Ghostbusters (NES)

Ghostbusters
"GHESTBUZTERZ!"
Genre(s): Action Platform(s): Nintendo Entertainment System Release: JP: September 22, 1986 NA: October 1988 Developer(s): Bits Laboratory Publisher(s): Activision Country: Japan Series: Ghostbusters Successor: Ghostbusters II

"CONGLATURATION!!!
YOU HAVE COMPLETED A GREAT GAME.
AND PROOVED THE JUSTICE OF OUR CULTURE.
NOW GO AND REST OUR HEROES!"

— The actual ending screen.

"CONGRATULATIONS!
YOU HAD THE PATIENCE TO SIT THROUGH THIS AWFUL GAME.
YOU PROVED YOUR NERDINESS.
NOW GO FUCK YOURSELF!"

— The Angry Video Game Nerd's response to the above.

Ghostbusters is an action game originally released for various platforms in 1984, and ported to the Nintendo Entertainment System by Bits Laboratory and released in 1986. It is based on the 1984 film of the same name.

Why It's Busted

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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, which he refers to), which is so expensive you have to grind for about 45 minutes to get it.
4. Capturing ghosts is 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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 "りり" (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.

The Only Redeeming Quality

1. The "Ghostbusters!" voice sample was a very honest attempt at putting a voice clip in an NES game.

Videos

"What were they thinking?" The Shit Scale Games that are debatably bad High level of shit contamination The very high category The severe zone Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Major code red 👆 This game/console belongs to the "Severe Zone" category of the AVGN's Shit Scale.

Trivia

• The ending screen appears on the Ghostbusters' computer as an easter egg in 2009's Ghostbusters: The Video Game.

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