Wednesday, January 17

I Ain't Afraid of No 3D-Rendered Ghosts

A little site called 'Gametab' has posted four videos of what looks to be a Ghostbusters game in the works. For those of you that haven't seen any of the Ghostbusters movies, piss off now, I don't want you reading any blogs from this site ever again.

You can peep all four videos by following this link right here - http://www.gametab.com/news/787050/ - however I have linked the most interesting and most disturbing videos below.



This appears to make up the bulk of the game's action - running around and blowing shit up with your proton pack. Unrealistic, you say? If you had a proton pack, isn't that exactly what you'd do?



For a second I thought that this was actually Bill Murray, his aged skin now almost completed its ultimate conversion into pure wax and reflecting so much light, but possibly because he has just been 'slimed'. Wait.. was I the only one there to come up with an awesome idea for a series of Ghostbuster pornos? Give me one second, I'm off to register 'heslimedme.com'.

Anyhoodlydoodles, this whole thing got me thinking. And by 'thinking' I mean 'having flashback to my youth but, this time, nothing to do with my mother force-feeding me 2 minute noodles for seven hours a day or my father painting me all black and telling me to play on the highway'.

No, it's flashbacking to Ghostbusters the game on the Commodore 64. What an amazing game that was. Ghostbusters on the Commodore 64 was and remains the superior and most ghost-busting of all the video game incarnations. Let's take a look back through memory lane, shall we?

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Nothing's happening? Hang on, let me try again...

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Oh, sorry, I see the problem. One second.

LOAD "GHOSTBUSTERS-FLASHBACK",8,1
RUN



For instance, before there was Grand Theft Auto, Ghostbusters on the Commodore 64 had a sprawling, realistic and thoroughly engaging world, based on real-life New York City.



Players could free-roam through the streets, catching ghosts in the conveniently placed vacuum cleaner (mounted to the hood of Ecto-1, of course) and could choose between left, right and centre lanes.



In a car-customisation section (which was blatantly plagarised by the bastards behind Need for Speed: Most Wanted), players could choose from a wide array of equipment to deck out their vehicle with. Ranging from PK sensors to additional traps to portable containment units to the much-talked-about 'Marshmallow Bait', the options were almost limitless. If limitless is like 5 or 6 things and you can only fit so many on before the little forklift dude wouldn't put any more on.



Doom 3 was scary, but not as scary as the true-to-life video graphics brought on by this game. With photorealistic textures you can only get from a big keyboard plugged directly into your TV, Ghostbusters stunned and amazed as you walked from stunningly similar house to stunningly similar house, putting your trap in the middle, activating the streams, moving closer towards each other (which served no discernable purpose) and then pressing the button to fire the trap and hoping like hell it would randomly move the ghost in there somehow. Those not skilled enough to repeat this sequence over and over would be treated to a digitised, no-name voice actor proudly proclaiming that 'he sliiiiiiiiimed me!'.



No, that's not a bad picture, that's motion blur from the enormous, imagination-defying marshmallow man that has formed outside Dana Barrett's apartment complex. Disregarding the fact that that doesn't really have anything to do with the movie and the big white guy sure as shit never hopped from leg to leg in front of the door at any point, it is your duty to take your lethal, unbelievably powerful proton packs and sneak through the door under that bastard's feet like you were a fifteen year old girl back late from the dance. THAT, my friends, is how you end a video game.

So you can keep your fancy 'graphics' and awesome 'gameplay'. I, for one, like it old-school. Just like Run DMC doing the theme song to Ghostbusters 2, with awesome lyrics like 'STOP! UHH! BREAK! HIT IT!', 'I-I-I, I-I-I ain't afraid of no ghosts' and 'We are the busters of any, G-H-O-S-T'.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I played the old ghostbusters game at my mates house one day after school. The problem was my mother didn't know i was at his house, she drove around the school area for 4 hours looking for me. I finally decided to walk home at around 8PM and when walked in the door, she began to molest me.

Anonymous said...

do you mind if i keep that story in the spank bank?

Anonymous said...

I played Ghostbusters on the Apple 2e. Thanks for the memories.

BNU is Brown Noise Unit.

The subtle humour reference is to myself and others who were all purged/from SGS a months back.