It's Slime Time! Ghostbusters II on the Game Boy

I remember when I first saw screenshots of Ghostbusters II for the Game Boy in Nintendo Power. I stared at those small pictures and thought of how cool it looked, the chibi forms of the Ghostbusters made them recognizable, and the two-buster method of one person zapping, the other trapping made a good deal more sense than the NES’ attempt of simply shooting ghosts with the slime blower until they disappeared. I was hardcore into anything Ghostbusters or TMNT related (and very little about that has changed to this day). So I’m not sure why this game passed me by as a kid. It wasn’t until much later, when I was working at GameStop, that I saw a copy of the game get traded in and thought I’d better pick it up and give it a try.

I played it a little here and there, but it’s pretty easy to lose your lives quickly, and I never got very far or had any serious attempt made to get through it. So when Yokoi Kids made it their game of the month for October, I figured this was the perfect opportunity to really play it.

First off, the game is cute. The character designs of everybody are great, and it’s easy to tell Ray, Peter, Egon, Winston, and Louis apart from the detail in their small sprites. You pick two busters, and I don’t think there’s any difference in how they play at all. You’ll control one buster while another follows behind you. The A button has your main buster fire their proton beam to stun a ghost, then while you’re zapping him, pressing the B button will have the secondary buster throw out a ghost trap to capture them. It translates the iconic Ghostbusters method of fighting ghosts well to the world of video games. Each stage has a number in the bottom right corner, which tells you how many ghosts are lurking in the area that you need to capture. Once you catch them all with the above method, the stage is won and you move to the next one.

There’s a little variety to how you have to go about catching ghosts as some of them have unique ways of moving or attacking that you have to be aware of if you don’t want to get hit. Some of them may come directly at you after appearing, others may be invincible during certain actions like spinning around the room, making you dodge and wait for them to leave themselves open. Along the way you’ll sometimes see other busters in the stage. Walk up to them and you’ll get an extra life, or some powerups like the slime blower which instantly kills ghosts for a limited time. One of the weirdest powerups I received though, was from Louis. For a short time I could walk through walls or anything scattered around the room. It was extremely hand for the short time it functioned, and as far as I know it was only available once in the entire game!

The game isn’t very long, I think there were only three bosses. The Scoleri Brothers, a ghost train, and then Janosz and Vigo. But I still had to rely on save states, because it is extremely easy to lose lives, and that leads me to some major frustrations in this game. You and your buster companion can’t walk through each other, and a lot of this game’s level design revolves around narrow corridors, hallways, and rooms with clutter thrown everywhere. A lot of the time I’ll zap a ghost, but the computer-controlled buster behind me couldn’t get close enough to catch the ghost with the trap. This happened constantly. The other buster also has terrible pathfinding skills, so sometimes they would try to follow me only to get snagged on a desk or chair or something, and I’d have to backtrack to guide them to me. All the while ghosts may be appearing and coming at you, or your computer-controlled buddy, which is a big problem because your AI-partner can be hit and killed! You and your partner each have a separate stock of lives, but if either of you lose all of them it’s game over. And everything is one-hit kill. I was super surprised to see them allow a character that I’m not controlling to be damaged by enemies! So many times my partner would get stuck behind a desk only to have a ghost come up behind them and take them down.

What makes this whole thing a bit more confusing is I’ve played the NES game New Ghostbusters II, which, like this game, is by HAL. That game plays similar to this one but with all these annoying problems seemingly solved. Your partner buster in the NES game can’t be hurt, which instantly fixes a lot of the problems this one has. The NES game also has much more screen real estate, so the levels don’t have the same claustrophobic hallway feel that the Game Boy game does. I really like the look of the Ghostbusters in the Game Boy and NES games, but I wonder if they shouldn’t have made the characters a bit smaller so they could zoom out a bit and give you more room to move.

One kind of weird mechanic has to do with the level timer. When the timer reaches zero, you’re still free to finish the level, but all ghosts will have turned into Ghostbusters logo icons. The icons have their own unique movement pattern. The weird thing is, with some ghosts it’s much easier to catch them after they’ve turned into the logo! The logo just kind of drifts around the level randomly, which can be much easier than say the spinning girl who can’t be hurt while she’s spinning around the room.

All those issues aside, I did enjoy this game, and I really feel that if I had bought it back when I was drooling over those magazine screenshots in my childhood, I would have kept at it and made it to the big Vigo showdown. It has a lot of charm and a fun ghostbusting mechanic. It's hard not to compare it to New Ghostbusters II on the NES/Famicom though. I’m really glad that Yokoi Kids made this their October game, it finally got me to play all the way through it, and it’s definitely worth your time to check it out!