Including the New York Public Library as a playable mission in the demo^[1] should have been a dead giveaway. As one of the signature setpieces in the film Ghostbusters, allowing players to take part in a second trip to this locale with familiar faces in tow, is essentially what Ghostbusters: The Video Game entails. It collects a series of touchstones for players to reminisce about, while attempting to tell a new story. Except the story reclaims entire sections of the film and its sequel, patching together plot points, locations and famous adversaries in what amounts to a playing inside a world of Ghostbusters: Greatest Hits. You are constantly harangued by Walter Peck and the new Paranormal Contract Oversight Committee. You have to fight the Stay Puft Marshmellow Man (again). You get to destroy the Sedgewick Hotel (again). About the only thing interesting is the encounter with Ivo Shandor, the Architect of Dana Barrett’s apartment building from the first film, who remained a legend that was never really explored. In Ghostbusters: The Video Game, you discover how obsessed with the Gozerian cult he really was, as the Ghosbusters slowly uncover a plot designed by Shandor years ago, to bring about the coming of The Destroyer.

This brief incursion into Ghostbusters lore comes too late in the game, and it’s frustratingly obvious that the previous missions were filler to relive everyone’s favorite moments from the films. But as you play the game, its intentions are clear: this is not meant to be a video game as much as it is intended to be those Greatest Hits, as it was not designed for an audience who plays video games. Rather, it was created to placate fans of the movies that also happen to play video games.

As a result, both Terminal Reality and Atari are banking on this brand recognition to give the game a passing grade. Any critic or reviewer that has been paying attention over the last eight years would see this game for what it is: old, outdated, unnecessary. So why the relatively high scores^[2], respectable sales performance^[3] and praise as wistful recollections? The answer is simple: Nostalgia is a dangerous weapon used to great effect in the video game industry. It will beat people senseless – especially in a hobby that helped many people through their childhoods.

If Terminal Reality were feeling ambitious when they started the project, they could have made Ghostbusters into a game that stood beside other “open-world” ^[4] titles like Red Faction: Guerrilla, inFamous, and Prototype that seemed to be in fashion in the first half of 2009. The entire concept behind Ghostbusters is ripe for exploitation with this formula, where side-missions can be completed while following the main plot to key story-driven missions in the streets of New York City. Even the films themselves establish such a framework: the Ghostbusters are either starting out (Ghostbusters) or making a comeback (Ghostbusters II), completing small tasks on the way to fighting a greater evil. The entire film worked towards a final confrontation. This should be familiar to anyone who’s ever played a video game.

Ghostbusters: The Video Game is not just another example of the lack of ambition on the part of game designers to develop a captivating product, but of the industry at large: stuck in the past assuming that the weight of intellectual property and the familiar will bear heavily on the opinions of those that play their game. Ghostbusters: The Video Game is not just old because it reuses scenes, jokes and events from the films, but also because of its unwavering approach to the game’s objectives. Its linear design is based on the most rudimentary of movie-tie ins. While the actual “ghostbusting” remains fun until the end, it’s hard not to view Ghostbusters: The Video Game as anything more than a third-person shooting gallery with proton packs. In this regard, the game fails on two fronts: it cannot provide an engaging framework for a game, and it cannot provide an engaging enough story to excuse the simple mechanics.

I was hoping for something like Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, where the creators clearly took the source material to heart, and created a brand new adventure that may have borrowed from the original films, but didn’t overtly copy them. Instead, the game carried the spirit of the original source so that it wouldn’t seem out of place next to the films that inspired it. Ghostbusters: The Video Game had the potential to do this as well, and would have made the limitations of the game a little easier to tolerate. The story and script were handled by Dan Ackroyd and Harold Ramis – the writers responsible for the original films – and the best they could come up with falls hopelessly short of these expectations.

Ackroyd often said in the interviews promoting the game and his involvement with it that Ghostbusters: The Video Game is “essentially Ghostbusters III“^[5], or the sequel that everyone wanted but never received. And to revisit the same locations so predictably says a lot about their opinions and assumptions of the fan base. The fans want wish fulfillment, they want cheap thrills. They want the security blanket of their youth. And they got it.

