NEW GHOSTBUSTERS II (NES)

In the past, I have made reference to my youthful obsession with Ghostbusters, an obsession I think you could accurately describe as “all-encompassing” and which left an immutable psychic scar because I never owned the firehouse play set. I had the toys, the book, the VHS tapes, I asked for red glasses so I could look like the cartoon version of Egon and my first ever crush was on cartoon Janine. Too much information? Probably. Yet somehow, in the period when my twin obsessions were Ghostbusters and the NES, I managed to completely miss out on today’s game. Developed by HAL Labs and released in 1990, it’s New Ghostbusters II!

Here are some Ghostbusters now, as Peter, Egon and Winston chase Slimer out of a cinema screen because it can’t be the Ghostbusters if they’re not causing significant property damage while busting ghosts.
These aren’t new Ghostbusters, of course. They’re old Ghostbusters. The game’s called New Ghostbusters II because there was already an NES game based on Ghostbusters II, developed by Imagineering. The Imagineering version is a pretty terrible game that I wouldn’t recommend to even the most hardcore Ghostbusters fan, because it’s an overly-difficult slog with tedious driving sections. New Ghostbusters II is a completely different beast, as we shall see. For once it was European console owners who got the better deal, because New Ghostbusters II was never released in the US, presumably due to licensing issues. Naturally it was also released in Japan, being developed by HAL, (a Japanese company,) and I’m looking forward to seeing a Japanese take on what is a very American film franchise. I’m sure I wouldn’t be the first person to point out that Ghostbusters is about a business that becomes successful by flouting health and safety regulations, mocking due legal process and monopolising their industry, after all.

Before the action begins, you must select two Ghostbusters to play as. You can even play as the Ghostbusters’ accountant / lawyer Louis Tully, which I imagine marks the first time I’ve ever had the chance to play as Rick Moranis in a videogame. I’ll be going with Egon and Ray for this playthrough, because they feel like the two most Ghostbuster-y characters to me. Plus Egon’s my favourite.

The game wastes no time in breaking out the spooks, beginning with good ol’ Slimer – a floating, unthreatening target on which to practise your busting skills. NG2 has an unusual set-up where you have two characters but only control one of them directly, in this case Egon. You move around with the d-pad until you see a ghost, at which point you press the A button to fire your proton beam. If you hit the ghost they’ll be stunned so long as you hold the beam on them, at which point you can press the B button to make your CPU-controlled partner throw out a trap to capture the ghost. Your partner will follow you around fairly closely and make their way to a good trapping position once you’ve got a ghost in your beam… for the most part. Ray's definitely more reliable than I expected him to be, though.

As far as the core gameplay goes, that’s about it. Zap ‘em and trap ‘em, nice and easy. Each stage is split into a series of rooms, and eliminating all the ghosts in a room opens up the next, complete with a big on-screen arrow telling you where to go next. Let’s pretend the arrow represents the PKE Meter tracking ectoplasmic activity throughout this… wait, where are we?

With all the offices and scattered paperwork, it appears that New Ghostbusters II begins at around the end of the movie’s first act, when the courthouse is attacked by ghosts thanks to the emotion-manipulating pink slime. Perhaps that’s why there are so many Slimers about; slime sticks together. There are plenty of other ghosts here too, though, including the jogging ghost from the movie, pink blobs that split into even smaller pink blobs when zapped, spectral snakes that pop out of bathtubs and chainsaw maniacs.

There’s a chainsaw maniac now, with its chainsaw and its face that’s kind of difficult to interpret. Is it wearing a baseball catcher’s mask, for a Jason Voorhees riff? Possibly, although thanks to my over-consumption of horror movies I keep seeing it as the Chatterer cenobite from Hellraiser. Not that the Chatterer ever used a chainsaw. I don’t think Pinhead would stand for one of his crew torturing people with something so gauche as a chainsaw, he’d have a big speech about how it lacks the brutal elegance of chains with hooks on the end.
It’s been easy going thus far, but I should mention that you don’t have any kind of health bar in this game. One hit and you lose a life, although thankfully your CPU partner is invulnerable. This means that you should try to be careful, and my top tip for doing that is that you can catch ghosts through walls, so use that to your advantage whenever possible.

Things get more difficult when projectiles are involved, such as in this room full of Slimers that chuck food at you. For whatever reason these lethal projectile pineapples cannot be stopped by blasting them with a highly-concentrated, nuclear-powered proton beam, so you’ll have to dodge them. Fortunately your chosen Buster handles well, with sharp, precise controls, although the perspective can sometimes make it difficult to tell if an attack is going to hit you even though it looks like it should pass “above” you.

Having cleared the building you arrive at the courtroom itself, where the jar of pink slime explodes and releases the game’s first boss – the Scoleri Brothers! A pair of murderers given the electric chair, they’re freed from Hell to enact their sinister plan of running around the screen in predictable patterns. Yeah, they’re not the most menacing pair. The difficulty comes from having to hold your beam on them for a little while before they turn pink and trappable, but you can move around while you’re zapping a ghost and your remain “tethered” to it up to a certain distance so you can still avoid the other brother.

