet plenty of new, fascinating meanies and either grapple them into traps using your proton pack or simply vanquish them completely. The pack has four modes, but you'll use the default mode most frequently; not only does it emit a capture stream that lets you grab onto weakened ghosts and wrestle them into traps, but it emits a nice strong blast of energy called a boson dart, which is handy for weakening a number of different enemies. A second mode grants you a shock blast (think shotgun) and a stasis stream that slows some enemies down, while a third, the meson collider, lets you shoot a homing beacon onto enemies and then blast them with rapid-fire beams. A fourth mode is the second-most handy one; its primary firing mode, a stream of green goo, makes it endlessly useful, while its slime tethering capability helps you solve a few puzzles and offers an additional and clever way of trapping your apparitional adversaries.

 

Ready for s'mores?

 

Weakening and trapping your enemies is the most enjoyable activity in the game. Generally, you weaken your enemy using the weapon most suited to the occasion, and then maneuver it into a trap using the capture stream. It's not as easy as it sounds. Some of the little buggers put up quite a fight, and even if you slam your target on the ground, it isn't uncommon to have a ghost wrangle itself away from the trap's capture beam. The more Ghostbusters you have dealing with the same enemy, the easier it becomes. You're never quite in control of these encounters, though the feel pleasantly authentic; it's like baiting a huge fish and trying to reel it in as it struggles. You can purchase pack upgrades that make this task, among others, a lot simpler. For example, you'll eventually be able to slam-dunk ghosts into a trap, which is a quick and satisfying way of ensnaring one of the pesky poltergeists.

 

You'll face off against an interesting variety of meanies, including some terrific-looking bosses. Some of them require using your various modes of fire, and they're often good fun. There are some minor tactics involved during these encounters, though bosses don't require a lot of creative thinking. For the most part, you'll be doing the same things throughout the game, which can get a bit tedious in time--especially when you realize that two of your four firing modes are doing the enormous majority of the work. The tedium is compounded some by the game's medium-paced tempo; your default movement speed is slow, and there are a few too many chunks during which you aren't trapping any ghosts. Yet while the action itself doesn't offer a lot of variety, the diverse environments, occasional puzzles, and wide array of enemy designs will keep you involved. Besides, trapping an enemy is so gratifying (again, think of bagging a humongous trout) that it's easy to look past the repetition.

 

Despite some drawbacks, this satisfying adventure is just what you'd want from a Ghostbusters game: it's funny and it's fun.

 

The Good

It'shilarious 

Wrangling and trapping ghosts is a blast 

Varied environments 

Budget price.

 

The Bad

Frustrating knockbacks and knockdowns 

Too much reviving, not enough busting 

Combat can get a little monotonous 

No multiplayer. (360/PS3 versions have Multiplayer)

 

As a rule, Ghostbusters isn't a challenging game, but every so often, the difficulty level veers into frustrating territory. You can take only a few hits before you're knocked out (you can't "die" per se), at which point you have to wait for an AI teammate to revive you. Your teammates are pretty quick to come to your rescue, but during a few encounters, projectiles seem to be coming from everywhere, knocking you over without giving you a chance to avoid them. The game is big on knockback attacks in general, so even if you aren't knocked out cold, you still might take a tumble and have to wait a few moments until you're standing again. The other Ghostbusters will be going through the same thing, requiring you to keep them on their feet while dealing with whatever enemies are at hand. Should you all get knocked out, it's game over. During a few scenarios, you'll be spending more time rushing around reviving downed team members than you will trapping ghosts, so between revivals, waiting for someone to revive you, and getting knocked over, there are a few moments when you don't feel like you're playing the game as much as you're trying to earn the right to do so. These occasions can be all the more annoying when you're in a tight space filled with a ton of objects. You can try sprinting into a better position, but the semi-unmanageable running mechanic, stripped right from Gears of War, is a poor fit for the small environments. A standard, controllable sprint would have been more welcome.

 

 

As vexing as these annoyances are, they're not so prominent that they cloud the experience. While Ghostbusters does have some negative surprises in store for you, there are plenty of positive ones as well. Encountering new enemies is a particular delight, because you can scan them into your database in a Pokemon, catch-'em-all way. You can do the same with hidden artifacts, and those scanned relics will then appear at the fire station that serves as your home base. There's also plenty of supernatural glee within your missions. In one creepy scene, bookcases slam themselves into new positions, which is fun and startling. The destructible environments crumble around you, and the game keeps track of the damage costs (it's amusing to see how much your exploits are costing the city). And chasing Stay Puft through the streets of Manhattan, while not quite as epic as you'd imagine, will still make Ghostbusters fans wring their hands with joy.

