Summer is here... about time.
This year's seasons have been rather odd. We had a mildly late winter bolt almost directly into spring and summer: March was rather chili, April warmed out of the 30's finally, but May landed Northwest Ohio in plenty of sunny, 80-degree weather. It's been up and down through June, but now we are expecting at least seven days - and probably more - of 80 to 90-degree temperatures. Scorching almost, with constant sun. A beautiful week, no doubt, and I'm looking forward to it.
With all this nice weather I have plenty to get done outside (jogging, some minor photography, hiking, etc.), but it will be hard to stay outside and not be tempted by the lure of a great new game I got: Ghostbusters: The Video Game. I am a long-time fan of the Ghostbusters, and it is one of the few movies that has impacted my life multiple times in multiple ways. As a child I saw it with simple amazement: I did not fully understand the movie, but I saw it for what caught my attention at the time: cool guys using cool guns to capture neat ghosts. Years later I re-watched it with a bit of an education under my belt, and I understood the humor much better - and the everlasting impact of the movie was complete.
Like so many other people, I've really been looking forward to the new Ghostbusters game - the first in 20 years - and now that it is here... I'm torn. As a movie-licensed product, there is success to be found. The script is funny, classic Ghostbusters, following in the footsteps of the first two movies very well. The script does the movie one better, by delving much deeper into the mythology and history of the events at hand, something achievable thanks to the greater amounts of time available to a gamer - a ten-hour game allows for much more narrative freedom than a 90-minute movie. The full cast is here providing voicework and likenesses. For fans of the first film, this is the true sequel that the second movie should have been.
As a game, things take a tumble. I am explicitly focusing this commentary on the PC version of the game, so my views may not apply to the Xbox 360 / PS3 versions of the game. First of all, technical problems plague the game. My PC meets and exceeds the system requirements, and I run the game with modest settings (1280 x 720, all medium settings) and there are areas of extreme slow down... frame-chug not seen this bad in a long time. This is forgivable in short bursts, but there are some sections of the game where the framerate never recovers, forcing a restart of the application. This isn't an occasional annoyance, it is a problem that plagues every few levels.
Actual gameplay isn't half bad. The variety of weapons is nice, but outright proton streams are done so well it's hard to want to use anything else. What Ghostbusters does right is nail the imagined feeling of being a Ghostbuster. This is the game I wanted to play in my childhood. Encountering a ghost, weakening it, wrangling it, and trapping is feels real damn good, and thanks to a wide variety of ghosts, doesn't really get old. Team work is required for many ghosts, and the game's AI seems to do a decent job of providing that team work. This is a straight-up linear adventure on the PC, no multiplayer, so I'm glad it was only a $30 purchase. The experience of finally being a Ghostbuster is awesome the first few times around, but I can't see too much replay value coming out of this game in the long run.
For all I can complain about The Ghostbusters, I can't ignore the initial childhood glee that filled me the first time I blasted and caught my first ghost alongside the original team. This game is an experience more than a game, one that will probably have a short overall lifespan, but until it's over, it's quite a ride.
B3 out.
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