Played Out: Ghostbusters - The Video Game

When people ask what my favorite movie is, I usually give some wishy-washy answer like, "Well, it depends on the situation. Am I stuck on a desert island with this film? Or am I spooning a chick?" When I don't do that, I respond with Ghostbusters.

In line with Chris's 1990s retrospective, much of my love for this movie comes from my personal history with it. Along with Back to the Future, it was one of the only non-animated videos I remember having in my house. My mom also cautioned me against watching it for a while, saying it was too scary, which of course made the movie that much more awesome when I finally did. Her actual reason might have been the fact that the PG movie featured Sigourney Weaver telling Bill Murray that she wanted him inside of her, but I had no idea what that meant anyway, so it just went in one ear and out the other, like ghosts do.

Like my modern favorite Hot Fuzz, Ghostbusters was able to combine good storytelling with humor that doesn't need to break the fourth wall to alert you to the fact that yes, this is a movie, and yes, this is fun. The pacing is amazing, too. If I see Ghostbusters on television when I'm flipping by, I'll stop and enjoy; and if the station I've landed on doesn't have commercials, it's likely I'll stay to the end. I call this "The Faculty effect," because that movie paces equally well, and because if I just called it "The Ghostbusters effect" here, I wouldn't be referencing enough pop culture.

I can't describe how jealous I was of kids who had the toy ghost traps, either. I remember I got some Slimer goo that was covered in carpet lint after a few days play but was still awesome. I died, too, of course, because I had nowhere to trap the slime. Who's writing this, then, you ask? A ghost.

I was also totally jealous of kids who had the Ghostbusters game for the NES. While I was stuck jumping over pits on my Atari, other people I knew were saving the world from Gozer! Or Zuul, the minion of Gozer, upon whom the makers of the game mistakenly placed power. Along with the Back to the Future game, though, time has only made more obvious how completely it missed out on the essence of the movie. Ghostbusters was an action comedy, and the game had weak action with no comedy - unless you count the victory screen.


Fast forward to now, when a new Ghostbusters video game released June 16 in conjunction with the movie's 25th anniversary. Maybe you know this or maybe you don't (I've seen virtually no marketing), but almost all of the original cast is back. Sigourney Weaver is out in favor of a pretty bland Alyssa Milano-voiced character. And Rick Moranis pretty much sticks to country music nowadays. But Annie Potts is back as Janine Melnitz, and even Pecker shows up. I mean Peck. Ha! Remember when jokes like that were funny, in the age of innocence, before Meet the Fockers ruined it for everyone.

I got the new game for my birthday last week, knowing that I would, seeing as no matter how many games I put on a birthday list, my dad will only buy ones that he has some kind of interest in. Even if I write down 20 possible games (which I do, so that I'll be surprised), my dad will usually ignore them all in favor of some Sherlock Holmes PC game. My dad is obsessed with most everything Holmes. Well, most everything...



Anyway, he's heard of Ghostbusters, so that's what he got me, and I beat the game yesterday already. That alone doesn't really say much, as I'll complete most any game, no matter its quality. This was good, however, in some really good ways. There's a lot of roughness around the edges (some sloppy pacing, ironically, with some poor transitions between gameplay and story), and, as has been mentioned in every review I've read, it's not the Ghostbusters 3 it was somewhat hyped up to be. But again, this was good, because I could feel the 10-year old in me actually imagining he was a ghostbuster again. It's hard to get that feeling anymore.


I played on the XBox, so I didn't get a feel for whether or not Wii motion would have made wrangling ghouls any more fun, but just a normal controller made trapping the enemy feel like an achievement. A lot of mundane, non-ethereal enemies do appear as filler between the big scenes, yet the ghost-dominated battles, such as one in which I had to pull down more than a dozen dead Civil War soldiers, were plenty satisfying.

Most importantly, I spent the whole game wandering around with the real Ghostbusters, with their real voices saying new, oftentimes funny things about a new, decent plot. I'm more than happy to overlook the game's missteps in favor of the authentic nostalgia delivered.

It's not a great game, and I wouldn't want to see it made into a movie unless the story were tightened up and the actual '80s versions of the actors were able to play themselves (no modernized Seth Rogen version please). But I could feel the effort put in by everyone from Harold Ramis and Dan Aykroyd (who wrote the script) to the other voice actors to the game designers, towards making a legitimately good Ghostbusters product, and that makes me happy. When I finished this game, I literally thought to myself about how glad I am that Ghostbusters has been a part of my life.

So sell me the t-shirt and the mug and the plastic trap and all that crap, cuz I'm not gonna care when I'm dead. I'll be too busy chatting up the hot librarian.

This entry was posted by DoktorPeace, on Friday, July 24, 2009. You can leave your response.