Onwards to stage two, which takes place during the Ghostbusters' exploration of New York’s abandoned subway tunnels. It’s also where the ghosts of all the Mets that Mega Man ever destroyed have ended up. They’re happily working away down here with their pickaxes and pneumatic drills until you bust them. I’m sure they were working on something evil. I assume they were trying to cause as much pubic transport disruption as possible, driving ordinary people to contemplate all manner of terrible acts as they’re crushed against someone who hasn’t bathed in three weeks while their train is stuck in a siding – a diabolical plan indeed.

You can’t have small train tracks in a videogame without mine carts, can you? If an alien civilisation learned of Earth solely through videogames they’d have to assume that mine carts are a fundamental aspect of an Earthling’s everyday life, along with opening chests and killing each other. Uh, scratch that last one.
So yeah, mine carts that’ll kill you if they crash into you. You still have to bust the ghosts inside, of course, but you can hold out your beam as they pass and let them ride into it. This stage represents a good step up from the first, with the same basic gameplay that’s spiced up by having to pay attention to where you’re standing. It feels like an organic addition to the complexity of the game and is definitely preferably to the game simply dumping more ghosts on you, or bigger ghosts, or ghosts with guns.

Sadly this stage does suffer from being a bit dull to look at. Ninety-five percent of the stage is the same orange bricks and mine cart tracks patrolled by undead construction workers. I’d be more critical of it if I wasn’t having so much fun with the gameplay, but it could definitely use a bit of sprucing up. At least chuck in a bit of graffiti or something, maybe a giant albino alligator that was flushed down the sewers and grew to an enormous size beneath the city. This is New York, after all.

The final few screens take place aboard a train where you’re attacked by ghostly severed heads. I certainly hope they’re ghosts, anyway. If not, I think the Ghostbusters should also be keeping an eye out for Herbert West.
Right at the very end of the train is Slimer, except now he’s a locomotive engineer with a little hat and everything, and it is adorable. Less adorable when Slimer fired a spread-shot of projectiles that immediately killed Egon with no warning, but still a lovely sight to see. Then I blasted the old onionhead. I felt a little bad about it, but not bad enough to prevent me from seeing the rest of the game.

Stage three takes place in Peter Venkman’s apartment building, where he let Sigourney Weaver stay after an evil force tried to kidnap her baby. Unfortunately the lifts aren’t working, so you have to work your way up from the ground floor, trapping a ton of ghosts as you go because Peter apparently lives in the most haunted building in America. Common spooks in this stage include pink blobs, strange winged things that look like Cupid fell asleep on a tanning bed and, for some reason, ninja ghosts. I want to know how the spirits of an entire ninja clan ended up bound to the earthly confines of a New York apartment building, although as I type this I realise I already know the answer – this must be the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ doing. “Ghostbusters meet Turtles” is a crossover event that, had I read it as a child, would probably have killed me through raw excitement. A couple of years ago there was a Ghostbusters / Turtles crossover comic, but I can’t bring myself to read it. I know it won’t live up to my childhood fantasy of the Turtles meeting Zuul and thinking of Shredder so they have to fight a giant Shredder and then the Ghostbusters arrive in the Statue of Liberty and they fight and it is the best. Ahem.

The apartment building has minibosses at the end of each floor in the form of these flail-wielding cyclopses. A menacing sight at first, you’ll soon learn that they can only attack directly downwards so once you’ve gotten around the side of them they’re completely helpless.

Much like the previous stage, this area does suffer from repetitiveness -  a feeling exacerbated by it being about three times longer than the previous stage. You move through the very similar looking rooms, fight a couple of cyclopses, repeat – and I repeated it for long enough that I was worried I was missing something, that I needed to do something special to break the cycle in a Zelda-Lost-Woods kind of deal. But no, you just have to keep plugging away until you reach the end of the stage.

I’m happy to keep plugging away, mind you, because I’m having a really fun time with New Ghostbusters II. The action’s slick and smooth, with just enough thought required to avoid boxing yourself in or getting surrounded that it avoids becoming stale. The range of your proton beam is long enough to give you room to manoeuvre but still short enough that you have to get involved and can’t just trap ghosts from a mile away, and when you’ve learned how the ghosts move you can use their patterns to your advantage. Plus it looks great, with endearingly chubby little sprites and simple but charming ghost designs. Oh, and the music is really good, too. You’ve got a fantastic NES recreation of the famous Ghostbusters theme, for starters, and all the stage music is a blast, from stage one’s bouncy use of motifs from the theme to stage four’s funky riff on “Entrance of the Gladiators.” Then there’s stage three’s theme, which is clearly from a Kirby game.

If you listened to that out of context, you’d definitely say “hey, that sure sounds a lot like music from a Kirby game.” I know I did. It’s because NG2’s soundtrack is by Kirby composer Jun Ishikawa. Having heard this track I’d have been amazed if Ishikawa wasn’t the composer.

Any complaints I may have had about this stage being repetitious were allayed once the Ghostbusters were attacked by these grim reapers with pumpkins for heads. They are, with only mild hyperbole, the greatest enemies in any videogame ever. I’d like to believe they’re based on the pumpkin-headed “Ghost of Halloween” Samhain from the Ghostbusters cartoon, but I don't have any evidence for that.

There’s no boss at the end of stage three, but you do get a cutscene showing Dana’s baby Oscar being abducted by the creepy Renfield-a-like Janosz. Like almost everything in this game, the cutscene is very cute.

