Game Review: Ghostbusters (Amstrad, Ricochet)

Arguably one of the best movies released in 1984 was the action-horror-comedy Ghostbusters. When Activision secured the rights to develop the home versions, they produced a wonderful tribute to the film for the Commodore 64 with a faithful release following not long after for Atari systems. Conversions to other systems were handled in the UK, including this one for the Amstrad CPC eventually re-released by Mastertronic on the Ricochet label…

Everybody Sing!

Once the game has loaded up, it starts with a blank screen and a short clip of sampled sound screaming out “Ghostbusters” followed by a haunting, cackling laugh.  Well, I think that’s what it is supposed to be, but the sound is so distorted it’s incredibly difficult to make out. Not off to a good start.

After this, the screen stays blanks while the Ghostbusters theme starts to play. In the bottom part of the screen the lyrics appear on screen and a bouncing ball appears turning this into the first, if not the only game with its own built in karaoke feature. Timing of the bouncing ball to the lyrics is spot on, and I dare anyone to resist letting the music play through at least once when you load the game up for the first time! Unfortunately, unlike the other versions you can’t interact with this in any way (pressing space on the C64 and Atari versions stops the music to trigger the speech to shout out “Ghostbusters”) but after the sample quality at the beginning, maybe this isn’t such a bad thing…

Do You Have What It Takes To Join The Ghostbusters?

Diving into the game itself, instead of taking on the role of the main characters or following the plot of the film, you’re working alongside the main characters of the film and managing your own Ghostbusters franchise on their behalf. You’re provided with an initial budget of $10,000 to get yourself started and with that you’ve got to buy all the gear you need.

Obviously you need your own answer to ECTO-1 and there are four to choose from, each with their own strengths and weaknesses but with a cost to match. Regardless of which of the four you select, you’ve then got to to load up with all the essential ghost hunting gear you need to run your franchise.

This includes a ghost vaccuum to capture stray ghosts you find around the city, ghost traps, bait to help deal with the Marshmallow Man, PK energy detectors to give you advance warnings of where ghost attacks are going to be and more. But all of these have to come within your budget and your car’s load capacity.

Saving The City One More Time…

So now you’re all set, it’s off on the road to save New York and hopefully make a nice profit along the way. That would be easy enough if it wasn’t for the fact that Zuul is still around. PK energy is rising in the city and you’ve got to stop it rising too high before the Keymaster and the Gatekeeper can get enough power to bring Zuul back to destroy the city.

So how do go about running your Ghostbusters franchise? There are three key elements and game modes in the game. The bulk of the game is played out on the city map. This highlights buildings that are facing ghost infestation and are in need of help. At the same time, other ghosts roam the city making their way towards Zuul in the city centre. It’s your job to capture as many ghosts as possible earning more than your opening budget before the city’s PK energy level reaches 9,999 and Zuul is unleashed. Each time the roaming ghosts reach Zuul this level rises so you can intercept these en route to each job, scooping them up with your ghost vacuum (if you remembered to buy one).

Just move your cursor around the map (which conveniently looks like the Ghostbusters insignia) and position it underneath any flashing building and press fire to travel to it. Buildings with ghosts there waiting to be captured will flash red and if you have a PK detector equipped some will flash purple indicating that ghosts will appear soon. As for the roaming ghosts… move over them and you’ll have a chance to catch them too once you start driving.

Drive Time

Driving along is simple enough and the time it takes to reach your destination depends on how long you were moving around the map (represented by the dots you left on the map) and the vehicle you selected as some are faster than others. If you didn’t drive over any roaming ghosts on the way, you can just sit back and watch the ride, but if you did then then pay attention as you’ll see these float past during your trip. Assuming you bought the ghost vaccuum, move your car towards them, press fire when they are near and the vaccuum will suck them up helping to keep the city’s PK levels down.

Anybody Seen A Ghost?

When you arrive at each location, the game switches over to the capture mini game. This is mode puts you outside one of the game’s locations with two of your crew and one of the offending ghosts. To capture said ghost, you simply position a trap, then moving two of your crew into place to guide a ghost over the trap before opening it, earning cash in the process. Miss and the ghost escapes after sliming one of your team, the city’s PK level rises and you’re off to the next job. It’s more a case of timing than anything else but still fun nevertheless.

If you manage to catch one of the ghosts successfully, you’re treated with sampled speech again with the CPC shouting “Ghostbusters” (much clearer here than at the start of the game), but if a ghost attacks you then another sample plays of a ghost laughing.

