Spook Central

As the new guy on the team, you get to do the dirty work. “Egon is constantly researching and giving you new equipment, and since you’re the rookie, you try it out,” says John O’Keefe, Terminal Reality’s studio director. “They make sure you’ve proven it’s safe before they use it!” That gear includes the classic proton pack, which Egon will update with new functionality throughout the game. The pack is also where you’ll find your health meter and your particle thrower’s heat gauge, which must be periodically vented or given time to cool. “We tried to keep as much of the UI off-screen as possible, so you stay immersed,” notes O’Keefe.

Other toys you’ll play with include the slime tether, a rope of ectoplasm that sticks any two things together — people or objects or both. In a physics test level, O’Keefe spawned a pile of cars, shot one with a slime tether, and launched the other end of the tether at the ceiling. Yoink! The car hung, suspended from the roof. O’Keefe says it’ll be useful both against enemies and in solving environmental obstacle puzzles. As for the other gadgets, Randel doesn’t want to ruin some of the surprises, but he does say there will be “plasma weapons, dark-energy weapons…there are about a dozen. We use the four basic directions on the D-pad, but the equipment is multi-function. There’s always a fire and an alt-fire.”

Slime Capsule

As a Ghostbuster, all your training will be on-the-job training. “You start out testing their equipment, and you get a call that Slimer is in the Sedgewick Hotel again,” says Randel. “So the Ghostbusters throw a proton pack on you, you jump in the Ecto-1, and you drive out there. You learn in tutorial mode how to catch Slimer. We’re re-creating Ghostbusters’ ballroom scene for fans — for the first level of the game we’re going to pay homage to the movies, but after that, it’s an all-new story. But you wind up in the ballroom, of course, and it’s been fixed and set up for a party…and you and Venkman get to trash it. After you catch Slimer, your PKE meter starts buzzing, you whip it out and you realize that more ghosts have been attracted to the Sedgewick Hotel for some unknown reason, Stay-Puft arrives, and the plot starts unfolding.”

That’s where we find ourselves now, having come face to face with Stay-Puft, blasting away at his squishy underlings. After hitting Y to bring up our PKE meter, we find a hotspot of psychokinetic energy in the ceiling — and dog-like chunks of sentient confection burst in. Every time we toast a wave of marshmallow minions, here comes s’more (sorry). Squeezing the right trigger and blasting them with the particle thrower doesn’t trap them so much as pop them. “We have some ethereal ghosts that can be captured,” explains O’Keefe. “These are more like destructible spawned minions.” The environment is destructible, too: as the fight unfolds, we blast desks, columns, plants, glass walls, and other objects into smoking rubble. Every so often, we tap the right bumper to vent the heat from the pack; less frequently, we’ve got to run over to an incapacitated Ray, hitting the B button to dodge attackers en route, and heal our teammate with a press
of the A button.

When the smoke clears, Ray chimes in with an off-hand comment: “Like crazed hormonal teenagers on a post-final-exam bender.” It’s exactly the kind of in-character quip that cements the experience. “We’ve already recorded Dan Aykroyd’s voice for the first pass of the game,” says Randel. “He’s been a really big help with the Hollywood talent, and he’s going to help with some of the other voice recording as well. Then he’s going to come back and record pick-up lines and make sure that we have everything we need to make the game the full Ghostbusters experience.”

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