I, Ghostbuster
Only one thing could make our columnist willing to try 3-D video games.
by Shaun Doniger

I never thought I’d have what it takes to cut it in a 3-D world.

As a young child at the dawn of the burgeoning home video game console craze, I was witness to the birth of what would become an unhealthy obsession for so many brilliant young minds of my generation. I was there to see Mario flatten his first Goomba, to watch Link slay his first goblin en route to saving Princess Zelda, and (to a lesser extent) marvel at Sonic the Hedgehog launching through his first of many dizzying loop-de-loops. Through all the innovations and improvements in graphics and gameplay, the one near-constant (with a few notable exceptions) was that all the adventures took place in a side-scrolling universe.

It was impossible to get lost in a game like “Super Mario Bros.” Even Sonic games, though wildly uncontrollable at times, were confined to the relative safety of a 2-D world where danger could be seen in advance from above, below or behind you at any time in the game. And as hard as we remember some of our favorite side-scrolling games being, consider the earlier generation of games like “Donkey Kong”: was there, or has there ever been a game harder than “Donkey Kong?” I don’t think I ever beat more than three levels in that fucking game, and that screen doesn’t even move.

I graduated to the Super Nintendo a few Christmases later, and managed to adapt to the four extra buttons on the controller, as well as the dazzling 16-bit graphics the system had to offer. But as it turned out, this was to be the point where video game technology would leave me behind. After a few years of glory as the reigning “Super Mario Kart” champion in my neighborhood, I remember playing “Doom” for the first time on a friend’s home computer and realizing this was the end. Monsters attacked from all sides! If you were facing the wrong direction, you couldn’t even see them! Worse yet, you could get stuck forever in the maze of brick-walled rooms that seemed to look identical no matter which way you went.

While everyone else was losing their minds over the ensuing wave of Doom-esque first-person 3-D shooter games that inevitably followed, I quietly hung up my controllers and retired from the race to keep up with the next platform doomed to planned obsolescence. It also helped that I was becoming interested in music and playing the guitar around this time, so video games were no longer my sole obsession for the long hours spent alone in my room – along with whatever else it is that teenagers do while alone in their rooms.

One obsession I indulged in deeply was the creation of the ultimate Halloween costume: a Ghostbuster outfit, complete with Proton Pack and all the accessories. It helped to have three other friends as reluctant to let go of childhood fantasies as I was, and we labored for several days making our gear out of scrap lumber, techy-looking stuff from Radio Shack and junk found around the house. Though our costumes may not have been note-perfect like some of the fans out there casting their own fiberglass replicas of Ghostbusters props (though given the resources, time and money, who knows how far we may have gone), they were true to the spirit of the franchise, and we had all the brashness and charisma needed to round out the presentation.

Halloween night, we headed to downtown San Diego right to the heart of all the action. People lined up for blocks for a cheap scare at the Haunted Hotel and Frightmare on Market Street, and clubs overflowed with party-goers hoping to win any one of the countless costume contests in the city with their cheap, store-bought “slutty nurse/police officer/witch/etc...” getups. We had a different itinerary, though. No alcohol, or even any costume contests for us; we were there to entertain, antagonize and indulge ourselves in general well-intentioned show-boating on one of the busiest, craziest nights in downtown.

What happened that night is the stuff of local legends, and well-known to those in our inner circle. In short, we were the Ghostbusters; loved by many, reviled by some, avoiding unpleasant brushes with the authorities and running up and down the busy streets looking like we were chasing ghosts. It’s all well and good to just look like a Ghostbuster, as any of the prop-fanatics online could attest, but we lived the dream. It was more than we could have ever planned for or expected. During one of our many runs in the middle of the gridlocked nighttime downtown traffic, throngs of people on both sides of the street started cheering loudly and chanting, “Ghostbusters, Ghostbusters!” As we ran between cars shouting things like, “stand aside!” we could hardly believe the roar of the crowd as it followed us like a growing wave for two or three city blocks. If I could have told my 7-year-old self that someday he would be running down a crowded city street in full Ghostbusters regalia to the cheers of hundreds of onlookers, he may not have felt so jilted at not getting the coveted Ghostbusters toy firehouse play set for Christmas.

Though for several successive Halloweens and at least one costume contest at work (I won), we strapped into our packs and made several more treks as the Ghostbusters. And though we upgraded costume details, even fitting the Proton Packs with the ability to shoot streams of Silly String, we never did quite recapture the glory of that first run. The costumes were still show-stoppers every time, but I guess as far these things go, you’d be lucky to have several crowded city blocks cheer for you even once in your lifetime.

What, you’re probably wondering, do these two disparate threads of stories have to do with each other?

Ghostbusters: The Video Game.

Yes, decades after the first movie debuted, and many sad and awful attempts to capture the franchise in video game format gone by, there was finally a modern video game released that would move me to pick up a video game controller for the first time in years. Sure, I’d played a little Wii sports at parties, downloaded chess on my cell phone and even tried a few minutes of “Grand Theft Auto” at a friend’s house, but not since my Super Nintendo had I owned any sort of game console, or bought a game for the computer of any kind. Plus, since my first time playing “Doom” in the mid-90s, I had logged no more than a few hours of 3-D game play experience, let alone with a controller that had twice the buttons my SNES controller had, and two joysticks to boot!

If there was ever a game that would entice me to learn, this would be it.

I bought the game on the day it came out. It was the first time I bought a game that didn’t come in cartridge form, and I was dismayed at how little effort goes into the instruction manuals these days; thank God for the full color game guide book I bought along with it. As it turns out, buying a game for your PC isn’t just something you can do, and then just expect to just go home and play it. No – you have to make sure that your computer can even handle the game. Having very little presence of mind to pay attention to these details, I soon found out that Dell had not equipped my computer with a sufficient video card to run the game. The game is just that awesome, I reasoned, so right back out I went to buy a $100 video card for my computer just to play this one game.

It was Ghostbusters, after all. And I had watched every sneak-peak video and leaked YouTube footage of this game since it was rumored to be in the works, even from way back when the prototype game looked more like some futuristic war game, the proton gun looked like a pulse rifle carried by the Space Marines in “Aliens”, and the Ecto-1 was upgraded from the iconic 1959 Cadillac ambulance to a stretched Chrysler 300 (which, even as stupid as this looked, I would probably still been just as eager to play).

I borrowed an Xbox 360 knockoff controller from a friend, spent entirely too long installing my new video card – which, with its own little built-in fan and enormous memory, is undoubtedly underwhelmed by the majority of my work on this computer, including writing this story – and finally loaded up the game.

I had envisioned that this article might serve as a review of sorts for the game, but there is no point in that. As a die-hard Ghostbusters fan, I think the game would had to have been extraordinarily bad – like pretty much all the Ghostbusters games that preceded it have been – to have disappointed me. Needless to say, I am absolutely over the moon for it. The game has been described by other reviewers as a “love letter to Ghostbusters fans” and I have to agree. I don’t know how it compares to other modern games, or if “serious” gamers will feel that this game is worth their time, but for any kid who wondered what it would be like to shoot a protonic capture stream at Slimer and wrangle him into a ghost trap, I say to you that our Ghostbusting dream has come true.