I will talk about this in more detail further on, but this section really does highlight the biggest flaw with the Amstrad conversion of Ghostbusters… this section is painfully slow to play. Moving your characters and trap into position isn’t too bad, but the instant you activate your beams, everything becomes incredibly sluggish to the point that timing for triggering your trap is luck just as much as it is skill. The game only seems to return to any semblance of normality speed wise once the streams have stopped and this isn’t the only time this happens…

Resource Management

All throughout, there is an element of strategy to the game. From the beginning you have to make very careful decisions about what to spend your opening $10,000 on. While the temptation is there to go for a bigger and better car, that leaves you with less funds for equipment and gadgets. The more ghost traps you have, the fewer times you need to jump back in the car return to Ghostbusters HQ to empty them. And if you don’t get the all important Ghost Bait or Marshmallow Detector, you won’t be able to stop the attacks on the city from the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.

These can be devastating, not only to the city but to your cashflow as you’ll be held responsible to any damaged caused losing thousands from your virtual bank account and potentially ruining your chances of completing the game.

Completing The Game

The game ends in one of three ways. Once the city’s PK levels reach 9,999 then Zuul is unleashed and assuming your franchise is in profit at that stage you have to make your way to the centre building in the city. Here you’ll find a new building guarded by the Marshmallow Man. Just sneak a couple of your team past him and if you manage to successful they’ll close the portal trapping Zuul forever… If you fail to do this, or if you don’t earn enough cash to get your franchise into profit then it’s game over!

One nice touch at this point for those of you who are successful is that you’re presented with a password at the end with details of a bank account number allowing you to play the game again with the amount of cash that you ended the game with. While this allows you to buy more next time around, it does add a fresh challenge meaning you need to earn more as well!

Playability

Despite its outward simplicity Ghostbusters is incredibly addictive, helped by the variety in the different sections to the game. Looking back, what seemed at the time to be just a fun game going around the city capturing ghosts, there’s far more depth to it than that. The resource management and planning adds a whole new level to the game, and the intensity as the PK levels rise near the end makes the game incredible tense.

This all adds up to make Ghostbusters such a compelling game and it’s no wonder its so highly regarded over 40 years after it was first released. Even today it holds up remarkably well and there are very few games that I can say that about. Unfortunately, even though it is addictive and once I sat down to play it for the review I couldn’t stop until I’d played it right through to completion, the Amstrad version isn’t without it’s flaws which do hurt it considerably.

Conversion Woes

I touched upon this briefly when I talked about catching ghosts outside of buildings, but the Amstrad version of Ghostbusters suffers from horrible slowdown throughout the game. As soon as there are more than a couple of things moving on screen the game almost grinds to a halt, whether it’s catching ghosts, moving around the city map or even the driving sequences.

The only reason I can see for this happening is that the developers have tried to recreate the Commodore 64 version too accurately. In the original, all of the ghosts and the Ghostbusters symbol on the map were sprites, as were the characters and ghost on the capture stages. All of these could be moved independent of the processor without any slowdown. In simuating sprites on the CPC without colour clash and transparency effects, it placed a huge strain on the system at the time and frankly it does impact on the game.

In fact, there are a lot of times where the software sprites flicker quite badly as they are being displayed, and the same happens with the stripes on the road in the driving sections, as you can see from the screenshot below where the roadlines disappeared completely.

Graphics and Sound

When porting over to the Amstrad, the team were certainly ambitious. Looking at the stills it looks as if they managed to achieve an impressive conversion, but it does fall apart at the seams as soon as everything starts to move which is a terrible shame. I would have been quite happy with fewer colours or other compromises visually if it meant faster or smoother gameplay as has made a real impact on the game itself.

Onto the sound and while the film’s theme has been converted reasonably well to the AY chip, it does drop notes at times so it’s not quite a perfect adaptation. Also, strangely, it re-starts from the beginning every time you have caught a ghost or move from one section of the game to another instead of playing continuously and looping which is quite bizzarre.

Once you get past the opening screech, the in game speech is handled quite well, but sadly that’s the only effect to be heard throughout leaving just the music to stop Ghostbusters from being played in total silence which I did find quite unusual.

Overall

I’d rank Ghostbusters in my top five 8-bit games of all time, so it’s sad to see the Amstrad version struggle so much. With the extra time available after the release of the original, I would have expected this to be at least of the same standard of the C64 or Atari versions but while it looks the part, it’s spoiled by the slowdown. The classic gameplay is still there, but you need an incredible amount of patience to be able to work past that to be able to enjoy this one.

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