Remember The Game? #70 - Ghostbusters

Oh Ghostbusters...

I love this damned franchise. Ghostbusters and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were my life as a kid. I had the action figures, movies, cartoons, clothes, books, toys, halloween costumes, and of course, video games. This was one of the games I rented over and over again. Pretty well every time my brother and I convinced our Mom to let us rent games for the weekend, Ghostbusters found it's way into the pile. We refused to admit it wasn't good.

Well, I'm thirty-five now. And it's time to face the music. The horribly repetitive 8-bit music. Ghostbusters on the NES is not a good video game. I'm sorry, Mr. Aykroyd...

(Many people have said that versions of this game on other consoles, such as Atari, Commodore 64 and Master System are a little better. I've never played any of them, so we're sticking to the NES version.)

I actually beat this game for the first time this week, prepping for this podcast. No cheat codes, turbo controllers, nothing. Just a little patience. OK, a lot of patience. The entire game is one boring grind to save money to buy gear to beat a boring level where you do nothing but climb 23 flights of stairs. Then you get one fun boss fight, and then the most infamous end screen in gaming history.

If you just read that and thought, "why the hell would anyone play this??", you get it. We don't know why we played it. But a lot of us did...

I wanted to cover a scary game for Halloween, and seeing as this is a nostalgia podcast, I saw this week as a perfect opportunity to review not only a treasured game from my childhood, but a "scary" game as well. The ghosts won't scare you in this game, but it'll still give you nightmares.

I'm solo this week, and I hope enjoy this trip down memory lane as we look back at the Walter Peck of NES games; Ghostbusters.

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