GHESTBUZTERZ!
Actual ending screen:
CONGLATURATION!!!
YOU HAVE COMPLETED A GREAT GAME.
AND PROOVED THE JUSTICE OF OUR CULTURE.
NOW GO AND REST OUR HEROES!
My response:
CONGRATULATIONS!
YOU HAD THE PATIENCE TO SIT THROUGH THIS AWFUL GAME.
YOU PROVED YOU'RE BUSTED.
NOW GO BUST YOURSELF!
Yeah, I had to add that in here. Anyways, this is Ghostbusters, an action game originally released for various platforms in 1984, and ported to the Nintendo Entertainment System by Bits Laboratory and released in 1988. It is based on the classic 1984 film of the same name.
The "Ghostbusters!" voice sample when you press start at the title screen is so muffled and badly digitized it's questionable why it was included, but at least it was a very honest attempt at putting a voice clip in an NES game.
The Ghostbusters theme is the only song in the whole game. While it sounds decent on the NES, it becomes very repetitive and annoying to hear over and over again.
The graphics are extremely hideous. There is barely any animation or detail in any of the sprites and the palette consists of washed-out greys, greens, and blues.
The gameplay is very boring and monotonous. You have to wait for certain buildings on the map screen to flash red and drive to them to catch ghosts. You just keep doing this until you have enough money to enter the Zuul building and face Gozer.
As for the driving sequence, it's one of the more irritating parts, as hitting traffic on the road costs you $400 and you have to keep running into gas barrels, otherwise, you run out of gas and have to watch a slow sequence of the Ghostbusters getting out to push their car along. Capturing ghosts is also a pain and unless you buy the "Super Trap" you can only catch a limited number of ghosts before you have to empty the trap again.
The stair sequence when you finally enter the Zuul building requires mashing the A button (unless you use a turbo controller) to climb up 25 floors of stairs without getting touched by the ghosts thrice. However, your characters move so slowly however that this feat is nearly impossible without a Game Genie unless you glitch yourself out by opening a door using the B button and being spooked by a ghost on your last chance, making the entire sequence a cinch without a Game Genie. The only way to legitimately beat the stairwell stage is to buy the Sound Generator (Sonic Generator, which he refers to), which is so expensive you have to grind for about 45 minutes to get it.
The ending of the game is just a black screen with text consisting of poor grammar, punctuation, and wrongly stating that this is a "great game". However, the Japanese version’s ending is even worse, as it just crashes to a black screen after defeating Gozer (the ending text is in the ROM, but fails to load due to a programming glitch). All the Japanese ending shows is a riri after several minutes, and would require a Game Genie to actually work, and even that it also misspells great as "grate" while the US version did not.
Catching the un-dead is their life. It's not a pretty job...especially the way they do it. But somebody has to. Someone who knows about games like this.
