Sorry for that terrible pun, firstly. Secondly, we're a little bit in love with Ghostbusters: The Video Game – a fixation that spawned from a misspent youth in front of the tube, watching Egon Spengler, Ray Stantz, Peter Venkman and Winston Zeddmore battle against ghosts, ghouls and possessed paintings. The game manages to capture much of the irreverent and occasionally spooky feeling of the two classic films, but it goes further, allowing you to turn on your proton pack and join the team as the 'Rookie'.
With Ghostbusters: The Video Game due in mid-June this year, there's just enough time left to polish out some of the smudges we've come across on an otherwise engrossing game. Read on for our top five quick-fixes.
Aiming and quick-turns
At it's heart, Ghostbusters is essentially a third-person shooter. As such, it has to fall in line with some basic tenets of shooter gameplay, such as aiming, reloading and simply tracking your target. While the game mostly nails this, we found that – even with a crosshair - the zig-zagging, wiggling stream was tricky to predict and track at times.
A quick-turn function would help make those pesky geists short work.
Ghosts move quickly and often over your head, making a quick turnaround very important. Unfortunately, there's no option for a quick about-face or lock on, other than the 'trapping' beam, which can be toggled when a ghost has been wrangled for long enough. Give us a Resident Evil-style quick-turn option and a better method for tracking quick moving ghouls, pronto!
In-game versus CG cutscenes
Once upon a time, rendered cutscenes were viewed as the more impressive portion of a game's presentation, usually outshining the in-game graphics. Today, the reverse is true. In Ghostbusters: The Video Game, there's a wide discrepancy between the quality of the in-game graphics, which are crisp, clean and high-resolution, and the pixelated, lower resolution cutscenes.
It's a problem for us that the game resorts to using prerendered sequences when the engine is already so pretty. In our view, it's not necessary to break out of the action with a flashy cutscene if the quality is lower than the actual in-game graphics. Besides – the characters are already nicely lip-synched and certain cutscenes are already in-game anyway. Why not go the whole hog, for consistency's sake?
Co-op, anyone?
Alright – we know there's a multiplayer mode in there already and this is hardly a quick-fix, but come on, guys - if there was ever a game that begged for four player co-op, this is it. You have four squad members, typically. You have a campaign with levels that beg to be traversed with a friend.
Who wouldn't want to play this game in co-op with a few mates?
Why the blooming heck was this omitted? If it turns out that this is in the pipeline and you're going to charge us to download it as 'extra content', we're not going to be happy campers. As it stands, it would be a terrible waste for the franchise if there wasn't a co-op function, so our fingers are crossed that it'll appear, even if we do end up having to pay extra for it.
Waypoints and maps
There's nothing worse than having to second-guess AI routes. In Ghostbusters, Egon can suddenly take off in a strange direction while you're mid-ghost capturing – and while he may know exactly where your next way-point might be, you don't have any indicators. This becomes more problematic in environments like the hotel, where there are a lot of winding corridors and branching routes.
The hotel's level design was intricate enough to become confusing. How about a map system or waypoints?
What we'd like to see is a screen added to your PDA that gives you a radar-like overview of the level, preferably identifying your teammate's locations, as well as your next objective. For people who think this might make things too easy, there should be an option to toggle this on and off at the start of the game and in the menu.
Repetitive voices
It's not that we don't appreciate having Dan Aykroyd voicing his own parts or Bill Murray sprinkling dry wit throughout Ghostbusters: The Video Game – what really begins to grate is how often Aykroyd's 'Ray' repeats the same lines and instructions over and over and over and over. And over:
"Hit him with a Boson dart! Hit him with a Boson dart! Hit him with a Boson dart! Hit him with a Boson dart! Hit him with a Boson dart! Hit him with a Boson dart!"
We're not sure if it was an oversight on the developer's part or whether they could only afford a certain number of fresh recordings, but we're really hoping that the final version of the game reduces the number of repeated lines , spacing them out or mixing them up a little more.
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