Into the river of slime for the next stage, where our intrepid paranormal investigators must do battle with evil strawberry jam while avoiding the projectiles that come their way. You might also notice that NG2 does have some problems with sprite flickering, especially when you’re zapping a ghost / deadly emotion-enhancing fruit preserve. It’s a fairly minor issue, and overall I’d say that there’s very little to criticise in NG2. Once or twice Ray managed to get himself stuck behind a wall and I had to go back and fetch him, but the pathfinding on your CPU helper is generally very good. The stage backgrounds do get samey, and that’s probably the game’s biggest flaw. I’ve played games with a lot worse biggest flaws.

Hey, maybe there is something to the whole Slimer / slime connection in this game? There certainly are a lot of Slimers down here and not much else beside, you know, slime. Maybe Slimers are independent, fully-realised globs of emotion slime, and that emotion is “me at about 8pm when I suddenly realise I’ve forgotten to have any dinner.”
It was also around this point that I realised what other game NG2 is reminding me of – Sunsoft’s NES version of Gremlins 2. They’re both top-down games based on spooky comedy movies set in New York that I watched a lot when I was a kid. There’s no point to this revelation, it’s just nice to finally figure it out.

Something that didn’t appear in Ghostbusters II (the movie) is this stage’s boss, a pack of slimy… lizards? Dragons? Whatever they are, they seem to have been flayed alive, given that they’re red and you can see all their musculature. They can also breathe fire, so I’m going with dragons. Slime dragons, the worst kind of dragons. Like the Scoleri Brothers you have to keep your beam on a dragon for a while to defeat it, although you don’t have to trap them. I assume this is because they’re made of slime and not ectoplasm. It works out nicely for Ray, who can spend the entire battle doing bugger all and being invincible. Hang on, why doesn’t Ray join in with the zapping? Does he not have a proton pack? Were there budget cuts at Ghostbusters HQ? C’mon, Ray, start pulling your weight.

With the dragons defeated it’s time for the final stage – the art museum, where kidnapped baby Oscar has been taken so that the evil wizard Vigo the Carpathian can transfer his essence out of the painting he’s trapped in and into Oscar’s body. Oh yeah, Vigo the Carpathian. You remember him, he’s the driving force behind the events of Ghostbusters 2. Kinda weird that we haven’t seen him in the game yet, huh?
I like the exhibits on display in the museum. You can’t go wrong with pictures of Slimer and blank canvases that drip blood, can you? Plus I reckon that the pictures you can see just about Egon and Ray in the screenshot above are teeny-tiny recreations of the Ghostbusters 2 movie poster.

The museum takes everything that you’ve seen thus far during the course of the game and bundles it all into one stage. Almost every type of previously-encountered ghost makes a return, including the Scoleri Brothers and the pumpkin reapers, and it feels like one last section of “pure” gameplay before the final battles ahead. Nothing much has changed, but nothing really needed to change because the gameplay was perfectly enjoyable as it was.

The stage ends with a battle against Janosz, as portrayed by the actor Peter MacNicol and represented in-game as a sprite of Peter MacNicol with a gigantic forehead. There’s something I find very entertaining about doing battle with an American character actor who I associate most with Ally McBeal in a Japanese-developed NES game. Like, I wonder if Peter MacNicol has ever seen this? I’m far too British to ever do it, but part of me wants to get in touch with him on Twitter and let him know about this (please do not take this as a request to bother Peter MacNicol). He does have a Twitter. I just checked it out. He seems to really like Halloween, so he’s okay in my book.
As for the boss fight itself, it’s… not great. The game’s lowest ebb, as far as I’m concerned, mostly because it’s an enormous spike in difficulty compared to the rest of the game which, up until this point, has been relatively easy. To defeat Janosz, you have to zap one of his clones with your beam for fifteen seconds or so – but as soon as you hit one Janosz, the other two begin firing projectiles at you, so you have to try to avoid those missile while maintaining your beam and that is no easy task. It’s made worse by you having to eliminate about ten Janosz clones before the fight grinds to a halt, with any lapse in concentration or false move leading to the loss of a life because hey, it’s one-hit kills. A frustrating battle needlessly stretched into a gruelling slog, then – but those sprites are fantastic.

There’s Vigo, the Scourge of Carpathia, the Sorrow of Moldavia. About bloody time. He used to sit in a castle of pain on a throne of blood, now he’s reduced to possessing art restorers and looking like a sculpture of George Carlin carved from scabs. No wonder he’s so angry.

After getting my arse kicked into a brand new shape by Janosz, fighting Vigo was like skipping through a summer meadow by comparison. It seems that Vigo’s been telling fibs on his CV and by “dark sorcery” he means juggling. Vigo throws slow, easily dodged balls at the Ghostbusters and then spins a protective ball barrier around himself, and it’s a very simple task to avoid the projectiles, hit him with the proton beam and then simply walk backwards a little so the spinning balls don’t hit you. Vigo’s must be out of practise, because he’s the scourge of nothing in this state, except maybe people who have to tidy the ball pit at a kid’s soft play centre.

With Vigo defeated, baby Oscar is saved and the game is over. There’s not really an “ending” as such, but that’s fine by me – I know how Ghostbusters II ends, and instead you get a fun series of little skits over the credits, like the Statue of Liberty chasing Vigo down presumably so she can kick him right in his huddled masses.

