I know I know. The Nerd did a review of this game, and he did cover a lot of what happened in this game, but for the life of me I don't know why I played it. I don't know why. Maybe I thought that it wasn't as bad as everyone thought it to be, or that perhaps there were some elements the Nerd missed out and I was SOMEHOW curious on them, but in reality, the reason I played this game is because I wanted to say I beat Ghostbusters for the NES. We all know the film Ghostbusters and how popular it was back then. We all know a popular film will be bade into some game adept at one stage, whether we like it or not. Ghostbusters had the most unimpeachable displeasure of falling victim to this for the NES. Let me start by saying this game actually isn't as bad as the Nerd leads us to believe....it's worse!

The story is that you, the three Ghostbusters (Why do they always leave out the black Ghostbuster? He was one of my favourites.) have to stop New York City from being destroyed by ghosts. These ghosts will go to the "Zuul Building" in the center of the city, building up PK energy. When this hits 9999 (or OVER 9000!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!), the game ends. In fact, you got to give this game credit. You can get a game over in five different ways, that's fairly impressive for an NES game, albeit it being a rather terrible one. Most involve money when you get a game over, though, and it does seem rather silly that you demand your heroes to pay up for damage you were trying to prevent in the first place. Imagine a building gets damaged that Superman stopped from falling over and destroying several over buildings and saved countless lives, and then someone coming over to him and saying "Those windows aren't cheap you know." and demands payment. That's just down right ungrateful.

Although you start playing immediately, you need a Ghost Trap and a Proton Pack before you can capture ghosts. You need to go to the shop and buy stuff before beginning your adventure. Now, I have no problem with this. I like the fact you need to buy stuff to do other stuff and a bit of tactical thinking is required. Clearly this shop is where the Ghostbusters make their equipment, and buying them merely "pays for the cost of making one". I mean, it would just be stupid if they had to buy their equipment from someone else who knew nothing about how a Proton pack works, right? You can also get many others things like a Sound Generator, which slows down Ghosts on the staircase, a stronger Proton Pack that does better than the original, a Ghost Alarm to alert you where ghosts are and of course, traps.

This is how the game works. You get a number of traps and a Proton Pack. You go to a building that flashes red when you are next to it, you press the A button and the direction of the building on the D-Pad, and you drive there. The more you move around, the longer you have to drive. So far everything seems realistic and has a nice touch. Then you start to play a driving stage. Here is where the game show's its true colours. If you have the Ghost Vacuum, you can press the A button to suck in ghosts, but it only works if you press it when you are near them. You can run over barrels to gain more fuel, which to be fair is a nice iconic sign in a game. Hitting another car will make you lose money. Again this make sense if you ram into the car. But if the car hits you, you should gain money. Even the slightest tap in this game could make you lose $800. Logic, eh? Also, I've noticed that no matter how fast or slow you are going in a car, you'll use the same amount of fuel. If you run out of fuel, however, your little Ghostbusters will get out of the car and push it, slowly and painfully to the Gas Station. For a moment, I thought they were going to push the car equal the distance I had left. Thankfully the game isn't that cruel.

Then you get to the ghostbusting level. This is quite fun to begin with. You have to set the trap by going up, down, left or right with the B button, press the B button again to activate the Proton Packs. From this angle, it looks like the Ghostbusters are trying to balance the Proton Packs like you would balance a cocktail feather in your palm. It looks rather silly. You can press the A button to switch between the two Ghostbusters and even rotate the beams to get some ghosts in tricky areas. The ghosts get caught in the beams like flies to fly-paper. You take them to the trap, press the B button a third time, and that kinda sucks them in. The more ghosts you trap at one time, the more money you get. This is actually fun the first few times you do it. I like having to place down the traps, and then have to activate the Proton Packs. It does feel like being a Ghostbuster. However, this gets old really fast. I enjoyed it for a bit, but I had to do this several times. It's horribly time consuming to grind for money and is very tedious. There is zero thrill in this. You stop thinking of it as a Ghostbusters game and think of it as a waste of time. If you don't purchase the Super-Trap, then you'll be making constant visits to Ghostbusters HQ to empty the traps, which makes the game even slower and more tedious. I highly recommend getting the Super-trap first thing.

