It sure as hell ain’t He-Man, lemme tell you that much.

Ghostbusters: The Video Game (Xbox 360)
Pub: Atari/Dev: Terminal Reality
ESRB: T/Players: 1 – 4

Ghostbusters: The Video Game

Okay, so – I bought Ghostbusters: the Video Game for the XBox 360 about a week-ish ago (maybe a week and a half? hard to remember). Now, I went into it excited, which is usually a bad thing for me because I’ve done the same thing countless times only to wind up disappointed at the result (Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World, Boom Blox, Fur Fighters, Star Fox Adventures, Sonic Heroes, etc.). If it’s a game that I don’t have a guarantee it will be good, and if it’s still something I’ll really look forward to, nine times out of ten I’ll wish I hadn’t bought it in the first place.

Fortunately for me, this is the one out of that ten, because I’m genuinely pleased with this game. Now, I bought the 360 version for three reasons: 1// The delicious allure of Achievements; 2// I don’t own a PS3; and 3// the Wii’s graphics style is akin to those Made in China dollar-store knock-offs. So let me break down my thoughts on this for you:

• STORY: Nothing too fancy, here – in fact, it’s pretty much lifted right from the first Ghostbusters movie. Some great evil spreads through New York City (although this time it’s more obvious as a bright blue shockwave of spectral energy floods the city), Venkman falls for a girl who is “a real fixer-upper” and has some close ties to aforementioned great evil, and Walter Peck tries to shut the Ghostbusters down for being frauds. They even repeat the containment unit incident (albeit through different means). Now, this isn’t a bad thing, since the first Ghostbusters was epic, but it could have been better. And while Ghostbusters: tVG sort-of acknowledges Ghostbusters II, it’s for the most part passively accepted as canon while all of the huge events of the game are tied to the first (Gozer, Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, Ivo Shandor, so on). The added benefit for this is that Winston is once again the straight man of the group, rather than the comic relief.
• GAMEPLAY: Ghostbusters: the Video Game plays identically to Gears of War – over-the-shoulder third person shooter, and if you fall in combat, your fellow Ghostbusters can walk over to you and resurrect you (and vice-versa). Again, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because what separates Gears from Ghostbusters: tVG is that the Ghostbusters are all middle-aged New Yorkers with believable personalities. And Winston isn’t Cole Train, who JUST LUBS HIS WATAMELON, YESSUH HE DO. This is always a good thing. Anyway – comparisons to Stereotypes in a War aside, Ghostbusters: tVG works with a basic premise. You shoot a ghost with your proton stream with the right trigger, you wrangle ‘em in with the left bumper when their health is low enough, you slam ‘em around a bit with the left trigger, and you wrestle them into a trap. As the game goes on, you unlock new weapons for the proton pack, and each Ghost has at least one weakness to something in your arsenal. In the default setting, you can alternate between these weapons with the d-pad, which is hilariously God-awful with the 360 (the controller is known for having the worst d-pad of all current-gen consoles), and you’ll sometimes wind up with the wrong weapon equipped during a crucial moment. Other than that, it’s pretty basic and really fun; the face buttons give you certain options (A is to interact with things, Y is to use your PKE meter, X throws down a trap and B is your quick-dodge and dash function). Not the most intuitive system, but you’ll get it with practice. And it’s so much fun slamming ghosts into things. Seriously. The only thing I don’t understand, though, is why I can’t go back to old levels with my new equipment; Ghostbusters: tVG has an odd mission replay system, where it literally bookmarks your progress up to the checkpoints you reach in each chapter, so when you go back, you have the same weapons and upgrades you’d purchased up to that point. It strikes me as unnecessary and somewhat archaic, because I personally like to go back to old levels and tear-ass through them with all of my fully-upgraded equipment, and I know I’m not the only one.
• VISUALS: This is the only true downfall the game has. It’s hard to see pretty much everything. It’s not gritty, and there are colors, but you’ll wind up frequently traversing areas with poor lighting – and while I can understand the realistic importance of that, we’re also playing a game where you’re zapping ghosts with lazors pew pew. I think they could have gotten away with illuminating parts of the game that are supposed to be dark. However, when you are in an area with good lighting, everything looks fantastic; you can even see Bill Murray’s face-divots, recreated very realistically from the 1980s. And the lip-synching is off…but that’s small potatoes, really.
