Label: Activision
Author: The Oliver Twins
Price: £8.95
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Jim Douglas
They're coming to save the world - for a second time! After a number of years scraping a living from appearing on TV re-living their spook-ridding escapades and unsuccessfully entertaining at children's parties, the Ghostbusters are about to don their funny jumpsuits and get slimey once again.
Since the end of the last movie, things have moved on quite a way. Sigourney Weaver has dropped a suspicious sprog and the Ghostbusters have had their busting licence revoked after virtually trashing New York the last time the spooks came around.
With the film due for release in the first week of December Activision have picked the prime time to release: just in time to catch the media whirl surrounding the movie.
The main three sections of the game are, of course, translations of the memorable moments in the movie.
We join the action after Sigourney's kid has been mysteriously whooshed all over the town and pursued by slime. The Busters have reformed and trying to track down the scumbag spectors.
Their investigations and Spook-o-meter lead them into the middle of a busy road. Below, they discover an ancient sewer network. Having dug a hole big enough to fit through, you must lower Peter down the hole in order to get proof of Ghostly goings on and therefore recover the licence to bust.
On your way down, you've got to zap as many fiends as possible. You've got to ensure that Peter doesn't come a cropper through any of the nasty tricks and traps awaiting him.
There are horrible slicing ghosts that attach themselves to the rope and knaw through it. There are horrible grabbing hands which cling onto you and drain your energy. There are also all manner of horrors that you'll discover for yourself.
This stage completed, you find yourself and the rest of the guys running around the base of the walking Statue of Liberty shooting ghosts and collecting slime.
Here you have to guide a spinning fireball around the screen and shoot down an ever-increasing army of evil spooks. Once plugged, each spook drops a globule of slime.
(Important movie info:- in the film the guys animate the Statue of Liberty with a load of dancing slime - honest - York)
The final section of the game takes place in the art gallery where Sigourney has been restoring a rather horrible painting of Mr Evil.
First you have to slide down the poles into the gallery. This is a tricky event for a start. The Ghostbusters seem to have got extremely fragile all of a sudden, and can be killed stone or at the very least stunned if you don't put them on the ground in the most gentle manner possible.
The bad guys are draining the lifeblood from - yes it's that kid again. Once safely on the floor, you must grab Sigourney's sprog from the clutches of the evil forces.
Once you've plucked him from the altar of doom, it's important that he doesn't get snatched back. You've got to kill the baddie with your special beam. (Fnar) After this, Mr Big himself will step out of the painting and attack you in a frenzy. Oooer!
Using the two characters carrying the beam lasers (quite a tricky maneouvre) you've got to get him cornered and zap until he melts away.
Label: The Hit Squad
Memory: 48K/128K
Price: £3.99 Tape, N/A Disk
Reviewer: Alan Dykes
The in the converted hearse are back! just one and a half years after Ghostbusters 2 first haunted the micro circuits of the Z80 processor it has arrived on budget courtesy of Hit Squad.
As far as the movies go, I've always preferred Ghostbusters to Ghostbusters 2 on the grounds that it is more entertaining, but the opposite holds true as far as the computer games are concerned. It's useful to have seen the film so that you understand the plot (which is as confusing to the average punter as a vegetarian menu is to the Tasmanian Devil), but the script does make for a more humorous and less straight-forward game than the original.
The famous foursome, Peter, Ray, Egon and Winston start the adventure after a mysterious incident involving Dana's newly-born brat. This leads them to discover a new build-up of psychokinetic energy apparently emanating from the smelly old city sewer. Ray is lowered into the catacombs to investigate, and must reach the bottom before his rope is cut. There are lots of horrid, slimy, grabby things to try and sever his connections and ol' Ray must zap these in order to succeed.
Next comes the craziest bit - the Buster boys steal the Statue of Liberty by animating her with psychic slime! Liberty leads a crowd of united New Yorkers into battle against the ghosts, and you control her torch which zaps them out of the sky with fireballs. Dead ghosts drop slime which will power Liberty's locomotion - if the people of New York can collect it without being grabbed by spooks.
The idea is to reach a museum which is the centre of psychic convergence and ocne there the guys must swing down from the roof, rescue Dana's wee lad and hold on to him against all odds. The really heavy bad dude end-of-game adversary, Vigo The Carpathian, finally jumps out of a painting and engages our heroes in a complete mother of a battle.
The graphics are O.K., with black outlined characters on a coloured background and vertical or horizontal scrolling, depending on the game situation. In general the scrolling is smooth and fast but I sometimes found a time lag between action and reaction when controlling character movement. Sound, although a little shaky at times, remains faithful to the Ghostbusters theme music.
MATT:
I didn't like the second film much, but this is a sturdy budget release that I'd recommend to anyone who ain't afraid of no ghosts!
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