Ghostbusters (C64)

You too can sing alone, in 3...2..1.."Repetitive Music.... repetitive music"

It's odd, but there's a lot of conflicting views around this particular game, more specifically based around which port of the game you happen to be playing. Some will slate and attack the Spectrum version, others will lambast the NES, some will applaud and love the Megadrive (.......genesis) version while I'm taking a look at the C64 version of Ghostbusters.

At least one of the cars lets you pretend you're in the film. It's shit too.

Let's start off. "GHOSTBUSTERS" and that's the digitised speech coming from the faithful old Commodore 64 (k of ram I'll have you know) and introduces us to the splendours and wonders that are voice synths. Followed by a slightly charming rendition in SID of the original theme tune with bouncy-dot lyric sing-a-long session for those thinking they bought a karaoke set instead of a game. And it might even work at first.

Whoo I caught it, only about 40 or so to go... for fucks sake.

The sad part is that this is the ONLY song in the entire game. On loop. You'll relish the start and end of the game where it's silent. At least, not at first. The novelty of humming along while singing "something strange...... in the hood.... call.... GHOSTBUSTERS!" while trying to recollect the full words and option just to belt out the chorus. While singing dee-duuh repeatedly in time with the music. Ray Parker Jr must be spinning in his grave... Or will be some day.

"He Slimed Me!" Sounds great, gives you a chuckle, you'll be ripping your hair out after the 5th time

The game itself is firmly based around the film (ignoring the library scene) where in the game takes place having bought and set up the company, you then get to decide upon which car you want to buy, which upgrades to install upon it and then set yourself off to playing the actual game. You've your traps to catch ghosts, a vacuum to suck up the ghosts on the street, marshmallow sensor to detect a Marshmallow Man attack, bait to stop him attacking building (which you WILL need and get a bonus few thousand on successful preventions), glasses to make the ghosts easier to see (instead of behind the backgrounds) and if you've the cash, a portable containment field to reset traps (you'll only need 1 and never need replace it).

Part of the driving experience, racing down the road and sucking up ghosts.

You start with 3 men and will have to drive to HQ if 2 of them get taken out (read: Slimed, with voice synth for it too) and have to visit the HQ if you fill all your traps (or not if you have the VERY expensive portable containment unit). Gameplay is broken down into 3 parts. Firstly, you have the map, which shows your logo, part of New York City including Zuul, the key master, the gatekeeper and 4 wandering ghosts. During the game these ghosts will make a straight line for Zuul and if they get there, they'll boost the PKE reading, which is your in-game timer. The higher it goes, the faster they move. They can be stopped by you running you logo into them but the further you go, the longer your next car drive will be as you're planning your next car trip.

Replenished. Notice the lack of Winston in the game. Racist developers.

This however, does not get the cash in. The money (to repay the bank loan at the start of 10,000) comes from visiting buildings and removing Slimers. A bit like in the film where you'll have to wait for a call, try to get there in time before it fucks off and/or slimes one of your people. Each Slimer will net you a few hundred dollars and then you're back to hunting more Slimers, stopping ghosts and baiting Marshmallow Men.

Me vs a big fat man. It's bed time all over again.

The game quickly devolves into getting to a red flashing house, dropping the trap, running a man to the left, running one to the right, launching the streams (don't cross them) and trapping the ghost (hopefully) in a long series of mini-games that don't really deviate aside from the backgrounds shown at each building. The map section becomes repetitive until the Marshmallow Man shows up and usually will catch you off guard unless you're fast enough to hit the bait button and net your few bonus thousand dollars, or it causes a building to break apart and you get stiffed with the fine for it.

Mwahahahahahaaa... Now you don't have to play this game. Incidentally, "spoilers"

Once the game picks up speed with the ghosts moving faster, more calls being registered and quickly enough, it becomes much more intense and worth playing, just a shame it has to start so slowly and leave you waiting quite a while for something to actually happen. The lack of difference between Slimers makes you feel like you're not really removing an issue but the spectral form of catch and release, in essence cheating people out of their hard earned cash as you become the slackers of the ghost catching community.

So... fucking... boring... Crossing the streams kills both men, let's do that!