My favourite is definitely when Egon steals the reaper’s jack o’lantern head.
I’ll use the obvious gag to sum up New Ghostbusters II – bustin’ made me feel good. HAL crafted an enjoyable little game that, unlike the Western Ghostbusters II game, does one thing and does it well. It’s extremely cute, and there’s a lot of fun to be had as you waddle around the stages hoovering up non-terminal repeating phantasms thanks to the solid controls and the smidgen of space for a bit of tactical play, especially when it comes to learning enemy patterns and grabbing ghosts through walls. It’s also not too difficult, Janosz fight excepted, and it’s nice to play through a NES action game that doesn’t spend every moment reminding me that I’m an old man with failing reflexes and encroaching baldness. New Ghostbusters II definitely gets my recommendation, and doubly so during the Halloween season. If only you could play as Janine, I’d be ordering myself a cartridge from eBay.

High marks of the Halloween-O-Meter for NG2, because hey, it’s Ghostbusters, and also I wouldn’t be surprised if that sprite of Peter MacNicol crept into my nightmares. Plus it’s got pumpkin-headed grim reapers, that’s worth an extra point all on its own.

Recently on VGJUNK:
Deadly Dracula doors in Vampire Killer!

Brand-new ZX Spectrum pumpkin-em-up All Hallows!
A disappointing sequel to a VGJunk favourite with Ghoul Patrol!

GHOST & BOOSTER (ZX SPECTRUM)

Today I’m going to fire up the ol’ ZX Spectrum and attempt to answer that age-old question: does boostin’ make me feel good? Let’s find out with the 1987 Spectrum spook-em-up Ghost & Booster!

I usually begin each article by showing you the title screen of the game in question, but Ghost & Booster doesn’t have a title screen. That’s because it appeared on the cover tape of an Italian Spectrum magazine called Load’n’Run. The September 1987 issue, to be precise, its cover adorned by a pair of magnificent dragons squaring up to each other like two drunken club-goers during an “are you looking at my girlfriend?” moment. Leave him, Smaug, he’s not worth it.
You can see Ghost & Booster listed at the bottom of the cover, amongst other such fascinating names as Thunderland and Kill Firer. With so many games crammed onto one cover tape, you’d be right to assume that Ghost & Booster isn’t the most involved game ever coded. But who’s Booster, and what have they got to do with ghosts?

Surprise, Ghost & Booster is a Ghostbusters knock-off. What do you mean you’re not surprised? Okay, fine, so it’s not the most well-disguised title, especially if you say “Ghost and Booster” out loud. I guess “Ghostbusterz,” “Ghostbashers” and “Ghostbotherers” were already taken.
Anyway, the game begins with Ghost & Booster’s van. I have concocted an elaborate backstory explaining that this is an Italian franchise of the original Ghostbusters, and they’ve had to replace Ecto-1 with a smaller micro-van that’s more suitable for nipping through the tightly-woven streets of Rome. Perhaps it’s a Goggomobil. Did I mention this purely because “Goggomobil” is an outrageously fun word to say aloud? Yes, yes I did.
The Boostermobile trundles along the moonlit road, past the haunted “tree” (a generous description of whatever that red polyp-looking thing is) and towards some modest chalets. You do not control the Boostermobile. It drives from left to right on its own…

...until it stops and the message “PREPARATI!!” appears at the bottom of the screen. Now, I’m about as fluent in Italian as I am in ancient Sumerian but I’m pretty sure that means “get ready.” So, take the game’s advice and prepare yourself for raw, unflinching horror.

Well, I don’t know about you but I’ve been chilled to my very core. It’s a vampire… bat? I guess? A vampire who grew tired of rigmarole of transforming all the way between humanoid and bat form, so decided to split the difference and become a flying vampire head. The vampire is also ahead (pun most certainly intended) of the fashion game, sporting as he does a trendy undercut hairstyle. Unfortunately I spent so long admiring this vampire that I suddenly lost a life.

Then the same vampire reappeared, this time with less bat-wings and now wearing a barber’s cape. His fashionable hairdo takes quite a lot of maintaining, it seems.
At this point, I figured out what Ghost & Booster’s gameplay entails. It’s a reaction test, basically. A monster appears, and you have to quickly react by selecting the appropriate weapon with which to defeat them. That’s what the icons on the left represent. There’s a crucifix at the bottom and that classic ghost-busting tool A Ruddy Great Kitchen Knife in the middle, but I was at a bit of a loss as to what the icon at the top was supposed to represent. A handful of paracetamol? Pez candies? An extreme close-up of some rice? None of those thing seem like they’d be helpful in dispatching a spectre, but then neither does a knife.
In the case of the vampires, it’s obvious that you need to use the crucifix (although I’ve played enough Castlevania to know that throwing knives at vampires can work) but the problem was I didn’t know how to use the crucifix. I couldn’t get a joystick to work and trying each individual key on the keyboard was a level of effort that Ghost & Booster does not warrant, so I went looking for a copy of September 1987’s Load’n’Run magazine.