The dialogue will make you laugh, and the sarcastic delivery of most lines will certainly bring you back to watching the movies as an impressionable youth. The fluidity of the dialogue is also impressive. Either the actors are drawing from experience, or more time than usual was spent in the studio. In either case, it suits the game and presents a playful atmosphere reminiscent of the films. Any scenarios intended to invoke fear are always undermined by a one-liner or wisecrack from one of the team, which is something the films did so well. However, the cutscenes between levels felt long, as if the development team were trying to assemble a movie. Except it doesn’t actually work when the game is already stripped to the bare essentials.

Apart from the infiltration of Ivo Shandor’s hidden island laboratory, players have seen everything else before. There is precious little information offered to substantiate the lore presented in the previous films. Reusing old plot points with different characters is common practice. To take Ghostbusters: The Video Game as the third film would therefore be a mistake, as I doubt any studio would support such a horrible script. And this is yet more evidence of the divergence between video games and their clumsy and pleading comparisons to the film industry: a bad plot in film is a pretty good plot for a video game, even as we “turn our brains off” as the reviewers love to justify. No one should play video games because they want to watch a movie. They would be wasting their time, and that of everyone else when they start complaining about the lack of interactivity afterward.

The depth to the system in Ghostbusters: The Video Game is through upgrades that can be purchased with money earned on each mission: better traps, four types of particle beams, modifications to the PKE meter. In other words, the most callous and unimaginative reason to ask someone to keep playing your game.

I’m willing to give Egon the benefit of the doubt for some of the weapons that were invented specifically for this game – the character was clearly a wizard with technology. They also keep with genre conventions to some degree: Boson darts are the shotgun, the freeze beam slows enemies, etc. However, simply pausing the game will allow the purchase of these upgrades. In fact, there is one mission where a new technology is suddenly activated on your proton pack in the middle of a mission, meaning you had been carrying it all along. I can understand the need for a certain technology to be available for a particular mission, but the mission progression should be designed so these upgrades could be purchased or handed out at the beginning of each. Allowing this kind of freedom to access new technology at any time removes the need for a planning phase. Even in such a linear game as this, the addition of something so simple would at least give the illusion of challenge.

Trapping ghosts is still satisfying right until the end. The game really makes you work for it. You feel the bend and pull of the makeshift equipment in your hands. With the “Slam Dunk” modification to the trap, ghosts can be captured in one shot if you Slam a ghost near a trap. In either case there is an exaggerated feeling of relief when the ghost is finally caught. You have to take a few seconds to regroup, even though there are five other ghosts floating around above you. The moment has to be savored. There are so precious few of them in this game.

A dynamic of the game that only reveals itself later on is teamwork. This isn’t as necessary at the beginning, where fallen teammates were an inconvenience during a boss battle. In the later missions, there are multiple ghosts requiring attention from your particle thrower, and even then they will require more than one person to knock it into submission. During these encounters, you need your teammates to survive. Even though a ghost may be seconds away from being trapped, you have to drop everything and revive your teammates or you will die attempting to do everything yourself. An example of this is in the Museum mission, where you must manage the ghostly possession of civilians as well as your own teammates, all the while attempting to capture the ghosts that are responsible. It’s a harsh lesson, but one that was clearly presented by the films. The war against the supernatural in New York City is not a solo effort.

In fact, starting with the fight against the Librarian partway through the third chapter, the game starts to show promise. Aside from the constant direction and commentary from your teammates, the encounters with large ghosts and mission bosses are challenging as you manage damage and try to recover teammates. It can be a frustrating system as you attempt to compensate for the middling squad AI, but at the end of each battle there is a sense of accomplishment. It’s like repeating the last 10 minutes of Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters II each time. These encounters are the reason you keep playing.

And yet the game really starts to break down in the last act when travelling towards the final encounter with Shandor. It becomes difficult in the way you have to manage projectile enemies, swarming enemies, ghosts that must be trapped, and larger monsters. This is a sharp spike that throws off the previously established rhythm of the game. It is no longer about “hunting” ghosts, but fending them off with random blasts of particle beams just to get some space to do your job.