IF (and it's not always going to happen) you raise enough cash by the endgame, you've seen the various Marshmallow Man attacks and been summoned to Zuul after the key master and gatekeeper have met (and they serve no real purpose on the map aside from just BEING THERE to show a sort of urgency that leaves you guessing "no really, what's the fucking point?"), you get to attempt to get into Zuul past the badly dancing Marshmallow Man. You've 3 lives and you need 2 to get into the building by running through his legs. Once 2 are in, you've done it. You kill Zuul, destroy the gateway and wreck up a building in the process while the game gives you more cash to play over with better equipment and cars. (Since you can't buy car #4 at the start)

It's nice at least to see a huge sprite like this adorned with all the items you ACTUALLY bought.

But would you want to? Not likely. You might save the state or write down the code and MAYBE give the purple car a go to see it race through the streets quickly, which then leaves you waiting even longer periods of time between ghost calls, a curse as much as it is a blessing. Beat it once and you'll likely never look back again.

Pang!

In case you didn't realise the title by now.

I have to admit to having a fondness for the 80s and 90s era of arcade gaming. Those who've ready read a lot of my blog/account/mindless-gibberish, will likely realise that I enjoy arcade gaming a lot and that I'm quite upset about its decline when the home console became an equal strength machine and then surpassed it. Leaving it just to be fruit machines, gimmick machines with guns/riding implements, coin-shovers and dancey dancey prancey trancey bollocks. However let's go back to 1990 and marvel at the wonder that is Pang!

Now that I've been to this location, am I assured to die in the near future?

The game is simple enough. You have your character running back and forth in his stereotypical hunting outfit (which suits for all locations from the top of Mt Fuji, to the frozen ice wastelands, to the Taj Mahal and beyond) and pop balloons. Apparently the world has been overrun with large bouncing ball/balloons and you (and possibly another berk) are armed with wire guns with points on the end and must hunting down and pop all the balloons.

Yes, your character is a prick.

Sounds simple and it is. Each balloon that is popped, will split into two smaller balloons until they're down to the smallest possible that bounces just high enough to sneak under at the apex of it's trajectory. These are removed from the game when popped. Larger balls can break into two and drop powerups ranging from double shot, trip wires, guns, shields, extra lives (rare, but true!) clocks to freeze the balloons and timers to increase the level limit.

Yep, still a prick.

Taking a single touch off the balloons while not shielded will end your life while your character takes a dive higher and faster and harder than any premiership footballer earning more in a week than the rest of us do in 5 years. Not only do you see the ultimate drama queen of amateur theatrics but you have to start the whole level over. Worse in 2 player as you BOTH stop if ONE gets killed by a balloon.

See the world and pop balloons. That's a lot of text to read in 10 seconds AND process it AND make an informed choice upon.

Aiding and hindering you, are the various creatures. Some will paralyse you, some will go so far as to pop balloons for you (usually right beside you to make the split-off land on you, some will just hit your wires and cause you to stop your shot and some... I've never realised what they do other than get really annoying. Perhaps that is the sole purpose of those creatures.

Trust me, it gets a lot harder, later on.

Musically there's some very upbeat tunes, the "hurry up" music isn't particularly overbearing and almost creeps into the game unlike say in Bubble Bobble where gameplay is stopped and a large klaxon goes off. The sounds are fairly solid with balloons popping with enough impact to make it feel like an accomplishment. The weapons firing have their own near-trademark recognition factor into them while the rest of the sounds are mildly muted pops squeaks and clomps. Nothing outstanding but at the same time nothing really below average either.

Some levels go for the platform approach and make it virtually impossible to avoid balloons unless you're quick.

It's nice to see some recognition has gone into the game for its locations and landmarks. Each level is 3 arenas at a specific landmark and at least the team responsible managed to make it look roughly like the landmark it's meant to represent. It's a purely graphical touch and has no impact on the gameplay but it's nice to see some effort went into it, despite the background having no actual bearing on the level or the layout of platforms and ladders.

It's just a balloon you fucking weakling!

As for a challenge, you can skip the first 18 or so levels at the start of a new game and go half way through the game from the off. A nice addition for those that already know the game and can bypass the easier levels, but the trade off is that you miss the chance to gain the points to give you lives to survive the later levels. However if you're that good in the first place, you shouldn't need the lives. Though later levels do become more difficult with blocks and platforms placed in such a manner as to make it more awkward to get past the bouncing targets and navigate towards things like the power ups and random foods that boost your scores.

New levels, new locations, new layouts, new challenges, same balloons.

There's a good challenge to this platform puzzler but once you've beaten it (if...) then you may not want to come back to it again. Some will, but that some won't be very many at all.

Space Harrier

Welcome to the fantasy zone... get repetitive.

