Distributed by
Sony and Atari

Price: £19.99 Players: 1 Widescreen: Yes Vote and comment on this game: View Comments When I fired up Ghostbusters on the PSP, my first thoughts were - is it as good at the '80s ZX Spectrum game? I loved that, but this one is completely different and, once you get into it, quite addictive despite all its (very annoying) faults. Set two years after Ghostbusters II, a dire sequel to the excellent original, you start off chasing Slimer into the Sedgewick Hotel and all around it before the going after the angry chef. This game features the voices of all the key cast members, Peter Venkman (Bill Murray), Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd), Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis), Winston Zeddmore (Ernie Hudson) and I'm sure Michael Ensign, as the hotel owner, is in it although I can't confirm that on IMDB.com. If it's not him, then they've got the voice spot-on but he deserves to be there. The main aim for this game is, obviously, to go through the levels trapping ghosts into the tiny boxes you carry around and ridding the city of New York with the infestation. As an aside, you can also collect missing art pages from Tobin's Spirit Guide. These make up half of a full Tobin entry and you need to scan the depicted phenomenon to complete the entry - do this by scanning the ghost, eg. Slimer. Once you've done a few of these, though, they do get a bit tedious and you just want to get on with the action instead of faffing about with little side missions that... well, aren't really missions.

Ghostbusters: Level 4: Marshmallow Hunt Overall, there are a lot of reasons not to like the game but it is, oddly, very addictive, partly because you do get to enjoy using your proton pack to shoot a beam at a ghost and control him into the trap. That said, various random observations are as follows: The controls are appalling. You move forwards, backwards and sideways with the joystick and have to actually turn with the buttons, and there's no way to change this. You can get slimed, which is quite amusing at first. The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man is here! It's very bitty, with a bit of action and then another CGI scene - and repeat, which isn't as fulfilling as it could be, especiallly since the cut-scenes are a little jerky and overused. You're supposed to be part of a team but in some of the levels, such as "Slimer's Mitzvah" early on, when I captured Slimer in this level, I ended up doing it on my own as Peter did Sweet Bo Diddley. It'd be nice to have quotes from the film like "Don't cross the streams" and "I looked into the trap, Ray", but even during the first level when you get to see Peter slimed by Slimer, he doesn't say, "He slimed me.", which is very much a missed opportunity. It's fun to rack up loads of damage as you hunt for ghosts since the City of New York will pay for it all, not you. I love the way that the music in the background sometimes plays at normal speed and sometimes goes a bit slow plinky-plonky in the slow moments, just like the film, which comes across as pretty cool. Finding the angry chef, early on, the game glitches and after destroying all the items in the room, you can't get him out of the wall, so after trying for almost 30 mins I looked this up to see what I was doing wrong, and apparently the answer is to replay the level. This happened on other levels too when glitches stopped the game from progressing. You're supposed to be able to revive downed ghostbusters by standing next to them and pressing the left shoulder button but this never seems to work. Sometimes the PKE Meter doesn't work as it points to places where there's nothing and doesn't point to places where ghosts are hiding, so you may as well shoot at everything! In this review, I've uploaded a number of clips which are as follows: Ghostbusters: Level 01 On The Job Training Ghostbusters: Level 02 Slimers Mitzvah Ghostbusters: Level 03 And The Kitchen Sink, Too Ghostbusters: Level 04 Marshmallow Hunt Ghostbusters: Level 05 Going Up... Ghostbusters: Level 06 A Sticky Situation Ghostbusters: Level 07 Puffy White Menace Ghostbusters: Level 08 The Rise and Fall of Stay Puft Visit my DVDfeverGames Youtube channel.

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Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2009.