 

The production values nail the Ghostbusters vibe. The sound effects in particular are fantastic, from eerie whispers in hotel hallways and groans of bosses to the whooshes and slurps of pulling a ghost into a trap. And while the game isn't amazing from a technical perspective, a vibrant color palette and detailed ghost designs make the story come alive. The character models do a reasonable job of re-creating the actors as they appeared in the films, though their movement and lip synching can be stiff, which makes watching certain scenes a bit uncomfortable. The best battles result in impressive light shows in which the screen fills with multiple streams of blazing light and goopy slime. The frame rate occasionally struggles to keep up on all three platforms, and while there are some minor differences among them, the game looks colorful and attractive regardless of which version you choose.

 

Stay Puft's minions are nasty but look delicious--which is why they should be roasted in this manner.

 

There's a gaping crevasse that PC enthusiasts will be staring into should they choose this version of the game, however: while Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 players get a fascinating online experience that extends this relatively short seven-hour jaunt, PC players don't get so much as a glimpse. The discount price helps alleviate this issue, but be prepared to stare down some noticeable signs of console porting, such as minimal graphics options and keyboard-centric menus. Yet these sour notes can't spoil a game that, by and large, tickles the funny bone and hits the notes a Ghostbusters game should, a few exceptions aside. If you're a fan of the films, or just like a little bit of supernatural fun, there's no need to glance about furtively when picking up your copy of Ghostbusters The Video Game. Instead, hold your head high, confident that you've spent your money on a fun game mostly worthy of its beloved license.

[SinisterDeath]

Source: http://www.1up.com/do/reviewPage?cId=3174809

Reviews

Atari's PS3/360 game does an admirable job of giving the player a taste of what it takes to be a Ghostbuster, but the technology isn't quite there yet.

 

Ever since I was a kid, I've loved the Ghostbusters. From the catchy, yet allegedly plagiarized theme song by Ray Parker Jr., to the pitch perfect performances from its three main stars (Harold Ramis, Dan Akroyd, and Bill Murray), the original Ivan Reitman film played a huge part in the lives of many children (and adults) in the 1980's. But how does Ghostbusters fare in the transition from film franchise to a modern day third-person shooter? Basically, the story fits in perfectly with the tone of the original movies, and the voice acting from the original cast (featuring Dan Akroyd's best work since Driving Miss Daisy) is fantastic. The game does an admirable job of giving the player a taste of what it takes to be a Ghostbuster, but the technology isn't quite there to deliver a Hollywood-quality story in a videogame.

 

Set in 1991, a scant two years after the events of Ghostbusters 2, the game begins with a strange supernatural shockwave that comes from the Gozer exhibit at a New York museum. Not cool enough to play as any of the main characters, the player instead wears the coveralls of the Ghostbusters' new, unnamed "experimental weapons specialist." The game constantly points out your anonymous existence, with the gang often referring to you with humiliating monikers such as "sport," "chief," or simply "the kid."

 

After strapping on your proton pack, you're quickly shown the basics of handling your unlicensed nuclear accelerator, and then sent off to track down some escaped ghosts. The basic mechanic of weakening, slamming and trapping ghosts is a bit cumbersome at first (those three big steps are what you have to nail down), but after upgrading the proton beam a few times, which allows you to trap much faster, I found myself taking out unruly spirits in no time. The basic combat system in the game is quite fun, and as the experimental weapons specialist, you get access to several other weapons to augment the basic proton beam. My personal favorite is the "slime pack," which blasts enemies with a torrent of ectoplasmic gel, and its secondary fire projects a thin rope of slime that is useful for quickly tethering weakened enemies into a ghost trap, and for solving the physics puzzles that crop up from time to time.