The final showdown with the mayor of New York City – possessed by the ghost of Ivo Shandor, no less – provides a two-stage battle that evokes something startlingly similar to the conclusion of Ghostbusters II. Though Terminal Reality must be given accolades for this encounter, as it is an extremely satisfying, drawn-out fight in the spirit realm, instead of the lucky shots at the end of each film that were favored in the name of pacing. The game’s plot had genuine closure, and all was right with the world (again).

So it’s quite puzzling as to why Terminal Reality assumed that multiplayer would be a big draw for people after the main game was completed, when all it really amounts to is a collection of random task-based missions that can be played co-operatively. It was wasted effort, considering that it had no hope of competing with more attractive options for online play at the time. And Terminal Reality wasn’t even responsible for this component of the game; it was contracted out to Threewave Software. Assuming that this freed up more time to be spent on the single-player campaign, the overall package doesn’t show it.

Nevertheless, there are the collective opinions of the press that must be resolved. If anyone took the time to consider what was being offered by the game, it would be very hard to justify the 78% average that the XBox 360 and Playstation 3 versions have received. Reading any number of reviews^[6] will yield the same sentiment: if you like Ghostbusters, this game is for you. But what if I like video games? No one dared look at this game critically, or in depth beyond pointing out obvious faults – it was perfectly acceptable to give the game an average score an move on, business as usual. There is no need to desecrate happy childhood memories. But sometimes there is.

Make no mistake: Ghostbusters: The Video Game is a tie-in to the films. The producers of the video game said as much: the release of the game was intended to coincide with the anniversary of the theatrical release of the first film, and the remastering of the films on Blu Ray. And yet any other movie tie-in is automatically approached with contempt by the video game press, as if these other video games were the reason the industry overall was being cheapened. Except that’s exactly what’s happening in this case. It’s just that no one wants to see it.

A recognizable piece of intellectual property can be made into a good video game – there are already a number of examples from recent years – but they, too, suffer the same fate of being intellectual property first, and a video game second. The most recent case of this is Batman: Arkham Asylum, where the general sentiment was “a Batman game that isn’t terrible.” How special developers Rocksteady must feel!

If players are happy to “play Ghostbuster”, Ghostbusters: The Video Game certainly succeeds on that crude level. But why should it get a pass just for fan service? It’s the same reason why video games should not be given the right of way because it supplies “a good story”^[7]. These are games, and should be judged as such from the beginning. Giving these types of games an acceptable grade assures that we we will see more of this half-hearted approach, proving once again that we are destined to recycle the same material with better graphical fidelity. Being satisfied with “good enough”, assures a future of being fed leftovers from the trough of nostalgia.

Ghostbusters: The Video Game isn’t long, and so despite the numerous faults that have been pointed out here it doesn’t take long to finish. The thrill of wrangling ghosts and capturing lasted until the end, even with the spike in difficulty. The production is also well done: Atari spared no expense in obtaining the music and original actors (they even dug up William Atherton to play Walter Peck). All the earmarks of a work inspired by these movies is there. But this is looking through the Ghostbusters Yearbook, and we’re all grown up now, and the Ghostbusters are old friends that aren’t as interesting as your remember them. Ghostbusters: The Video Game could have put a familiar face on the proven, comfortable sandbox/”open world” formula. Bust ghosts with your pals Venkman, Stanz, Spengler and Zedmore. But do it inside the structure of a game that is well-equipped for such a theme. Invent your own story. Save the city of New York again, on your terms.

So the question for the player becomes: Am I interested enough in a recycled story to continue?

Even though Ghostbusters: The Video Game takes place in 1991, the game is still stuck in its own past as a hopeless artifact of the 1980s. A retread referencing old jokes, old plot points and forever doomed to be a nostalgic curiosity. If Terminal Reality had worked on making a video game instead of a finely polished homage, there might have been something in Ghostbusters: The Video Game worth praising. As it stands, nostalgia is the selling feature and weighs heavily on the game’s proceedings. For some, that is obviously enough. However, complaining about a lack of advancement in video games, while cuddling with one that is mired in our collective childhood means there is really only one person to blame. And there will be no sympathy.

