Ghostbusters Day#2: Busting Lessons Learned

My second day on Ghostbusters. Another hour of play, another ten deaths. But I learned some lessons about how to play Ghostbusters, and what not to do in FPS games.  Spoilers within.

I restarted from the beginning of the Stay-Puft scene. I died through that scene probably another seven times. During the course of this, I figured out a key trick. Revive your companions whenever they go down. It’s not so much that they actually help you in combat that much, but they can revive you when you go down, and you WILL go down. This reviving decreased my mortality dramatically.

I also figured out (by accident) that you can dodge using the B button. It would have been really great to have learned that in the tutorial.

There’s a fairly new bit of narrative as you run through Times Square and enter an office building looking for what the Marshmallow Man is hunting. The office building was another death trap for me; Stay-Puft’s minions killed me repeatedly until I figured out you save Ray every chance you get and you use your missiles liberally.

Then there’s a neat but not very challenging boss fight to defeat Stay Puft, and following that, we return to nostalgia land with a trip to the library. I got some new short-range and slow-down special beams, and was then put in a room with a book golem to test them. They don’t seem very powerful, and I gave up after dying three times.

Narrative remains stronger than expected. Venkman gets the worst lines in terms of flat-footedness, but even that’s not too bad. The game is extremely cinematic in that there are whole scenes whose only interactive is running to a part of the map to trigger the next cut scene. Like the save problem I mentioned last time (which is still with us, by the way), it’s annoying, but not so much that I feel like I’m in the intro to a recent Square Enix game.

There’s one misstep in the story. There’s a scene when an odd bald guy shows up with Peck, the EPA agent from the first movie. Turns out the bad guy is the mayor (who knew!) and that he’s assigning Peck to a municipal Paranomal Control agency, which means he’s watching over you. What a Twist! I like the character as an antagonist, but come on, you have to TRY to make me believe this. Of course, I guess one difference between 1984 and 2009 is that you can’t make the EPA the bad guy anymore.

Otherwise, the game still holds my interest. Let’s see if we’re at the end of the old movie references.