I recently played a game for the NES called Ghostbusters. It was intended as a Ghostbusters movie tie-in, depicting the events of the Ghostbusters movie. I remember watching the movie as a child, and I never understood what it was about. The story was very confusing to me. Recently, I’ve had the wisdom to process all of the wrinkles, and I do consider the film to be good. But if you had asked me as a child, I would have said I didn’t like it.
Many people asked me to review the Ghostbusters movie released in 2016, but I had no interest in doing so. I was simply uninterested in seeing the movie, and resilient against the advertisements that told me it was a laugh-out-loud blockbuster. My statement of disinterest received a lot of positive feedback, but in returning to it now, I’ve realized that it was in it of itself a review. The concept was flawed. I regret that. But I am flawed, and I recognize that as well.
I was drinking Rolling Rock beer while playing, which is atypical. I don’t typically play video games or drink beer, but I felt the need to at this time. As soon as I booted the game up, I was greeted by a loud shout: “Ghostbusters.” The sound quality was far from impressive, and in-fact sounded bad. This set the tone of my experience.
The NES game Ghostbusters is a game in which you drive to different locations in New York City in order to find different kinds of ghosts and shoot them with your laser beams. This is the plot of the movie, as well.
When you drive around the city, you do so simply as the Ghostbusters logo, which while iconic is not a car. The car in Ghostbusters is iconic, so I do not understand why it wasn’t included. I found it to be shit for the birds.
I’ve had experiences driving in New York City, but only in taxis. I’ve never had interest in doing the driving in New York City. I’ve only had others drive me. When I lived in New York and went to New York University, I almost exclusively took the train. And when I lived on First Ave in the East Village, seducing my child-bride, I walked back and forth from her high-school to my apartment.
There is only one song in the entirety of the game, an 8-bit rendition of the Ghostbusters theme by Ray Parker Jr. An iconic song. I enjoyed it as a child. But in this game, the theme droned over me and made my brain go numb. The one second when the music stopped, right before it began again, was a second of pure bliss. My mind experienced something akin to ego death. LSD at proper dosages can create similar experiences.
The game’s systems are obtuse. If enough ghosts enter the center building, labeled ZUUL, the PKE meter gets to its peak and the Staypuff Marshmellow Man appears to destroy the building. I don’t understand how it works, but I’m not worried about understanding. I’m only trying to share my experience of the game as I see it. I would never eat Marshmallows. They are produced with materials that are unfit to consume.
Sometimes there are racing segments. Every car was out to get me. The fluidity of movement in the Ghostbusters NES game is very inaccurate, but the fact that there are hostile cars is factual. It was frustrating. It gave me the impression that the city has a bigger problem than ghosts in the form of drunk drivers.
Sometimes ghosts will be on the road, and you can inhale them with vacuums attached to the roof of your car. You can’t do this before you have the vacuum, and you have to buy the vacuum at the shop. I was interested in the idea that they had ghost vacuums for the roof of your car, and wanted to know if they had these in real life. I took out my cellular phone, which is a flip-phone. Part of my interest in technology is more archaic technologies which have been left behind. I attempt to focus my attention on my day-to-day experiences such as doing the dishes and find that smartphones impede that, so I still have the old technology of the flip-phone. I was disturbed to find that you can no longer tweet over text, but I find no shame in going onto my computer to do so.
I called a store and asked them if they had ghost vacuums. The man on the other end answered me: “You want a ghost vacuum?” he said.
“Yes, I do,” I said. “It’s shaped like a funnel, and you put it on the roof of your car while you are driving.”
“To clean your car?” He asked.
“No, these vacuums are made to catch ghosts,” I said.
He hung up the phone. Inquisition is often punished. From my independent research, I’ve had difficulty finding any proof that vacuums really do exist in real life. I think this game is the only place you can use a ghost vacuum to suck up ghosts on the road. The realm of fantasy is best depicted honestly in art.
In the game, when entering the Zuul building, you must ascend the stairs to the top. This happens in the movie as well. But in the movie, the Ghostbusters ride an elevator. It’s hard to understand why it is that you have to climb the stairs. It is very difficult to climb the stairs. I had to press the A button as fast as possible, and the ghosts moved so quickly that they frequently knocked me down the stairs. After falling three times, I died and had to begin the entire game again. The result is frustrating.
I learned that there is equipment to help with this section. The only issue was that the equipment cost a lot of money. In the world of the game I had no father with three million dollars in gambling debt, but it was still difficult to get the money. I had to catch far too many ghosts to do this and replace my equipment constantly. You’re not allowed to accumulate items, which I would have preferred. You are only allowed to carry four items on you at any given moment.
At this point I simply had to conclude that I hate this fucking game. The question I was left with, and pondered for the rest of my experience, is: “What were they thinking?”
I ordered an NES Turbo controller off of the Internet. It cost me forty-five dollars. This controller allowed me to speed up in the stairway sections and helped me to continue through the game. The game was too hard. I found myself saying: “Fuck, fuck.”
I ordered a Game Genie off of the Internet. That’s right, I cheated. The reason I did so was that the game was too hard to continue without it. It cost me sixty dollars.
Going up the staircase still took me minutes. At the end of the staircase, they ran into the doorway, which upset me. They ran as if they had propellers inside of their asses. Through the door was the last screen of the game. And it looked like shit.
The layout of the screen was mostly composed of tiles, and the ghosts which floated around with their tongues out looked like children’s Halloween decorations. Gozer and the dogs did not move.
This was the first time that the game felt like a game. It surprised me. It was a piece of shit, but it was almost a game. Staypuff was climbing the building, which I assumed was a kind of time limit for the battle. I defeated Gozer in time and was given a screen that congratulated me, but it had spelling errors. I laughed at this.