After a random amount of time, you'll be told to enter the Zuul Building in the enter of the map. You can do one of four things here. The first, and most highly recommended is to turn off the power and do something more productive. The second is to continue to grind for money, as you will still be offered to enter the Zuul Building despite how many buildings you clear. The third is to go to the shop and get kitted up, but that takes your option to go into the Zuul Building away until the game chooses you have suffered enough, which is extremely annoying. The forth is to enter the Zuul Building straight away. As you do, you are greeted with the colour red...and ghosts. This is by far the most annoying, unfair and difficult part of the game. You need to mash the A button to climb up the stairs, which is extremely tedious. On every floor, you can open a door with the B button, and you'll either get nothing, an extra hit, or lose a hit. This might have been a good feature to the game, if the ghost pattern wasn't completely random. You'll need a degree of luck to get past this, and I think the only way to get past it without cheating is to get the armour and the Sound Generator. However, the Sound Generator takes ages to get, and requires luck that you'll get to enter the Zuul Building a second time before the counter reaches 9999 PK Energy. When (or if) you do get to the top, just a fair bit of warning, there is a bit of nudity during the final battle.

I really, really hate the graphics on this game. It's just grey everywhere. There's a bit of yellow and green here and there, but it's all the dull and murky green and yellow that seems to blend in with the background and doesn't really "stand out". It just makes the whole place seem lifeless. Are you trying to say New York City is lifeless, game? You can do better than that. Look at Contra ans the details they have in the rocks and trees and water. Look at Super Mario Bros., that was a very early NES game, and it was chocked full of colour. Here, it's just a collection of uncreative grey slabs pushed together and expected it to be called art. The NES can handle more than one colour at a time, you know. It had candle several. There is no excuse for the game to look good, so it's clear the designers were very lazy and didn't bother to put effort into it.

The music is also very limited. It's just the same music over, and over, and over, and over, and over....and over. It's an 8-bit cover of the Ghostbusters theme, and it's no that bad to begin with, but it repeats. There isn't any variety in the music, and what's more, it's a very poor cover. It's thin, it doesn't have any harmony in it. It also has the odd sour note here and there which makes me wrench every time I hear it. Again they could have made it sound really awesome in 8-bit, but they were lazy, and it sucked. Some of the sound effects also seemed rather "incomplete". They sounded like they were still being worked on half the time, and the other half were very simple sound effects. The designers could have made the game look and sound so much better, but they just didn't put effort in.

Like I said before, the game play is tediously boring. The game play is basically a grinding game. You go somewhere, you do the same thing every time, you hope to get lucky and you want it to be over as soon as possible just so you can continue with the next round of pretty much the same thing. This is further irritated by the fact you have to continuously press the A button in the Zuul Building, and the chances of death are high there. Your thumbs will ache a lot after that level, but rest assure there is indeed a pause button in this game. You press select. I thought the game crashed when I accidentally pressed this button, because it retains the last note played for a while.

Overall, I give this game a 1.4/10    This game is bad, and I mean really, really bad. it's one of the worst games I have ever played. I'm not sure if this game is worse than Superman 64 or not, but it;s bad enough to claim the title. If you want to play this game. Just don't. Nothing will be gained from playing it, only things will be lost. Sanity and time are the main ones and you'll gain no satisfaction from completing it.

i really hated this game.sorry but i did.i played it and wanted to choke myself.sorry but this is terrible....still a nice review.

This is one of the worst NES game that I ever play in my life. I don't even want to touch this game again ever. Anyway great review on a horrible game.

I gotta say that this game isn't very good. Mostly because NES games based off of a blockbuster movie wasn't necessarily a very good idea back then. It usually ended up with LJN or it just sucked. Which sometimes leads to both.