It does seem that the further back we go in time to gaming, the simpler and slower a game is compared to the modern days of gaming. That's probably more than given as processing powers are a lot more powerful than in the older days. Given that some of the machines in the older days are running around 10 Mega Hertz and the computer I'm writing this on is a 3.4 Giga Hertz machine quad core processor. There's been a little bit of an improvement in the last 30 years or so.

 

Another late shot after you killed the enemy, but it'll happily float there and show you what killed you.

Likening this to cars, it's like saying a car back in the 80s was running at max speed of about 10 miles an hour and nowadays it can run at 3400 miles an hour. But as was said when someone made this comparison a few years back. It's nice but nobody wants to drive a car that crashes several times a day. Some will likely disagree with me on this, but I'm happy enough cruising around at 120mph thanks very much.

You get to ride a giant cat. Whose fantasy zone is this? It sure isn't mine!

Given that in 1985, you had games like Boulder Dash, Commando, Choplifter and a whole host of other such games that weren't renowned for being fast action-paced games. Space Harrier set a new bar on how to get the most out of the processors within the machine and as such, boosted the idea of arcades being more adrenaline fuelled and frantic.

Moot point, moot level.

In this instance we have Space Harrier, from SEGA doing what Sega seems to do best, making a fast action packed game with very little overall substance or even gameplay. You control FloatyMcPrickman, a blonde haired ass-hat with little real value or personality as he enters the Fantasy Zone (get ready...) with little more than the ability to fly at variable speeds that the game controls while armed with an unlimited supply of energy shots.

Each head needs to be killed, individually. Boss fights are actually more fun than the levels.

Initially, the game looks impressive. It runs fast, you're up and flying and moving around the levels with incredible speed and shooting down trees, bushes, flying robots and other such nasties while avoiding the occasional incoming projectile and the surroundings. Making yourself survive for long enough treats you to the boss monster that surges back and forth while spraying flaming rock balls at you while you try to pepper its head with shots.

Nice to see the grass has been mowed well.

Levels themselves are bright and colourful and showcasing nearly the full spectrum of colours. Though in this it also becomes hard to work out what's an enemy, what's an incoming attack and what is a background/arena aspect that can be avoided or shot down. But the psychedelic experience is what most will remember from a very colourful and very vividly graphic game.

Great... killed by a giant high speed dick-tree-mushroom thing.

Aiming is a bit of a hazard as you can only shoot straight ahead on the perspective plane. If you're in the top left of the screen, you're only going to shoot whatever is in the top left of the field of attack and to hit something that's aiming for you, you're going to have to shoot while on the move rather than strafing or orbiting them. Identifying them is also a problem from a distance, especially when there's a myriad of projectiles hurtling your way and usually you can't see specifically what the target is until it's glaring at you in the face and heading away again while it's invulnerable arse is lovingly displayed to you.

Finally, something mildy recognisable.

That said, the game for the most part is relatively easy if you keep in mind that projectiles are very direct and very exact. The difficulty comes when you've got other things to worry about such as the flight paths of enemies, the oncoming obstacles and the general shift and movement of the arena while you're moving around within it. The further difficulty comes from where you've gotten used to the fact you can shoot the floating rocks and huge trees in one level, then when the next level turns up, you find you CAN'T shoot the large structures and instead fly straight into it like a moth to a flame.... before being blasted by a brick.

I can't imagine the East End of London named this level.

The game does love to taunt you however, namely by showing you enemies and speeding them away before anything happens. Or even worse, when you DO die, whatever it was that hit you just stands there, remaining perfectly poised in showing you THIS IS WHAT KILLED YOU! while the rest of the game carries on around it. Aside from this, there's not much more to the game other than finding out what new sprites await in later levels and how much more difficult they can make the game by hurling more and more awkward enemies at you at regular intervals. Even the bosses start to become recycled and the game continues this way until the unceremoniously defeated final boss happens.

Though few will both spending the cash and time getting to the umpteenth repetitive level.

Later, flying jellyfish. For now, repeated robot sprites.

Having said that, the music is fairly memorable and toe-tapping for each composition contained with the game while the control system is a little overly responsive to movement but whether this is because of the way it plays and feels that it should play or is on the part of the designers to smoke out some more credits, is a harder question to answer. There's a lot of nostalgia factor in this game and those that remember it will do very well to make sure that it stays remembered and ONLY remembered, this is not a game to revisit.

Sometimes the game randomly speeds up, and catches me off-guard... the cheating bastard.