"Good, compared to watching paint dry, watching grass grow, or watching paint dry on growing grass!!"
The good:
The game offers a realistic ghostbusting experience for the time of the NES.
It has a good 8-bit rendition of the Ghostbusters theme
Good Timekiller
The bad:
The theme repeats over and over again.
The stairway level is too difficult and too long
There are only three levels: (1) Catching Ghosts (2) Stairway Level (3) Final Boss
Awful "You Win" screen
It starts out with a simple picture of the Ghostbusters logo, the Activision logo, and "Press Start." You press start and you hear a hideously distorted audio clip of someone saying, "Ghostbusters!" It may have been a limitation of the NES, but that's the point. Why add a voice to the game if the NES is incapable? That's just idiotic!!
You then come to the worst map screen ever, pictures of buildings, ghosts you cannot fight, and you playing as the Ghostbusters logo. This game is directed to kids, but it is nowhere near as self explanatory as, say, Super Mario Bros. Even Mario Bros. 3 had a map screen that was pretty self explanatory. If this is NES, and NES is directed towards kids, then why not make it a sidescroller? I gave the controller to a three year old child. He thought you were playing hide & seek with the ghosts, and if they touch you, you lose.
What you have to do is buy your equipment and catch ghosts until the PKE level gets to 1000. The catching ghost scenes, are much worse than they could be. You DRIVE to the building. That's acceptable, but you can run out of gas. And you run out of gas quickly. The only way to not run out of gas is if you sped up to get to the building, got gas barrels lying in the middle of the road, or to go to the gas station as frequently as possible. If you run out of gas, to ghostbusters push the car to a gas station, and I checked, to fill up a whole tank of gas, it costs around $250. Wow.
So you get to the building and your proton stream (once you turn it on) is a bunch of white diamonds. You have to get ghosts into your stream, hold them over the trap and press the "B" button. But there's a time limit, so if the ghosts go too high or too low, you're screwed! You CANNOT get them unless they come back up before the time runs out, and that rarely happens. One thing that is bad, is the ghosts are yellow, and look like Casper the friendly ghost. No slimers, no nothing. BUT, you don't HAVE to fight ghosts, unless you want enough money to buy things that will get you through the second level.
Then, you get 1000 PKE, go inside the "ZUUL." I'm sure you know what's wrong with the name of the building. Anyway, remember the movie, where the Ghostbusters walk up 22 flights of stairs? Remember how it made cuts so you didn't watch them walk up the stairs? Well, in the game you have to walk up all 22 flights. You can't get hit by ghosts three times, or you restart the whole game from the beginning. But you walk by tapping the "A" button as fast as you can. For this part, just get a turbo controller, some ghost food, and a Game Genie. But even then it's still hard.
Once you get past that, you get the third, and final level. The boss battle against Gozer. Well, statues of Gozer and the Keymaster and the Gatekeeper. They shoot you, you have to shoot them back. If you go down, you see Stay Puff climbing the building. I don't know what that means. He gets closer each time you go down, so maybe it's a time limit? I don't know. Also, at the end Gozer read Ray's mind and became Stay Puff, right? So, how is he climbing the building while you're fighting Gozer? Whatever. Now, you've beaten Gozer, and you get the worst ending screen known to man:
Conglaturation !!!
You have completed a great game.
And Prooved the Justice of our Culture.
Now go and Rest Our Heroes !
Watch the beginning of Ghostbusters Follow- Up by the Angry Video Game Nerd, to go into greater detail of the end screen.
In conclusion, Ghostbusters is okay. No, It's good. When compared to being attacked by a guy made out of grenades doing LSD on steroids with eight chainsaws in each hand!! It's good compared to watching paint dry! Good compared to watching grass grow! Or compared to watching paint dry on growing grass! It's that bad! Well, It's okay until you get to the stairway. It's a good timekiller. Then you get to the stairwell and the game gets worse and worse until the end. They spelled "Congratulations" wrong!! They spelled "Proved" wrong!! They tell you to go and rest their heroes, whoever they are!! They SAY THAT GHOSTBUSTERS FOR THE NES IS "A GREAT GAME!!!!!!"
DO NOT PLAY THIS GAME, UNLESS YOU WANT TO CRY FOR YEARS TO COME (lol, jkjk)!!!!
Here's how I rated it:
10 minus
5 due to gameplay.
5 minus
2 due to stairwell
3 minus
1 due to final fight
2 minus
1 due to end screen
1 plus
1 due to okay first level.
2 minus
0.5 due to bad voice at beginning.
I give it a 1.5.
Don't play it, it's bad.