Ghostbusters (NES)

Ghostbusters

GHESHTBESHTERS!

Genre:	Action Adventure
Platforms:	Nintendo Entertainment System
Release Date:	October 1988
Developer:	Bits Laboratory
Publisher:	Activision
Franchise:	Ghostbusters
Next Game:	Ghostbusters II (NES)

Ghostbusters is a game originally released for various platforms in 1984, and ported to the Nintendo Entertainment System and released in North America in 1988. It is an action-adventure game based on the 1984 film of the same name. While the other versions are deemed to be okay for their time, the NES version is considered to be the worst of them all.

Why It Sucks

Very boring and monotonous gameplay. 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.
The driving sequence is 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.
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.
LordKat claims the only way to legitimately beat the stairwell stage is to buy the Sound Generator (Sonic Generator, in which he refers to), which is so expensive you have to grind for about 45 minutes to get it.
Capturing ghosts is 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 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 once in a while.
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.
Hideous graphics. There is barely any animation or detail in any of the sprites and the palette consists of washed-out greys, greens, and blues.
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).