 

The gameplay is fun, but it's the constant barrage of one-liners from familiar characters that constantly put a smile on my face -- this game absolutely revels in its fan service. In between levels, you can browse the Ghostbusters' firehouse headquarters, which is littered with everything from an awesome (but non-functioning) Q*Bert machine to the very talkative painting of Vigo the Carpathian from Ghostbusters 2. You'll also have the opportunity to find plenty of hidden items throughout the game by following the readings on your PKE meter. My personal favorite (and very meta) of those items is a Ghostbusters DVD labeled as an "artifact from the future." All the little trinkets and details are great, but on the whole, the visual storytelling in this game just doesn't do the writing and voice performances justice, which is my biggest criticism. The uncanny valley-inspired character models actually look fine during the game, but their mannequinlike performances in cut-scenes detract from the overall quality of the story.

 

http://www.1up.com/media/03/6/7/4/lg/294.jpg[/img]

 

My biggest surprise was how much fun I had with the multplayer offerings. Instead of trying to shoehorn some kind of dull "versus" game, you can play as one of the original four Ghosbusters and blast ghosts cooperatively. Playing through the single-player game is fun, but it doesn't come close to teaming up with a couple of your buddies and cracking a few ethereal heads. In each of the modes, you're given a specific job, like defending and charging some piece of equipment, or taking out a certain number of ghosts in a short time frame, but you'll pretty much just run around blowing a ton of stuff up. There is an actual co-op "campaign," but it just strings together a few of those job-based modes together with no actual story in between.

 

In the spirit of full disclosure, I must confess that I played the game on "casual" and enjoyed the ride, but feel free to prove your e-manliness by taking on the hardest difficulty level. The combat is good, but I didn't really want to play it where I would most likely die a lot. As a Ghostbusters fan, this game came through by delivering an entertaining experience with plenty of laughs and just the right amount of action.

[SinisterDeath]

Source: http://ps3.ign.com/articles/992/992635p1.html

June 8, 2009 - Let's get this out of the way: I'm a Ghostbusters Super-Fan. It's my favorite movie, I own a jumpsuit, a movie-accurate Proton Pack and I even cried during an episode of Extreme Ghostbusters when Slimer accidentally killed Eduardo... keep in mind that this was a cartoon that aired when I was in high school. Personally, I like the idea of people reviewing games from franchises they love because I feel like they'll be tougher on a property than your average reviewer, but that's my opinion. You're an IGN reader -- you get pissed when a non-fan reviews a game and you get pissed when an admitted fan reviews a game, so there's no way to win.

 

Anyway, still here? Awesome; Ghostbusters: The Video Game is very good.

http://ps3.ign.com/dor/objects/14218851/ghostbusters/videos/ghostbusters_review_060909.html

 

Set in 1991, two years after the events of Ghostbusters 2, this title finds the boys in gray moving onto the next chapter in the world of paranormal investigations and eliminations -- namely, expanding the team. You'll join the squad as an experimental weapons technician with the sole purpose of testing Egon's latest Proton Pack modifications. Within moments of showing up on the job, a strange wave of ghostly energy emanates from a museum packing a Gozer exhibit and spreads across New York City. The spiritual spike gets every ghoul in the five boroughs riled up, the boys get to work and a devious master plan is set in motion.

 

This game is meant to be the third movie in the franchise, and with that in mind, we have to talk about presentation right off the bat. The game opens detailing the ghostly explosion in a beautiful cutscene -- all the computer-generated movies look great with lots of detail and animations -- and we're launched into the Ghostbusters theme just like when the Gray Lady scared the librarian in the first movie and when Dana caught up to Oscar's carriage in the second film. These nifty scenes will continue along with the soundtrack from the original movie throughout the game and setup the tale. There are dips in this presentation value -- which I'll get to in a bit -- but these touches are pulled right from the movie and drop you into this third-person shooter with a specific story to tell (i.e. don't expect to choose your next job GTA-style).

 

To immerse you in the experience, your noob Ghostbuster character doesn't speak and isn't given a name other than "rookie." In the game, it's explained that this nameless move is to keep the core four from getting attached in case a device goes haywire and puts the whippersnapper out of commission, but in reality, it's so you can just sit back and play your part as the real Ghostbusters banter with each other in the tech-heavy dialogue and comedic one-liners you'd expect.

 

Maybe now you'll never slime a guy with a positron collider, huh?For me, this works quite well. If you haven't been paying attention, the four original Ghostbusters (Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, and Ernie Hudson) are back to lend their voices along with the team's receptionist (Annie Potts) and the dickless wonder known as Walter Peck (William Atherton) so you really don't need some new guy getting in the way of the dialogue, which was penned in part by the films' original writers Aykroyd and Ramis. I'm sure many would want to create their own character, but when you see some of the facial animations in the CG cutscenes and how the experience plays as a whole, I think you'll forgive the omission.

