Reviews// Ghostbusters: The Video Game

Bill Murray's voice is in it. It's apparently got different graphics from the Xbox 360 version. It's had a varied release history. Ghostbusters: The Video Game – it's had a large amount of hype, based mostly on the vast marketing budgets and needs of Sony (and, in passing, of Atari) leveraged (as I'm sure they'd say) by nostalgia but is it playable? Is it more than any other movie tie-in for a 25 year-old anniversary edition of a movie that was probably best known for its theme tune? Worse, is it more than a movie tie-in for a forthcoming movie?

Bear in mind that I saw Ghostbusters I and II in the cinema with my girlfriend and went to the pub afterwards, where I got served without being asked for ID, yet I seem strangely untainted by the nostalgia for the movies or games.

Frankly, my esteemed writing chum Andy – 'Wiffy' – Smith sums up Ghostbusters: The Video Game quite eloquently like this:

“As a game in its own right it is not the best ever written, but it is a lot of fun and will keep you playing for some while.

“There are some nice digitised shots and speech between the levels and the rest of the game looks good and is well animated (especially the little people in the second section). Again the sound effects and title music are fine.”

That said, Andy did write those words in 1990 for Amiga Format about Ghostbusters II. Excluding the bit about the little people in the second level, however, I've got to say that Andy's somehow magically captured Ghostbusters: The Video Game as well. Spooky!

But, much as that would be a convenient (and thematically nostalgic) way for me to review the game, it's not what you're after.

So, first up, it's played in a strangely first-cum-third-person aspect whereby you flip from occasionally looking at nameless you (unlike Fallout 3 or any number of other titles, you don't even get to name yourself) in the cutscenes (sorry, 'movie elements') to you wandering around the place seeing things through your eyes over the top of your pack.

I'm not a graphics whore, never was, never will be; it's all about the game-play for me, but even I was taken up a little short by the simplicity of what I was watching in either mode. Somehow developer, Terminal Reality, has also managed to make all the faces of the much-loved characters seem (again spookily) just unlike the people they are supposed to look like. So, while the voice acting (replete with Mr Murray) makes a fine attempt at synching to the action (“It's in front of you!”, “It's coming from the left”), I was more than happy while playing to learn the the original Monkey Island voice actors were returning for a real nostalgia hit on Xbox Live... damn, I've lost the thread and headed off into talking about something vastly more interesting than GB:TVG.

That's the trouble with it. It's so uninspiring in absolutely every single thing it does. It's one of those games that, if you were gifted it, you'd think kindly of the person who got it as a two-for-one offer. You wouldn't hate them for thinking that you might like to bust ghosts, slowly and repetitively.