I mentioned the appeal of attaching an already well-known name to your game when discussing Daley Thompson’s Decathlon, and here is the even more popular form of that. Ghostbusters is the first of many, many games of films I’ll be playing. Here is your chance to play a part in the film you already know and love!
In Ghostbusters you don’t actually really play as any of the ghostbusters in the film, though, even if you’re in a simplified version of New York. You direct some nameless and characterless ghostbusters in a bit of ghost catching, trying not to cross the streams as you shepherd a ghost towards a trap in a rather simple mini-game, or using your car-mounted ghost vacuum in an even simpler one. Look at what you spend your time doing, though, and that doesn’t ring true as the focus of the game.
You spend a decent amount of the time just driving around the city, a fine way of stalling for time which outlives just about anything else in Ghostbusters as something games do. What you spend even more time doing, though, is admin. Before you even get started you need to register your ghostbusting franchise and stock up on equipment. If you don’t buy any ghost traps you won’t be able to get anywhere, but Ghostbusters still makes you go through buying some, looking over your shoulder and saying “well, you could try going without…”. Once you’re out and catching ghosts, you have a lot of going back to HQ to recharge, and reinvesting your money is at least as essential as doing anything to prevent the oncoming apocalypse. Ghostbusters is a bad ghostbusting sim, and a decent precarious small business sim.
What else stands out about it? In this version, there’s the sound. I don’t want to get into comparisons between the graphical capabilities of the Spectrum and the C64, something I know is a long-established and hard-fought debate (and which people probably still care deeply about even now). What I can say I’ve noticed in playing Spectrum games for the first time is that its sound is definitely worse, to an extent I would not have guessed. And Ghostbusters highlights both the best and worst of the Spectrum’s sound. At one end, much of GB is played in total silence. I suppose the effect could be ghostly, but there isn’t the design to back that up. Instead it just makes much of the game feel even more uninvolving and distanced.
At the other end, there’s the way that the game begins with a neat rendition of the theme tune, complete with karaoke style lyrics. The game has to switch between the main melody and the backing as it can’t pull off both simultaneously, but that acts as a generous invitation for interactivity – it assumes that someone is there singing along, not being passively entertained but working in collaboration. You are the ghost in the orchestra. What could be more appropriate?