To my surprise, I managed to find one. It taught me a few things about Ghost & Booster. It was programmed by one Gb. Aicardi, and sometimes it’s called Ghost & Boosters, plural. More importantly, I learned that the controls are E, S and Z for up, left and down respectively. I even learned that the top icon is supposed to be silver bullets, because they’re mentioned in the magazine as “proiettili d’argento” and I’ve spent enough time playing as the Kingdom of Italy in Battlefield 1 to know that proiettili means “bullet.”

Having figured out a) what the game wants me to do and b) how to do it, I managed to clear the first set of five or so monsters that popped up by selecting the right tool to defeat them. Then the Boostermobile trundled along a little further, moving on to the next screen before another set of monsters attacked. That’s the entire game. React to the monsters, move forward, repeat. It’s not just vampires and vampire heads standing in your way, however.

You’ll be attacked by a hideous green lizard-genie hybrid sometimes. Its weakness? Bullets. If they’re silver bullets, does that mean this thing’s supposed to be a werewolf? I hope so, because then I can imagine a much more interesting version of the Twilight movies where this thing makes googly eyes at Kristen Stewart.

Or how about this chap, who appears to be the ghost of a turd struggling to escape from a heavily-shoulderpadded eighties power suit? He looks familiar, and my first thought was that he was a ghost from the Real Ghostbusters cartoon but I can’t seem to find any hard evidence of that. Forgive me, but it’s not like I have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Ghostbusters cartoon, which is strange because I spent around seventy-five percent of my childhood watching the Ghostbusters cartoon. The other twenty-five percent was playing with Ghostbusters toys and being bitter that I never had the firehouse playset.
This ghost is vulnerable to the knife. Somehow. The Ghostbusters could have avoided a lot of trouble with the Environmental Protection Agency if they’d stuck to carrying guns and knives rather than unlicensed nuclear accelerators.

Lastly, there’s this familiar face. It’s the ghost from the Ghostbusters logo, free from its confinement and ready to wreak havoc on the land of the living! What tool can I use to send it to an eternal rest? None of them seem very practical. Using the silver bullets seems like a lawsuit waiting to happen if anyone happens to be standing behind the ghost, the knife would surely pass straight through it and I don’t think the ghost is religious enough for the crucifix to have any effect. Fine, I’ll try the knife.

Oh no, it was a trick! Attacking this ghost causes you to lose a life, with this message appearing - “You don’t have to kill the little ghost” is how I’d translate it. There’s a lot to unpack here. Firstly, “fantasmino” is a wonderful word that I’m going to try to use more often. Secondly, I know I don’t have to kill the ghost. It’s already dead. It’s a ghost. Thirdly, it’s very strange that they chose this specific ghost to be the one you don’t harm, because the Ghostbusters’ logo is very clear that this ghost in particular should be dealt with, and it’s not like I have any way to imprison the bloody thing. So, what you do is you ignore this ghost whenever it pops up. It’s a red herring, you should let the little fantasmino live. Okay, not live, but continue to exist even if it is intent on committing suicide by Ghostbuster.

To reiterate, that’s the entire game. Every time you clear a round of ghost attacks, the next set gives you less time to press the correct key before you lose a life. By the time you reach the third screen, the ghosts attack so quickly that you don’t have time to react so you’re reduced to guessing which monster is coming up next, and I’d like to take this opportunity to apologise to fantasmino for all the times I accidentally shot it.

With much scumming of save-states I managed to get about five screens in, but the backgrounds had started repeating and nothing new was happening so I feel confident in saying I’ve explored Ghost & Booster to its deepest depths. Those depths might barely lap around my ankles, but I had fun all the same, because spooky ZX Spectrum graphics, misshapen monsters and blatant copyright infringements are all things I enjoy spending time with. I couldn’t call it a good game because it’s hardly a game at all, but a fun little thing to mess around with for ten minutes? Absolutely. For added enjoyment, listen to the theme from the official ZX Spectrum Ghostbusters game at the same time. You won’t regret it, unless the maniacal voice sample at the beginning creeps into your nightmares. I admit that is a possibility.

Recently on VGJUNK:
Superman? Never heard of him. This is Sunman!
Unreleased ninja action in Hangzo!

Mortal Kombat magazine covers!

THE REAL GHOSTBUSTERS (ARCADE)

The nights are getting longer, the air grows colder and finally October has arrived, and if you've been following VGJunk for a while you'll know that this can only mean one thing: it's time for the third annual VGJunk Hallowe'en Spookstravaganza! For the entire month of October, I'll be playing and writing about videogames filled with ghosts, ghouls and gremlins, games that marry the creepy to the cute, games that capture the feeling of this most wonderful time of the year. With that in mind, what could be a better place to start than with a game based on the finest spectre-based classic comedy that the Eighties can provide? It's Data East's 1987 arcade who-ya-gonna-call-em-up The Real Ghostbusters!

I know I say this a lot, but I'm sure I don't need to explain what Ghostbusters is all about - if you don't know it from the hit 1984 movie or the sequel, you'll be familiar with the cartoon. Hell, some of you might even know the franchise from the mid-Nineties Extreme Ghostbusters animated series, and if that's the case then I hope you're enjoying your stay here after your journey from whatever parallel dimension you call home.
Presumably this game is based on the original animated series, which was named The Real Ghostbusters to distinguish it from Filmation's far inferior cartoon, also called Ghostbusters. It's not often I call something that stars a hat-wearing gorilla "inferior," but there you go. However, if you're hoping for a faithful recreation of the classic Real Ghostbusters cartoon then you're probably going to find this game a little... lacking.

