We came, we saw, we kicked its ass! OXM suits up and straps on a proton pack for the first hands-on with Ghostbusters: The Video Game.

“No sudden movements.”

The order comes from Dr. Ray Stantz, professional paranormal investigator and eliminator — “the heart of the Ghostbusters,” as colleague Peter Venkman once put it. Ray’s leading us through a building that has caught the particular interest of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, a 100-foot-high spongy monstrosity made of gelatin, dextrose, and pure evil. We’re here to see if we can figure out what makes this building so attractive to the beast — and hopefully not garner any undue attention ourselves. And suddenly, as we turn the corner, there he is, looming through a destroyed window, staring menacingly at a helpless woman who is clearly terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought.

Oops — with one press of the right trigger, we let loose with a stream of pure protonic energy from the particle thrower, aimed directly at his jaunty sailor hat. “Sudden movements, sudden movements!” screams Ray, as Stay-Puft turns his attention to us, his face rapidly breaking out in toasty scars. He looks intimidating and…delicious.

We knew the risks when we signed up. Hell, we asked for it — we’ve wanted to don the jumpsuits of New York City’s supernatural janitors for years. And with the impending release of Ghostbusters: The Video Game from Sierra, we’ve finally got our chance.



Back in Business

But unlike most movie tie-ins, this is no mere licensed cash-in: the game features the full participation of most of the major players from the hit films, including all four Ghostbusters — Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, and Ernie Hudson — plus Annie Potts (Janine) and William Atherton (Walter Peck). (Only Sigourney Weaver and Rick Moranis chose to pass.) Crucially, Aykroyd and Ramis are also writing the game’s script together (as they did for the movies) and treating this as an official part of the Ghostbusters canon.

The game is due on store shelves Halloween 2008, but the story’s timeline takes place in 1991, a few years after the events of Ghostbusters II. “You are a new recruit — you become the fifth Ghostbuster,” explains Mark Randel, president of the game’s development studio, Terminal Reality. “We decided to have you be a recruit because so much of the fun of Ghostbusters is the banter between the characters — their attitude, the comedic timing that Harold and Dan and Bill have from working together. You can’t replicate that unless you’re not one of them. You have to be an outsider, watching that. So we’ve been able to keep the feel of the movies by including over 40 ‘cineractive’ sequences in the game, where you’ll be able to listen to them speak and talk to each other and advance the story, but you also play as a Ghostbuster.”

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.”

All-New Cheap Moves

From here, we venture up to the roof — harassed by Stay-Puft en route, as he punches through the walls to try to stop us — and it’s here we get to bust some actual ghosts with Stantz and Venkman. As we chase hardhat-wearing spooks flitting around the ventilation ducts, we’re free to read the situation and chase our own targets — nobody’s taking or giving strict orders. “We originally worked on having squad commands, but it was really awkward because you’re the rookie — why would you tell them ‘Hey, throw out a trap’?” reasons O’Keefe. “So if they see that you’re wrangling a ghost, they’ll come out and help or throw out a trap. But if they’re occupied with other ghosts, they won’t — they’re more worried about their own butts.”

“Wrangling” is a good way to put it. Actually containing a spectre in a proton beam is a little like fishing upside-down. When you’ve got one on the line, they fight to get away, and you’ll find yourself yanking the controller in the opposite direction out of pure instinct. Even if you do tap X to throw out a trap, the full-torso vaporous apparitions won’t exactly dive inside. Clever Ghostbusters will use the left trigger to slam ghosts into the ground, dizzy them into submission, then steer them over the porta-prison. O’Keefe says that with practice, you can actually slam ghosts directly into open traps.

And while your teammates may help you by throwing up a second containment stream, they won’t accidentally cross — which, as you’ll remember Egon warning, would result in “all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.” Important safety tip…but will you do it anyway? “I don’t want to give away too much,” says O’Keefe reluctantly. “There will be stream-crossing, but it’s not something that happens often, because obviously, all life in the world is supposed to end! It will be in special occasions in the game, but it won’t be something that players are doing all the time.”



We’re Ready to Believe You

Much of Ghostbusters’ success will depend on how it strikes a balance between franchise love and pure fun, but our all-too-brief hands-on session satisfied us both as gamers and as Ghostbusters nerds. “Most of us in the office can quote Ghostbusters chapter and verse,” admits Randel, who adds that it hasn’t been very difficult to make sure the game is equally accessible to both casual and hardcore fans of the movies. “We’ve been doing a lot of focus tests where we’ve taken people who are just familiar with it as well as people who can recite every line. It’s testing, testing, and more testing.”

That helps, but nothing trumps getting assistance from the boys in gray themselves. “The inclusion of Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis…they wrote the script, they named the equipment, they’re keeping it in track with the Ghostbusters universe,” says Randel. “We think the hardcore fans will be really happy, because it’s official, it’s authentic. It’s real Ghostbusters.”