• DIFFICULTY: Ghostbusters: tVG has a nice learning curve (at least, on the first two difficulty levels – you’ll get your ass kicked a lot if you choose the hardest). It starts out easy, with you fighting off relatively harmless ghosts; as you progress, you wind up crossing paths with increasingly deadlier ones, as well as minions and golems (which are dispersable). However, there are points when you’ll be separated from the other Ghostbusters and you’ll have to do a large chunk of the mission alone; this is when things get frustrating because on your first playthrough you will die a lot during these segments, forcing you to replay that part of the mission and sit through any of the unskippable in-game cutscenes that may put the action on hold for up to as long as thirty seconds (which is agonizingly long in game-time). Near the last half of the last mission, though, that curve becomes a sheer cliff; you will have to fight off a mess of golems and super-powered ghosts and bothersome minions all at the same time, which will KO your fellow Ghostbusters frequently and force you to play clean-up more than actually busting ghosts, something the other Ghostbusters have trouble doing, as if once the trap goes out they develop a sudden case of the retards. And why the hell are you put up against an unending line of ‘kamikaze [stone] angels’ that can kill you in one hit on the medium difficulty with only Ray as your back-up all the while trying to meet an unclear goal? You have to slime tether aforementioned angels to the frame of an indestructible grate, something which takes time and deliberation all while you have an unending brigade of angel-reinforcements bum-rushing you and gravestone minions charge at you from behind. Even then, what part of the gate you have to tether these angels to is never specified! You have to do this up to three times with three different angels – but, sometimes I’ve done it with one, and I’m never sure what I did to make this happen. This is the mission you will have to replay the most, and it’s also the most frustrating. Hell, the final boss was easier than that.
• VOICE ACTING: I really enjoyed the voice acting in this game. Honestly, the worst voices come from the characters unique to the game – Mayor Jock Mulligan and Venkmen’s new love interest (because they couldn’t get Sigourney Weaver back to play Dana Barrett), Ilyssa something-or-other. Ilyssa is especially guilty of this – it sounds as if Terminal Reality, the game’s developer,  brought some random Jane Smith from the coding department up and had her read some lines. As for the returning characters, of the four Ghostbusters, Bill Murray felt like the weak link – a lot of his lines were mumbled and sometimes unintelligible. Harold Ramis, Dan Akyroid and Ernie Hudson were all strong, though, and despite the fact that they were playing the characters they’d last represented twenty years ago, it was difficult to discern that. Sure, it doesn’t stop them from occasionally delivering some real clunkers, but for the most part, their acting is spot-on. Annie Potts reprises her role as Janine Melnitz and, like the Ghostbusters, mostly represents her old character really well, and William Atherton (returning as Ghostbusters epic-antagonist Walter Peck) was phenomenal, probably having the strongest voice acting presence of the entire Ghostbusters: tVG cast. Dialog for the most part is well-written, Harold Ramis and Dan Akyroid’s writing still as strong as it was in the movies, though the in-game lines (when being attacked, or when a character has gone down) get obnoxious at times due to repetition. And though I might have regretted it in execution, it’s a shame Rick Moranis wouldn’t come out of retirement to voice Louis Tulley, because his geeky once-stalker now wild-with-Janine personality would have been a warm welcome.
• SLIMER: Yes. Ray even addresses him as “Onionhead” (his in-production name for the first Ghostbusters) and “Spud” (his nickname in The Real Ghostbusters) on occasion.

Overall – a solid title and a definite buy if you’re a fan of the franchise. It’s not without flaws, and you’ll notice most of them as you play, but the level of fun and fanservice more than make up for it.

Also, you get paired up with Egon a lot, and he’s my favorite of the four. XD

TEi out.