In the wait for Diablo III, Torchlight has been cause for celebration among those that wish for an effortless and predictable excursion into well-worn territory. But like Darkstone was to the deadspace between Diablo and Diablo II, Torchlight is being overvalued because of timing. I’ll certainly give Runic Games credit for creating a slick action role playing game that pays adequate homage to Blizzard’s seminal genre template, but Torchlight is in a genre holding pattern that is waiting for something else to take its place.

Indeed, Diablo is a name is guaranteed to be referenced when talking about any gear collecting, gold hoarding, point-click-kill marathon. And perhaps some developers think that this is something to aspire to, hoping to capture the players that don’t want to pay for an MMORPG by capitalizing on the success of a proven formula. But does the already diluted genre of role playing games need another Diablo clone?^[1] What is this really offering the platform of PC gaming, in a time when the industry is rightfully criticized for creating sequels and clones and sequels of clones?

That’s a pretty heavy topic for such an innocent genre retread to lead to – after all, Torchlight is instant and fleeting gratification at its most elemental. One would also be remiss in failing to point out that Torchlight is a front to fund Runic’s upcoming Free-to-Play/micropayment MMORPG^[2]. There’s not much more you can say about Torchlight’s intentions, even if like Neverwinter Nights the game and its toolset are being released to provide a product for the community with virtually endless replayability. Yet I was still compelled to spend many hours with Torchlight, because it closed the loop on something that was started almost five years ago.

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In Canabalt, you jump or you die. It’s that simple. When you think about it.

But Canabalt doesn’t give you much time to think. You have no control over your avatar’s movements in the game besides jumping. He is already running. Your responsibility as the player is to make sure he jumps. There is one button in this game. It can be picked up by anyone. The only difficulty curve is learning to overcome your own lack of patience to wait until that perfect second to execute the jump. There are no pretenses of depth that only end up disappointing.

The game starts in what appears to be an office building. Your avatar is wearing a suit. He starts to run. The window you jump through accents the beginning of what will most certainly be a daring escape.

The entire time you are playing Canabalt, you are gripped with fear of the unknown. Will you make the next jump? Will you escape destruction? And where is it you are escaping to? But there isn’t enough time to contemplate the incongruities of this game. You have to run. You have to jump. Freedom awaits. Or more buildings.

I could say I had visions of Out of this World (Another World) and Flashback while playing this game. The simple, yet effective artwork and smooth animations bear enough of a resemblance. But in truth I couldn’t stop thinking about F-Zero GX ^[1], and the billboards throughout the game that tell you to “GO FAST”. The obnoxious guitar-laced techno always thumping in the background, constantly pressing you forward.

Canabalt is the same. Like some other iPhone/iPod Touch games, it allows you to listen to your own music while playing. But to do that would be a mistake. Before the game starts, Semi-Secret advises players that headphones supply the best experience for their game. They’re right about that.

There is only one piece of music in this game^[2] . It starts off quiet, then develops into the same abrasive techno from F-Zero GX. You can’t help but feel prodded by the music, letting it affect your decisions. A high, long jump when it gets loud seems only fitting. Then it gets quiet again. But you don’t want to slow down; you can’t slow down.

The more you run, the more momentum builds up. The soundtrack complements everything that happens on screen. It is essential to the experience. Every single footstep can be heard. Stone, metal, and then glass breaking as you leap through a window across another gap between buildings.

Semi-Secret Software didn’t really have to do that, you know. There is no purpose to breaking through windows or the delectable tinkling sound of falling glass that results. It is the only thing in Canabalt that feels gratuitous; It’s embellishment for the urgency of your escape. Clearly you will stop at nothing – not even a full-story pane of glass – to get away.

Then there are other obtacles. Sometimes you have to hit them to slow down for a short jump before a long one. Sometimes undetonated bombs fall from the sky. You have to jump over them, or they explode when you hit them. Despite the urgency to keep moving at all costs, Canabalt makes you think ahead. You dread what’s coming. You don’t want to ruin a good run.