 

OK. So, the game feels a lot like a movie -- we've even got a new love interest for Venkman in Dr. Ilyssa Selwyn, who is voiced by Alyssa Milano -- but you're probably more concerned with how it plays. A third-person shooter, your Ghostbusters experience is told from the behind-the-back perspective. Rather than have the screen littered with health bars and HUDs (the screen will get red as you take damage and display a running damage total as you blast objects in an environment), your Proton Pack will serve as your hub of in-game information. By monitoring the meter on the right side of the device, you can see how close to overheating you are; yes, to give you some restraints, liberties were taken with the device so that you now have to vent the pack to keep it from overheating and taking you out of the game for an extended period of time.

 

The pack is also your visual representation for which weapon mode you are in. Rather than limit you to just a proton stream, Egon will have outfitted you pack with a total of four firing modes by the time all is said and done. The first mode is the classic Proton Pack from the movies but packs a Boson Dart (a ball of condensed energy that explodes on impact) as a secondary fire. By tapping left on your D-pad, you'll switch to your dark matter functions, which causes some blue lights and gizmos to pop out of the pack. These dark blue attacks include the shotgun-like Shock Blast and Stasis Stream that slows enemies to a crawl. The Meson Collider is assigned to Right on the D-Pad -- which causes an antenna crackling with electricity to come out of the pack -- and tags a ghoul with a tracker and then rapidly fires particles at the enemy. Finally, the Slime Blower is down on the D-Pad and can be used to coat enemies and objects in positively charged goo or as a Slime Tether that draws two objects together. This beaut turns the four red lights green and causes a slime reservoir to rise out of the pack.

 

Now, let's be honest: we all expected Ghostbusters to suck. That's not a comment about Terminal Reality, Atari, or anyone else involved in the project, it's just one of those things videogame fans have come to terms with: most games connected to the movie industry end up sucking. Ghostbusters bucks the trend in a few different ways, but the weapon options are high on that list. Being able to hit a specter with one end of a Slime Tether, attach the other end to a trap, and watch as the sprit is quickly pulled into the trap is great. Watching Ray's proton stream sail past your head and help wrestle a ghoul is fun. On top of the fact that you're getting these devices every now and again to keep you on your toes, there are also 20 upgrades you can buy along the way to supe-up the experience (you're earning cash for every beast you bust). Sure, the Meson Collider and Dark Matter weapons are forgettable and don't really need to be used, but the other half of the Twinkie is great.

 

http://ps3.ign.com/dor/objects/14218851/ghostbusters/videos/ghost_gmp_containmentr_60809.html

 

In early previews, I openly worried that the game could become pretty mundane and repetitive if it was just trapping ghost after ghost, but thankfully, the final product dodges that bullet by dropping in these weapons and keeping the spirit types fresh. Sure, you're chasing the librarian and Stay Puft, but new poltergeists such as hobo ghosts and spirits that possess your friends keep things fresh and entertaining. Who doesn't like walking in on a Union/Confederate ghost war or battling a hulking demon made of red-hot embers?

 

When you run into one of these new apparitions, you can scan them with your PKE meter to discover if they need to be trapped or blasted to bits, but this move will also log them in your copy of Tobin's Spirit Guide. There are 55 ghosts to log, and once you have them, you can check out their unique back stories as well as weapon weaknesses from your PKE Meter (the back of the device serves as your pause screen and has a slew of stats and files to scope).

 

While you're running around zapping and trapping, your PKE Meter will be on your hip chirping away. When you bring it up via a face button, the POV drops to first-person from behind your Para-goggles (almost like night vision with vital information popping up), with the meter in the middle of the screen. You'll follow the peaking bars on the meter to enemies (red bars), objectives (green bars), and hidden artifacts (blue bars). The artifacts are another set of Easter eggs for you to find. If you want to ignore them, you can, but if you keep an ear out for your PKE meter and play the game of hot and cold, you'll uncover 42 of these gems that each have a tale connected to them. You can read the stories from the start screen and see any objects you've found in the firehouse.

