Reviews

I never liked it. Especally the top down driving bit. A typical movie tie in that's just really a series of poor mini games.

Ghostbusters is a mix of strategy and action/adventure. You have to make decisions on how to equip your Ghostbusters franchise (using limited money), clean up the ghosts to earn more money (and get better kit) and finally, defeat the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.

There certainly was plenty of potential for a reasonable strategy/action/adventure, but as nearly every movie tie-in is - it ended up being just a fraction of what it should have been - basically, Activision trying to use the marketing tie in to sell the game without having to go to the bother of making a game that was actually good.

If you did stick around for long enough to fight the Stay Puft marshmallow man, the screen to get there was nearly impossible to pass - a sudden death after doing all the work to get there. (Some details may be hazy; the game (mercifully?) is distribution denied so I can't really verify that this was truly the case).

Additionally, the game was expensive - £10, when most full price games of far higher quality were £5.99. Well worth missing. The Commodore 64 version did have as a saving grace a decent sound track, but it still had the same terrible game at its heart.

Despite the poor graphics, I found this game quite amusing back in the day and got me playing it for some time. Not bad.

Having just seen one of the most slick and stylish comedies of the 1980's, it's hardly an adrenaline rush to start procedings by opening a franchise account and buying equipment with which to catch ghosts.

At this point the game aspires to capture all the excitement of a visit to the bank. It succeeds.

There's no hint of the dry wit and humour that shot through the film, even a beeper approximation of the music falls flat.

This is the point when (even back in the 80's) the gamer mourns the loss of another potentially great movie licence and moves on to other things.

But for some reason once I'd got over the initial dissapointment, I carried on driving my cheap badly drawn car around, collecting ghosts, catching slimers and stopping marshmallow men.

After a few plays I even had enough money to buy some serious hardware and a badly drawn car almost too big to fit on the badly animated road.

So this game has something - I've still no idea what.

The graphics are uninspiring, the sound is awful and the gameplay is at best serviceable. Yet it somehow kept me playing.

It's not often a game I consciously don't like keeps me playing for more than a few minutes. I actually loaded this up and kept playing for weeks.

Spooky.

This game always made me feel about there is always more, bigger thing to find out.

The graphics were quite nice, even I liked the beeper music with subtitled lyrics. It was like karaoke fun, we sing the song with my sister (That was the only game my sister ever interested in).

The game always promises "do that, now do that, you don't have to, but you better do that now and if you do, there is a different quest in the end, but first you have to do this 10 more time! Look, you have money, go buy new gear, even a new car, you got an actual bank account, I give you the number, hide it, use it, keep your money, sing the song! Here is a key and a hole, a jumping mushroom man. And if you destroy him 10 times, you're gonna meet another thing but I won't tell you" kind of thing.

In the end, it's a uniqe game. Ghostbusters may not be a hit for everyone, but it was still a nice change for manicminerized minds.

I agree with the positive reviews about this game.

In spite of all its faults I still find Ghostbusters quite amusing ... it is really a unique title in the history of software.

I find the tune irresistible in extreme !!

What really hook me about this game is that it looks like an old Spectrum classic ...

1984 Activision Inc (UK)
by James Software and David Aubrey-Jones (speech)

Both the movie and the game bring back some very nice memories to me.
The tune is excellent in both versions, specialy the 128k with a really good karaoke style text, and you can almost ear the nifty Ray Parker Jr. sing in the background, simply cute.
Ghostbusters combines some strategy elements with a few simple sub arcade games, not too inspiring nor addictive but still playable and cute.

3,5 stars overall.
4 for the nostalgic value.

A very strange film tie in.
It is a collection of pretty awful sections, strung together in a way that hardly even works as a real game. That said, it is somehow much greater than the sum of its parts. It sparked my imagination as a kid, and is simply fun to play.
A flawed classic with real heart, so perfectly suited to Spectrum.

It's alright really. People say it's great where it isn't and people say it's crap where it isn't. It's alright, quite fun but quite tedious too.

This has always been a guilty pleasure of mine and I keep coming back to it and enjoy it.