On the plus side, that car is immediately recognisable as Ecto-1. Everything else, not so much. I'm certain the Ghostbusters’s HQ wasn't called the "Ghosthouse" in the cartoon - Egon would never have stood for a name that made it sound like a fairground attraction. They also didn't bother to put the famous Ghostbusters logo on the building even though it's clearly visible on the side of Ecto-1, so the only conclusion I can reach is that this scene shows one of the "real" Real Ghostbusters heading into the premises of an unlicensed bootleg competitor to serve them with a cease-and-desist order.

At least the game outlines your goals in a clear and concise manner, although the first and third items on that list were pretty much a given. In the Ghostbusters universe, New York must be as synonymous with ghosts as it is with bagels and Broadway in our world because apparently The City That Never Sleeps is also The City That Cannot Let Its Dead Rest Peacefully.

The game begins, and if you were expecting the usual movie-license fare of a side-scrolling action platformer then prepare to have you mind blown - The Real Ghostbusters is a top-down shooter! Slightly unexpected, that, but I suppose one of the Ghostbusters' most famous trademarks is a nuclear-powered particle cannon so it's hardly like shooting at ghosts is unknown to them. The joystick moves your Ghostbuster - who, as far as I can tell isn't supposed to be any of the actual Ghostbusters but some faceless everyman with an unlicensed nuclear accelerator on his back - and you fire in the direction you're facing. Yes, this game sadly does not have the dual-stick controls of games like Robotron and Smash TV, which is a damn shame because once you've played a top-down shooter with dual-stick controls and the freedom to move and shoot in different directions, it's always a disappointment to go back to the face-and-fire handling of games such as this.
To make up for it, The Real Ghostbusters gives you two separate fire buttons. The first one fires what looks like, of all things, a barrage of tiny rockets. It fires it an odd way: if you face in one direction and hold the button down, it produces a steady but not very rapid stream of projectiles, but each time you change direction you can fire a rocket instantly. This means that if you hold the button down and kind of wiggle about on the spot, always changing your angle, you can fire a spread of missiles much, much faster, and given that there are a lot of enemies this strange thrashing motion quickly becomes mandatory if you want to get anywhere without dying a lot.

The other fire button comes into play once you've killed a ghost, because killing a ghost turns them into... a ghost? They're a little difficult to see here, but those two grey shapes at the bottom-right of the screen are the ghosts of ghosts that you can catch by using the other fire button to produce the famous proton beam. Keep the ghost-ghosts in the proton beam for long enough and you'll "capture" them, although your Ghostbuster doesn't use a trap so I'm not sure how that works. I think Egon's been tinkering with the proton packs and now they work as some kind of ectoplasmic vacuum cleaner.
For every 100 ghosts you capture you get an extra life. Does this reveal that the true purpose of the Ghostbusters is to prolong their own lifespans by harvesting the souls of others? Possibly, but I'm still struggling with the idea that these ghosts have other ghosts inside them. Ghostception? Or are these enemies actually living creatures that you're killing and then capturing their newly-formed ghosts? It's probably the latter: if you're a newly hired Ghostbuster then it can be hard to meet your quotas, and no-one's gonna mind if you knock the ectoplasm out of these guys.

I mean, some of them are KKK members. Who's going to miss these guys? Well, their bug-eyed purple elephant monster companion might. The story of how a grape-coloured snout demon came to be working with the Ku Klux Klan is one that I'm sure must be utterly fascinating, but sadly it's never expanded on.
Something that's also never mentioned is exactly where the hell this first stage is meant to be taking place. It consists of a series of dilapidated buildings linked by concrete walkways, but if you look over the edge you can see what appears to be a distant galaxy hanging in the blackness. Honestly, I find it a little unsettling - I'm not scared of many things, besides the usual ones like "hard work" and "human contact," but vast, blank, formless labyrinths from which there is no hope of escape creep me out on some deep subconscious level. Maybe I was laboratory rat in a previous life.

So what else is there to see in the first stage? Well, there's the usual array of power-ups: increases to the power of your shot and your proton beam, temporary invincibility, that kind of thing, and you can also summon Slimer to help you out. I say "Slimer" but the game simply refers to him as "Green Ghost," a name that he was given in the early years of the Ghostbusters toy line before the animated series gave him a name and a personality beyond "food go in ghost now." Slimer acts as a shield of sorts, sometimes protecting you from enemy attacks but mostly just bouncing around the screen like an irritating twerp, so at least Data East captured his cartoon personality pretty well.

Of course, there must be bosses, and here are the first, a pair of traditional sheet-wearing apparitions that attack by firing toilet paper at you. It doesn't even seem to be particularly haunted toilet paper, either, although any contact with it will kill you instantly so there must be a little more to it than the average two-ply. The most baffling thing about this fight is that you can't destroy the papers by shooting them with your particle accelerator, which leads me to wonder what would happen if you blocked the Large Hadron Collider with wet tissue paper like it was a high-school toilet.
Fortunately for our hero, toilet paper doesn't move very fast and if you keep on your toes you should be able to deal with these ghosts pretty easily. Once they're (un(un))dead, a key appears and you can escape from this terrifying concrete maze and head back to the "ghosthouse."