 

Although you're not given free reign of New York City, you will get to fool around the firehouse in between missions. You can slide down the pole, eavesdrop on Janine's telephone calls, play with the jumping toaster on the pool table and more. None of it really affects the story, but it's a neat distraction that lets you feel like you're really a Ghostbuster. Environments are actually pretty diverse in this game. Like I said, I was worried about everything becoming the same old same old by the end of the game, but the decision to take you from Times Square to the library to a parallel dimension and so on keeps you guessing as to what will happen next. At times these levels are bright and colorful (the kitchen battle in the Sedgewick), dark and twisted (the 13th floor of the hotel), creepy as hell (the children's reading room in the library that is filled with disembodied kid voices and eerie handprints all over the wall).

 

 

mean, there was one part where I was in this spooky graveyard and had to use the Slime Tether to pull open a gate. When the job was done, the Ecto-1 and the rest of the boys rolled on in and we set off to fight a bunch of purple cultist ghosts -- there was this moment where I realize how cool all this was. Here I am blowing up zombie dudes while an angry portal is swirling in the sky and the Ecto-1 is rolling to my right. Rad.

 

The gameplay can run into trouble every now and again. Seeing as how the story is driven by the core four almost the whole time, you'll sometimes run into spots where you need to wait or move to a specific spot so that one of them will say something and advance the level. Often when they say these things, they're not looking at each other and are kind of just staring off into space. You'll also run into rather pissy difficulty spikes every now and again. I consider myself a pretty accomplished Ghostbuster player (Here I come, Platinum Trophy!), but when I got to a part later in the game that needed me to Slime Tether some flying stone angels to a door, I nearly flipped my desk in anger. The level would begin and these damn things would just dive in and instantly kill me. Sure, as long as one of the other Ghostbusters is still on his feet, he can come revive you (you can revive them as well) and continue the level, but somehow these concrete bastards were killing Ray and I at the exact same time so I couldn't save him and he couldn't save me. Urge to kill rising.

 

Still, those complaints shouldn't turn you off to this game because it's so much fun to bust spirits on your own and they definitely shouldn't sour you when you take into account that this title has a pretty nifty multiplayer component. Here, you'll enter into matches with three other online Ghostbusters -- you can be any member of the original four as well as the brand new rookie -- and see who can earn the most cash by bagging ghosts. Your cash is logged at the end of a match and acts as experience points so that you ascend through the 20 levels of Ghostbuster ranks. Aside from leaderboards, the game also catalogs everything you've done from the number of ghosts trapped to the times you've been knocked out.

 

There are four campaigns (which are the teaming of three level parts) for you and the team to go through, but these are just pulled from the six job types that you can tackle. Containment simply asks you to trap as many ghosts as you can in a given time limit, Survival will go for as long as you can stay alive and keep time on the clock by trapping spirits, Destruction means you and the team have to destroy a set number of evil relics, Slime Dunk is a competition to see who can dunk Slimer into the trap the most times, Protection has you guarding some of Egon's equipment and you'll have to keep some pesky spirits from making off with artifacts in Thief.

 

http://ps3.ign.com/dor/objects/14218851/ghostbusters/videos/ghost_gmp_slimetime_60809.html

 

For my money, blasting relics in Destruction was a bit ho-hum and protecting PKE poles in Protection could get frustrating seeing as how the bad guys keep respawning, but the other modes were actually a lot of fun. Slime Dunk is just a frantic fight to get a hold of the green guy and toss him in some of the preset traps; you can't die in this competition, so expect your "teammates" to blast you out of commission every now and again so that they have the playing field all to themselves. In other modes, you should probably keep the other players alive so that the missions keep going. The online games run as well as the single-player levels; meaning there was no lag in my matches. Although, Venkman's head did look weird from behind -- like his hair was layered goofily.

 

If the modes, levels to attain, and ability to play as Ernie Hudson weren't enough to keep you coming back, there are also 20 rare ghosts that will occasionally pop up in the levels. Catch'em all!

 

Of course, like any game, Ghostbusters isn't perfect -- especially in that presentation aspect I wrote about in the beginning. Although the CG scenes look great, the in-game cutscenes can't hold a candle to the polish of the former. Lip sync will seem off at places (laughably so in the cutscene after the library chapter), the characters are standing a bit too rigidly and so on. It's that double-edged sword of using a property people know so well -- we know how the actors are supposed to speak and act, so when there's a miscue, it's obvious. In that same vein -- as happy as I am to have all the actors back on board -- Bill Murray sounds like he's doing an impression of Peter Venkman at times; he's always got this smarmy tone to his voice and he doesn't seem to genuinely care about the team. Perhaps this is just the progression of his character because the Ghostbusters are a big hit nowadays, but it definitely isn't the human, well-rounded Peter from the films. Plus, the whole Peter/Ilyssa love story never really had any spark so it... it seems forced in the end.

