Well, actually it turns out I am.

I’ve installed Ghostbusters on my computer and have been playing it since it was released.  I wanted to play through it to give everyone a review, but it seems I might not be able to!  See, I’ve played it nearly every night . . . and I have yet to pass the first level!  So, I’ll give you what I can in review form.

Gameplay

It must have taken the game designers some time to figure out how to turn busting ghosts into compelling game play, but they did it!  Assuming the ghost is just sitting there in front of you (which rarely happens), you hit it with your particle stream to wear it down.  A green circle around your reticule will start to wear down as you tire the ghost out.  When the ghost is sufficiently weakened the pack will automatically switch to your secondary attack, the capture stream (you can also manually do this to other objects, more on that later).  With a capture stream engaged, you can wrangle the ghost pretty much where ever you want.  Throw out your trap and drag the ghost over; the trap automatically opens when the ghost is above it.

"See? Now that wasn't such a chore, was it?"

Now that you know the basics of trapping the ghosts, let me just say this:  The ghosts are NEVER staying still!  If there are multiple ghosts, you could be just about to have one in the trap when the other attacks you and you break lock.  If you are still at step 1 and trying to wear down the ghost, they might throw a table at you, or duck through a wall.  Anything to get you to STOP wearing them down.  Only once you have the capture stream locked onto them does your proton pack actually lock onto the ghost; the rest of the time it’s like using a machine gun.

Using the PKE Meter and Goggles adds another part of game play.  By equipping the goggles, you can track down where ghosts are hiding and any other environmental anomalies nearby.  You can also find randomly placed “Cursed Artifacts” lying about different levels.  By using your scanners in this manner you can not only track down ghosts easier, but you are paid for every “snapshot” of a ghost you get, and Egon can upgrade your equipment with what those snapshots contain.  This forces you to really balance your need to explore with the knowledge that what you’re looking for is trying to kill you.  Of course, if you just go shooting for ghosts willy-nilly, you’ll never get any upgrades for your pack that you’d need later on!

Red means "bad". Bars are down, so it's not close.

Story

Having only made it through the introduction and partway through the Sedgewick Hotel level, I can’t tell you everything that happens.  I can tell you that the story is as solid as you should expect from Ghostbusters; that is, if anything from either movie seemed remotely realistic, then everything should feel totally fine here.  That being said, the story is really well done and fleshed out.  There is an actual over-arcing story that your rookie character (who is given no name, no lines, and not even a proper nametag) gets caught up in on his first night.  This is a very good thing, however, as I believe a simple “Go Here, Shoot That, Come Back” would have done this game a great disservice.

Graphics

I’ll split this into two parts, with the other part being under “Design” down below.  These ARE next-gen graphics.  I’m not entirely sure which engine they used, but it’s hard at work in this game.  Characters look awesome, the proton streams look incredible, ghosts are beautifully done, and the proton pack didn’t look that good in the movies!  While it’s hard to say if this is a good thing or not, there is a LOT of stuff going on in many scenes; five bright proton streams going everywhere, ghosts weaving in and out of walls, fire popping up from the places on the walls you WILL inevitably hit, and debris from everything you are actively destroying can make the scene very hectic.  It can get easy to lose where you threw your trap and there are times when the game suddenly sags under so much processing.  It can be argued, though, that this just adds to the frantic experience that is being a Ghostbuster.

Sound/Environment

All the voices are done by the original cast, including Walter Peck and Janean.  The proton pack sounds are authentic and deliver all the right notes to make you happy every time you blast something.  The music is from the movie as well, and is tastefully done throughout the menus and cut scenes (can you imagine the theme looping non-stop in menus?).  While that’s all kinda expected, what was a surprise was all the little sounds that come from everywhere else.  When tracking a ghost through the Sedgewick by yourself, you really do get creeped out by the mist, creaking sounds, and dripping water.  With the light bulb in my office burnt out and my headphones in (to keep from waking the kids next door), I was jumping out of my chair more than a couple times!  Going into PKE Meter mode makes things even worse, since your field of view is suddenly very limited (think night-vision meets tunnel-vision) and all you have is a little bar to tell you a ghost is nearby, but not in which direction.  Oh, and the black slime on the wall will make your skin crawl (just don’t touch it).

Design/Development

This is a bit of a mixed bag.  Activision originally developed this game, and you can tell it was a labor of love by the designers.  Everything looks exactly how you think it should look, levels have real weight to them, and the game is really immersing.  When Activision “merged” with Blizzard, the new management shelved Ghostbusters as well as other games that had been in development.  Activision then sold the rights to Atari, who then published the game.  Without knowing for sure, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that Atari saw a game that was 85% done and said, “Meh, good enough.”

Cut scenes are an odd mix of prerendered full motion videos and prescripted in-game action.  The FMV’s were likely rendered in 720 to fit most consoles and that’s fine.  Except they used the SAME FMV’s for all versions of the game!  That means that if you’re playing the game in 1080, it will automatically downscale for the cutscenes.  If you’re like me and playing on the PC at 1920X1200, the cutscenes will just look like crap.  On the other hand, the prescripted scenes that use the graphics engine look awesome . . . except they take so much computing horsepower from my PC that the sound and graphics rarely match up.

This leads me to another issue with graphics.  My PC has a Windows Experience Rating of 4.7 with the lowest subscore being the hard drive.  Ghostbusters says the required lowest score is 3.7, and the recommended score is ALSO 3.7.  So why does the game play like crap on my system?  Even with all the shiny extras turned off (high detail, shadow mapping, etc) and my resolution scaled way down, my framerates are wretched.  I installed the game again, this time on my beast of a machine (the one with a 5.9 in Vista and 6.7 in Windows 7) and had some very impressive game play . . . right up until the game crashed.

There is a LOT of humor in this game, and the script is very well written (what else would you expect from the original cast AND writers?), however many of the conversations are triggered by you moving into a certain position, or a certain action happening nearby.  This leads to many occasions where something happens, Ray says a line, then after 50 seconds of your poor GPU trying to catch up, Peter says the punchline.  A 50 second lag makes the whole conversation unfunny and really messes with the flow of things.  Add to that the odd jumping back and forth between in-game scenes and FMV’s for what could be considered unnecessary cut scenes, and things get REALLY choppy.

This could all be simply chalked up to poor PC coding, and maybe the console versions of the game don’t suffer from these problems.  However, to me, it’s pretty bad.  Perhaps Activision hadn’t had much time to perfect their PC coding, and Atari didn’t want to deal with it, but it feels like it could have used some more time in development cooking.  Other games that have been released across the Xbox 360 and PC have had much better consistency, with players on both platforms getting the same experience.  As it is, I feel like I’m being cheated by Atari for their lack of effort.

I might not be too far off the mark on this either; the PC version sells for much cheaper than it’s console counterparts, reportedly because it lacks multiplayer.  It’s very possible that the PC side of development was father behind than the Xbox or PS3 sides, and Atari just pushed it out regardless.

All I know is that I WANT to love this game, but can’t get past the first level because I keep getting swarmed by these things and my framerate drops to zero!  Maybe I’ll have more luck on the Xbox.

Easy to kill, slow, and stupid. Too bad there are too many for my CPU to handle.