June 23, 2009

The number of times I crossed the streams cannot be counted.

So I beat Ghostbusters: The Vidjeo Game.
Honestly, you could probably get away with renting it and then putting in serious time and energy into beating the single player during the rental period. But you should definitely play it. This is how you make a good licensed game, seriously.

The game brings the humor, as you would hope. It’s got all the voices of the cast, which is a wonderful thing indeed. These are things so many licensed games get wrong, I suppose, but the moment you heard they had the original cast, you knew this game was going to get that right.
So the exciting part is that the gameplay stands up against all the writing.
Granted, there is nothing TOO shocking. It’s fairly stock Third Person Shooter fare. (although most Third Person Shooters nowadays steal Gears of War’s cover system, and this has no cover system, so it almost feels a little fresh because of it.) But it’s very solid, mechanically. You get to wrangle ghosts into traps, which is tons of fun, but they also have “Corporeal” spirits to mix it up, which are bound to physical objects, so they can throw a wide variety of enemies at you. Often you’ll get a mix of ghosts you have to trap, and smaller, corporeal minions which you can just blow up with your proton stream without trapping, to make you have to make choices: Do I take out the big threats, or do I try to clear out the area first of the little guys to make trapping the big ghosts easier?

Your Proton Pack has the standard Proton Beam, which acts just like you expect and is a great general-purpose weapon. You can pretty well use it all game, if you want to. But since you are the “Experimental Equipment Technician” you also get a nice selection of upgrades and other “weapons.” (Although I find it odd that you are supposed to be the Guinea Pig testing all these new weapons, and yet all the other Ghostbusters use them, too. Not that I don’t appreciate the AI having the appropriate weapons for the job.) The first thing you get is your “Boson Dart,” which is basically like a rocket you can fire while shooting your Proton Beam. Then you get the “Shock Blast,” which works like a shotgun and feels completely awesome to use, the “Stasis Stream” which freezes enemies in place, the Slime Blower from the second movie, with attached “Slime Tether” which is basically a setup for environmental puzzles, and my favorite named one, the “Meson Collier.” Using the Slime Blower seems a little weak, but that’s okay because it’s useful for other things. All the other weapons have a great feel, and are effective in most situations, though there is always a best one for the job.

Throughout the game, you can also put on some goggles and scan things with your PKE Meter, Metroid Prime-style. Not only does this provide a tactical benefit, as it gives you extra money to use to buy upgrades, as well as tells you what different beams and whatnot a particular ghost is weak against, but it also is another vector for humor. There are multi-paragraph explanations for everything in the game, and they are all fairly entertaining to read. If you scan a ghost, you can be sure that Tobin’s Spirit Guide will have a full write-up of that Ghost’s history. The same if you find some sort of haunted or supernatural artifact. It’s a nice touch.

I played the game on “Experienced,” but I would probably suggest playing the game on Casual. Experienced isn’t hard, but I certainly didn’t feel like I gained anything by the times I had to restart a few difficult situations time and again. I’m just glad the game was smart enough to have a checkpoint before basically every large-scale combat scenario to keep the frustration to a minimum. But yeah, you aren’t missing anything by playing it on Casual, I don’t think. Go ahead and be a wuss.

But yeah, I’ve thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed this game. It’s helped me realize that, more and more, what I want out of games isn’t difficulty, and it isn’t even some sort of clever new gameplay mechanic. It’s just something that’s purely and genuinely fun, and not frustrating. That is pretty well the exact definition of Ghostbusters: The Vidjeo Game. Genuine fun. Play it.

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