Ghostbusters II

The Good
It was a very fun and simulating game. When I played it, I really felt like I was a Ghostbuster. The title screen graphics were pretty cool too. The images in the game weren't bad either.

The Bad
When shooting the ghosts, there health restores a little to quickly. Your proton pack over heats a little to easily. Also, you only have like 3 or 4 lives and trying to rescue Ghostbusters can be hard.

The Bottom Line
It's a fun game. It requires some patience but overall, is fun especially if your a Ghostbuster fan like me! Who ya gonna call?

The Good
The graphics for Ghostbusters 2 were good for the time, and some of the arcade sequences were fun. Others were downright tedious.

The Bad
Like a lot of games based on movies made in this era, they tried to do too much. Each part of the movie is a completely different game, not nearly fleshed out enough and coming off as half baked.

The Bottom Line
It's a classic late-80's 'movie' game - meaning that each part of the movie is treated with a different game, where you need to relearn skills as the game advances through often tedious parts. Like most games of this type, you'll find parts of it fun, and parts of it annoying. The first one is much better.

The Good
Well, I got it when I was a young boy and when Ghostbusters meant everything to me, and it blew my mind. First off, the game had well rendered graphics, somewhere between the 8-16 bit range. There were this amusing various little cut-scenes like newspapers that told you what was going on after you completed a mission, shots of Ecto-1A, shots of Venkman or Egon or Vigo... All around, the bright bold colors were just dazzling and fun. The game was divided into something like 2-3 mini games. The most fun was where you have to go into the river of slime to collect slime samples. If you were successful, you'd take the slime back to the lab, and try out all sorts of music on it to find which ones made positive mood slime that you needed to build the slime blowers. If you failed collecting the slime, your Ghostbuster would fall in the river, and thus a bizarre new mini game would begin. You had to climb down the building of the mental hospital where your buddy was being held, and swing into various windows hoping to find and free your friend. This was really hard, but off the wall and fun. The other part of the game was going out on Ghostbusting missions to zap and trap ghosts for money. This was also challenging, cause the more you destroyed of the store, the more money you lost, also there was a time limit. But, there were naughty little things like blasting the changing room at a women's department store and seeing frightened beautiful women run around in their lingerie.

The Bad
Well, on my original computer, the ghosts moved far too quickly to capture, and thus the game was impossible to beat. But then I installed it a few years later on a different computer, and all the sudden, the ghosts were catchable, and I actually got to the last level. But, I couldn't beat that either because you had to follow some ridiculous map that was in the instruction booklet and hard to read, to navigate the Statue of Liberty downtown. Also, when rescuing your fellow Ghostbusters at the mental hospital, it was impossible to tell what window they were hiding in, and most of the times you did it, you'd just get captured by the armed hospital guards, and lose another Ghostbuster. Also, the worst thing about the game was the overall time limit, counting down to New Years. Even if you made it to the last level, you have to beat it fast to beat this ever present clock.

The Bottom Line
I think, despite it being impossible in some parts, and overall lack of depth in length of game play, its still an incredible game. It was sort of ambitious for its diversity of mini games, and how they all kind of related to running a successful Ghostbusting business. The game wasn't forgiving at all for mistakes, and this was especially a challenge because the game play mechanics weren't so easy to master. But, it had great sound, great bold dazzling detailed 8-16 bit graphics, and most important, plenty of unique Ghostbuster action and humor.

The Good
It's Ghostbusters! I could even play Pong for a good time if it's called "Ghostbusters". Well seriously, graphics are decent considering the game uses EGA graphics. At times it's hard to believe the game uses only 16 colours!

The Bad
Game style changes all the time which is annoying. First you bust some ghosts, then you collect some slime, you HAVE to test it, bust some more ghosts, escape from mental hospital, collect some more slime and finally take the Lady Liberty for a ride through New York and then bust Vigo. So it's typical movie license game for it's time where the game tries to follow the movie too closely by taking every single element and scene from the movie and trying to make it a game.

Ghost busting scenes are by far the best the game can offer. Player can destroy environment with proton streams and these scenes actually feel like you're a ghostbuster. But the gameplay is a bit poor. With a mouse the game is playable but with keyboard it's just impossible to capture the ghosts. That is a bad thing because every other scene in the game almost requires player to use keyboard. Collecting slime, escaping the mental hospital and Liberty lady scene are just too hard with a mouse. Of course you can't use both keyboard and mouse, you have to select either mouse or keyboard at the installation screen and stick with it.

Music and sound effects are mostly annoying beeps and ordinary music which will soon get in your nerves.

The Bottom Line
You have to be a hardcore Ghostbusters fan if you can play this game more than 5 minutes. Play the Game Boy version of Ghostbusters II instead.