 

If you're looking for more audio commentary, I wish the fine folks at Terminal Reality and Atari could've created some new music or borrowed from Ghostbusters 2. Sure, I love having the original soundtrack on board, but that was designed for a two-hour movie. By the end of the game, you're going to have heard the same handful of songs repeated several times at different places in the title.

 

In terms of being a nitpicky fan, the game's pretty good at not making a ton of continuity errors. Being able to explore the firehouse in between is pretty darn cool. However, you can go listen to the Vigo painting spout phrases, but that doesn't make any sense because that painting was destroyed at the end of Ghostbusters 2. Similarly, when the hell did Winston get a PhD? Didn't he just walk in off the street in the original film? Here, he just nonchalantly drops in that he spent a lot of time in a particular part of the museum while working on his doctorate. I guess the movies didn't document exactly what happened in the five years between GB and GB2 and an additional two years that have passed since the last film in this game, but it's still weird.

 

Now, as great as the game can look graphically, it also has a number of stumbles along with the shoddy in-game scenes and stiff characters. For starters, a lot of the cutscenes look like they were compressed in low quality; you'll see pixilization here and there. Also, everyone's hair could use some more work -- it's like you can see it being layered in places and it's all shimmery. Plus, there's noticeable screen-tearing when you spin the camera in busy areas like Slimer's ballroom and so on. These issues aren't deal breakers, but they're there and keep the title from being as impressive as it could've been.

 

 

For all the fanboys out there who want to beat their chests about which system got it right, there are some differences between the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions of this game. The PS3 features an eight-minute, 4 GB install that apparently doesn't do much seeing as how it takes both games about 30 seconds to load after a death or load a mission from the main screen. Although the PS3 has exclusive videos about refurbishing Ecto-1 and the Blu-ray trailer, the graphics seem to be a touch dumbed down on Sony's system. When you proton stream burns a wall on the 360, there's a black gouge in the wall that features smoldering embers and bits of fire. On the PS3, you get the fire and black gouge, but the little embers embedded in the cut don't make it. Similarly, when you attack Stay Puft on Microsoft's console, you're making dramatic changes to his puffy exterior. On the PS3, these changes aren't as severe -- it's almost like a bruise rather than a fiery cut. Still, I'll save you the suspense and tell you both versions are getting the same score for graphics because the overall package is solid on each platform.

 

Closing Comments

If you dug the movies, there's no reason that you should be disappointed with Ghostbusters: The Video Game. There are some moments that cause the game to stumble, but you're getting a new tale in the Ghostbusters canon, fun gameplay, a whole bunch of stuff to destroy, and some cool ghosts to scan. I felt that the game's ending was a bit flat and the romantic interest was forced, but Ghostbusters is a hell of a ride

 

7.5 Presentation

The game plays like the third movie in the way it opens and is presented to fans, but some scenes need work. There are moments that don't fit here and there, but overall, it's sweet.

 

7.5 Graphics

The proton streams look great, the ghosts are detailed, and the CG cutscenes rock; but the in-game cutscenes are rough, there's screen-tearing and some aliasing issues.

 

8.0 Sound

The voices make the experience, but I wish Murray didn't sound like he was doing an impression of Venkman. The original music is nice, but it's used a bit too much.

 

8.0 Gameplay

Who doesn't love tearing apart ballrooms and libraries with a Proton Pack? The Meson Collider's worthless, but it's fun to wrangle ghosts into traps.

 

8.0 Lasting Appeal

A playthrough should take about eight hours, however, there are hidden artifacts to go back for and the multiplayer is actually a lot of fun for ghostheads.

 

8.0

Impressive OVERALL

(out of 10 / not an average)

[Kaznen]

Any one here play it?

[Silver]

I have, it's quite fun and brings back tons of memories.

[Blig Blog]

It was available to rent at my local video store way before it came out...don't know why but I never rented it. It looks too fruity. :-\

[SinisterDeath]

It was available to rent at my local video store way before it came out...don't know why but I never rented it. It looks too fruity. :-\

 

Its GHOOSTT BUSTERSSS!

Its like the Sequal to Ghost Busters 2 for gods sakes!