The buildings are random. Sometimes the gaps seem like they are getting bigger. You learn that holding on to a jump even for a split second more extends the airtime.

The whole time you are running, there is a war going on in the distance. More likely it’s an invasion. You never find out. It brings to mind the tripods from War of the Worlds and Half Life 2. These silhouettes are purposefully placed out of focus, so you can never pay full attention to what is happening. There is a more important task at hand: survival.

The most revealing feature of this game is the lack of a pause button^[3]. You are running for your life, away from some unknown force that will surely kill you if your death-defying stunts don’t. The only thing left is your life. This is an all-or-nothing gamble. There are no breaks. There is no stopping. You either make the next jump, or you die.

I’ve seen Canabalt labelled as one of 2009’s “indie darlings.” The criticism that naturally follows such attention has focused on its lack of producing an experience of any significance; it’s too short. Aside from the initial novelty, there is no reason a person needs to pick this game up more than once. They would be wrong. There is a reason.

Canabalt is a game of the simplest philosophy, hearkening back to the days where “High Score” actually meant something^[4]. Success is easily quantified. There is no secret there: to go farther, you must get better at the game. Anyone can grasp this concept. The failure condition is equally simple: you die. But even here the game has something to say, because you don’t just fall into a chasm. You hit the brick wall of your skill level. Canabalt wants you to do better.

With enough patience, Canabalt can last forever. And you want it to last forever. As long as that character is running across the screen, you are alive. You go on because you must.

Or you die.

Prototype is excess. It is what happens when game designers grow up with American comic books post-comics code and the type of Japanese animation that is more interested in overblown displays of power than telling a story. It is a game with rules that are designed to be broken at every turn. The player is rewarded for brazen and barbaric tactics. In Prototype, there are too many abilities and limitless power, yet no loyalty to an ideal. Like X-Men’s Dark Phoenix, Alex Mercer is granted godlike status with no one to stand in his way. The game revels in bloodshed and in selfish pursuits that amount to little more than breadcrumbs on the trail of some government conspiracy. Prototype is advertised as a “superhero” video game. But Alex Mercer is no hero. He isn’t even an anti-hero. He is a plague on humanity. And at the end of it all, after everything he has wreaked upon the city of New York, this descriptor proves to be the most accurate.

After a few hours of play, Prototype will come across as a patchwork of unfinished concepts. On the one hand, it offers up such a varied selection of powers and skills that it will suit any playing style, and in theory adds levels of complexity to completing the tasks that are presented to the player. Yet on the other, Prototype provides two completely overpowered vehicles that will get any job done a lot faster, without the strategic use of Alex’s talents. This is a game that needs rules put in place. While I wanted to figure out other ways to approach Prototype’s challenges, the winning strategy was to cause enough havoc to summon a strike team, and then steal their vehicles. Aside from some fairly engaging boss battles where vehicles were not options, the challenge in Prototype is the player’s own restraint.

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This is the second part of a two-part review of Prince of Persia (2008) and the “Epilogue” (2009) downloadable content. There are spoilers, but you already knew that. This review examines the “Epilogue” adventure and its relationship with the original game. The review of the original game can be read in Part 1.

Whether fans of Prince of Persia (2008) want to accept it or not, Epilogue (2009) is canon. At its core, it is a meandering journey through the corrupted Underground Palace that adds neither depth to the original story, nor game mechanics of any real consequence to the original game^[1]. So what was the purpose of this new content? The cynical answer to this question would be “to get stupid people to pay for the intended ending to the original game.” And while I can agree with that statement, there are parts of Epilogue that skirt the edges of something great – something that should have formed the basis for the original game. Epilogue implores us to keep the candle burning for this series, in a last-ditch attempt to convince us that UbiSoft hasn’t lost their touch with the franchise they resurrected so successfully six years ago. Prince of Persia (2008) was just the beginning; we can expect more from the obviously planned sequels. Except Epilogue fails to convince us that there is anything worth waiting for.

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