I guess I was right about the proton packs working like vacuums, because our hero seems to simply flip his from "suck" to "blow" and fires all the ghost he's captured into the Containment Unit. Ah, the Containment Unit, home and prison to all the ghosts the Ghostbusters ever busted. As a kid I was a huge Ghostbusters fan - and I mean "fan" in the actual "short for fanatic" sense, a ectoplasm-fuelled zealot who would try to convert everyone to the Ghostbusters cause with all the ferocity of a living Jack Chick tract but without all the evil - and the Containment Unit was a source of endless fascination for me. Any episode of the cartoon where they actually entered the Containment Unit, revealing it to be a twisted, hellish landscape of pure nightmare horror, that was the best episode. Sadly there's nothing so exciting in this game, and once you've dropped off the ghosts you caught it's time for stage two.
If you're looking at this game so far and thinking "well, it doesn't look that Ghostbuster­s-y" then congratulations, you've seen through Data East's cunning ruse. The Real Ghostbusters is actually a conversion of a different Data East game called Meikyuu Hunter G, which looks like this.

It plays the same as The Real Ghostbusters, apart from the proton beam being a more powerful special weapon activated by pressing both fire buttons together. If I had to guess at the design process for The Real Ghostbusters, I'd say that someone pointed out to a Data East executive that the main character from Meikyuu Hunter G looked a little like a Ghostbuster, and when said executive saw the "proton beam" weapon his eyes turned into cartoon dollar signs and he was on the phone to his American distributors within seconds.

Back to The Real Ghostbusters, and the rest of the game is pretty much identical to the first stage, just with a different background: you move vaguely up the screen, shooting and capturing ghosts until you reach the boss, who drops the key to the exit once he's defeated.

The second boss is at least more interesting than the first, looking as it does like something you'd expect to find hiding in the Devil's U-bend. Slimer refuses to take the whole thing seriously, despite the fact that this monster is clearly very angry: you can tell by the way it's frowning its single eye.

The next few stages gradually introduce new landscapes, like this desert graveyard, and new enemies, like these mummies that crawl from the ground when you shoot their graves. I'd say their anger is justifiable, firstly at not being buried in a grand pyramid like any self-respecting mummy and secondly at some dick with a proton cannon blasting away at their eternal resting places.
Actually, it was at about this point that I realised that as well as capturing ghosts, the proton beam also damages enemies. Suddenly I had to question the usefulness of the basic shot - after all, the beam is a constant attack that seems to be more powerful than the missiles. The thing is, I think the proton beam is supposed to have limited ammunition, measured by the yellow bar at the top-left, but for some reason while I was playing it never went down. Odd, but it was certainly helpful to find I could use my beam on everything and it definitely made me feel more like an actual, non-rocket-firing Ghostbuster, so I stuck with it.

Stage three also introduces the first really infuriating boss fight, a gaggle of scissor-headed demon... I was going to say birds, but they're actually not that bird-like at all, are they? Sure they've got beaks, but they look more like recently flayed sheep skulls attached to balls of lint by bungee cords. They attack by extending their heads at you in a manner that seems more borne of curiosity than any real desire to kill you, but because there are loads of them you'll quickly be overwhelmed as their desire to get a closer look results in you being pummeled to death.

By the time you reach stage five, it becomes very difficult to make any progress without either moving very slowly and eradicating every single monster you encounter (which really isn't an option because of the time limit) or without dying constantly. Enemies attack from every angle, often appearing right next to you without warning, and you die in one hit. My age-raddled brain found it quite difficult to keep up with everything that was happening on-screen - and between enemies, moving spikes, deadly projectiles and power-ups, there was plenty going on - and so I ended up dying and respawning so frequently that Jesus himself would have let out a slow whistle of appreciation had he seen it.

These turd-headed red demons are especially annoying, as their only attack pattern is to swarm all over you as a group and stay on top of you as you respawn, so if you don't clear them all away in the brief period of invincibility that comes with a new life you're just going to die again straight away. I suppose it's nice to see that at least one species of unspeakable monstrosity has come up with an effective strategy, at least - it definitely beats the KKK guys, they just slowly launch fireballs at you and infuse you with an unshakeable sense of man's inhumanity to man as they prattle on about the mixing of the races.

At least stage five has a good boss encounter, a battle with a group of bizarre scythe-wielding demons whose huge saucer eyes give them a constant look of confusion... until they swing their scythes at you and brutally murder you. Then they're all business.

Unfortunately, The Real Ghostbusters rather loses its way after the half-way mark. Backgrounds are repeated, no new enemies are introduced and the game because more of a chore than anything else. The gameplay never changes, there are no new weapons to collect, and there's only one music track that plays throughout the entire game. Luckily, that track is a slightly wonky recreation of Ray Parker Jr.'s famous Ghostbusters theme.

It is a testament to the incredible catchiness of the Ghostbusters theme that this not-quite-accurate digital recreation powered by arcade technology a quarter of a century old never grates. You might start to tune it out after a while, but it never makes you want to ram angry wasps down your ear canals.

I would also like to add that this boss looks like Shadow Weaver from She-Ra but without the curvaceous - and for a young but maturing boy, kind of, erm, confusing - body.

