Retro Game of the Week: Ghostbusters

The ghost look so surprised.

I am a huge fan of simulation games.  When it comes right down to it, I could play Sim City for a few hours a day and really enjoy myself.  Unfortunately there are some simulation games that are boring, too complex, or just downright annoying.  Ghostbusters for the NES falls into all three categories.  I do have to go on record, again, and say that I fucking love Ghostbusters, but this game is just the shits.  It's a great idea, but poorly executed and on a system that just cannot handle what the game could have, and should have, been.  Let's start with the box on the left.  If you were to pick up this game back in 1988, there's little to no indication that you may not be getting what you want.  All you know is that you're getting Ghostbusters the video game and you're shitting your pants because you're just that damn excited.  Well, when you get home, change pants, and put that game in your Nintendo all your excitement is going to fall right out your ass.

Bustin' ghosts.

As soon as you start the game you get this voice yelling out Ghostbusters and you immediately get crapped out to the screen on the right.  The player takes control of the Ghostbusters logo.  So your first inclination might be that the game is some sort of Pac-Man clone, but by the time you travel all over the board, you find out that touching the ghosts only freezes them for a short period of time and that some of the buildings flash red.  Well, here's the scoop, those red buildings are haunted by ghosts and you need to bust 'em.  But how?  The game doesn't gives you one fucking clue.  You need a Proton Pack.  Oh, right, duh, there's a freaking shop up there.  Before you can actually go into the shop, you need to drive there.  No, not on the overworld map, but on a different screen.  You drive the damn car avoiding drunk drivers and obstacles or you lose money, and you need money to buy your equipment, which means you really need to be on top of things.  So you go to the shop and buy your pack and a trap and you're all set to go out and bust the hell out of some spirits.

Literally the only picture I could use.

So you head back out onto the overworld and zip on over to a red flashing building.  When you get there and go inside, the game forces you to drive there yet again.  After avoiding the damn obstacles for the second time you finally get to shoot some ghosts, and hell, it sucks too.  Your beam controls are as stiff as a corpse and the ghosts move too high up or too low down to capture almost every single time you get to this screen.  Even if you manage to get a ghost over the trap, it's almost up to pure luck if you capture it or not.  Oh yeah, and don't cross the streams, if you do, you disintegrate.  So if you finally capture a ghost or two you get some money.  Gain enough money and you can buy other worthless shit like Ghost Food, an upgraded Proton Pack, or better gear that has greater defense against ghosts.  So where exactly would you use this Ghost Food or defensive gear?  So far all we've seen are the overworld, driving, and ghost busting scenes and you can't exactly use items there.  In any case, now that you've gotten some ghosts you need to empty your trap and buy a new one.  That's right, you can't use one trap forever, you need to keep buying them.

This is very gray, too gray in fact.

So once you hit the shop again, you need to do the driving scene all over.  Fun.  By now, though, your gas meter is probably pretty low and you don't know why the fuck you have a gas meter anyway.  Well guess what?  You need to get gas for your damn car too.  For now you run out of gas and the sprites get out and push the car to the gas station, which costs more money.  So now you've wasted your precious ghost busting fee on gas and you can't buy that upgraded Proton Pack.  Fucknuts.  Whatever, you buy another trap and go after more ghosts.  After about an hour or so of doing this shit, you're still not any further along.  I had the problem of just spending my fees on new traps, gas, and getting hit in the driving stages.  It's like you were exercising only to go back to McDonalds any time that you made any progress at all, except without the addiction and food.  There's no food in Ghostbusters for NES.

Endgame staircases are harder to climb than any other type of staircase.  This is a fact.

Also after about an hour something flashes across the bottom of the screen.  Every time this happened while I was playing I barely caught the tail end of it.  The message just flies across the bottom of the screen at warp-fucking-speed.  Essentially it's telling you that you can now go into the Zuul building and play the rest of the game.  Finally.  Anyway, what you see next is the screen above.  Here you have to play stairmaster and avoid the ghosts.  This is where the defensive gear comes in handy, cause three hits and you're done, and you need to be almost flawless to beat this fuckfest.  Good luck.

The boss in an NES game is a naked woman-man. Fun.

At the top of the stairs, the next screen greets you and the game actually becomes fun for about five minutes until you beat the everliving shit out of the crazy bitch.  You dodge bullets here and fire back with your proton packs until she's toast.  The game ends and you get a shitty black and white ending screen with misspelled words and horrible grammar.  Yay.

Alright, I'm over it.  Hopefully now you see what I mean.  The game is way too boring.  I mean, how many times do you have to play the same freaking driving scene or the same ghost capturing scene?  Seriously, the only fun part of the game is the end where you're mimicking a 2D vertical shooter.  And talk about complex: why do you need to buy gas?  Getting down into that level of detail is just not needed here, it only creates problems for the gamer and causes them to get too frustrated to enjoy or finish the game.  The annoyance of this game is on full throttle and it shows with all of the same scenes, frustrating gameplay, and lackluster music.  I didn't mention this before, but the music is really annoying.  It's a decent rendition of the Ghostbusters theme, but it never stops.  Ever.  You'll want to cut your own ears off just to stop the noise.

Like I was saying at the beginning, I love simulation games, but this is just ass.  There's definitely an issue with the limitations of the NES and if it were on the SNES a few years later, I think that with some alterations, this could have been a good game, like SimCity.  The best change that this game could use though, is a change in location.  It needs to be located right in the fucking toilet.  Just drop that game right in like the shit bomb it is and move on with your life.