It's a much better boss than this ball-swinging Cyclops. All he does is swing his ball-and-chain around. I don't think he even knows I'm there, he's just been told by the head ghost or his demonic department manager or whoever is his direct superior that he should just stand here swing his weapon around. Remember this guy, we'll be seeing him again soon.

The next boss is even worse, as it's just a swarm of those purple elephants we've been seeing since stage bloody one. No new powers, no special tricks, they can't even morph together to form one giant purple stalk-eyed pachyderm - they're exactly the same as they've been for the whole damn game, except now they've discovered the joys of teamwork.

By the time I reached the final stage, I seemed to be spending more time dead than alive. Enemies that were once bosses have returned as normal enemies, which at least makes some kind of sense - the infernal bureaucracy of Hell probably would demote you if you failed to stop the Ghostbusters. Those red demons are everywhere, and they won't be happy until forty of them have piled on top of me and crushed me beneath their bulk. Like, they've got axes but screw that, axes are so passé, I'm going to sit on this human until his internal organs are crushed into the consistency of minestrone soup.
I'm sure this will all be redeemed by the final boss, though. He'll be the King of the Ghosts, after all! It could be any number of hell-spawned monstrosities! The Ghostbusters fought Cthulhu once, you know. Or maybe, just maybe, we'll see an appearance by a certain gooey white advertising mascot.

Oh, you poor dope, you shouldn't have gotten your hopes up. The final boss is just two of those Cyclopses (Cyclopi?) and they're doubly irritating. That's right, no impressive final encounter and not even an appearance from the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man. Not a single appearance from him, in fact, which is weird given that he's one of the most memorable things from the entire Ghostbusters franchise. What a sour note to end the game on, right? It's a good job I wasn't really expecting anything interesting, I would have been really disappointed!

Good bustin', indeed. The city is safe from all the Cyclopses and purple elephants, and our hero can return to headquarters for some well-deserved rest...

...except there's some kind of cock-up (probably Slimer's fault) and all the ghosts escape, regaining the forms they had before I shot them and hoovered up their spiritual essences. Nice try, Data East, but there's no way I'm playing through this again just yet.
Before I wrap up, it would be remiss of me to not take a closer look at some of the various spooks and phantoms that I didn't mention - after all, this is the first article in this year's Hallowe'en season, and what says "Hallowe'en" better than deformed freaks from a realm beyond the ken of Man?

Oh man, look at this wonderful bunch of weirdos. First, there's a small green monster who looks perpetually disgusted at everything he sees, which given his huge eyes is probably quite a lot. I like to think he's a good, decent creature who is most horrified that his ghostly brethren have teamed up with the KKK. The other green monster doesn't look quite as happy, and you would be happy if your teeth resembled the front end of a snowplow. I do like the pin-point glow of his sunken eyes, though. Thirdly we have some living spikes, more of an environmental hazard than an enemy as they do is pop up out of the ground, trying to stab Ghostbusters in the butt. The life of a sentient spike is not a glamorous one. Finally there's a ghost that I recognise from the cartoon, or at least from the toys - this running ghost appeared on a lot of early promotional material and is apparently called the "Creepy Thing Ghost." I think that might be the most generic thing that you could possibly call a ghost.

That's The Real Ghostbusters arcade game, then, a proud example of the gaming tradition of slapping a licensed name over a different, unrelated game. So, did busting make me feel good? Well, kinda. A little bit, at the start. For someone of my generation and background, it's difficult to not get excited when that familiar theme starts up, even if I knew this was never going to be a great game. It does what it does well enough, though, or at least for the first half of the game - it becomes tedious quite quickly and once you've seen all the ghosts and monsters there's not much else to keep you interested. The actual gameplay is fine, with decent controls and even a surprisingly smooth difficulty curve, but it's just missing something, a certain spark that might have raised it above the average.
You know that it reminds me of the most? Zombies Ate My Neighbors. A slightly dull, undercooked version of Zombies Ate My Neighbors to be sure, but there's just enough of a connection to make me wonder if the developers of ZAMN took some inspiration from this. And now that I've reminded you all of a far superior monster-blastin' top-down shooter, my work here is done. I mean for today, at least; I'll be back soon with yet more Hallowe'en frolics.

Actually wait, there's one more thing: the return of the VGJunk Hallowe'en season also means the return of the VGJunk Hallowe'en-O-Meter! This is a measure, not of how good a game is, but how much Hallowe'eny-ness it contains, judged by my own set of loosely-defined standard (although the involvement of pumpkins always bumps it up). Last year, for example, Castlevania scored a full ten out of ten, whereas something like Katamari Damacy would get one out of ten (it gets one point because the King of All Cosmos can be pretty creepy.) So, where did The Real Ghostbusters fall on the Hallowe'en-O-Meter?

Not a bad start to the spooky goings-on, but I thought a Ghostbusters title might have scored higher - sadly this game was let down by being too brightly-lit and suffering from a notable absence of any Hallowe'en staples. Except, y'know, ghosts. They were in there.

Recently on VGJUNK:
The NES Game Difficulty Challenge!
It's a god-damn bug hunt with Alien 3: The Gun!
Punch your way to freedom in P.O.W.: Prisoners of War!