Pixelated Proton Packs: A Look at Fan-Created Ghostbusters Games

Ghostbusters games have been really hit or miss over the years. Sure, fans have gotten Ghostbusters: The Video Game, which was essentially a Ghostbusters 3 long before Ghostbusters Afterlife. But we've also had The Real Ghostbusters on Game Boy, which had so little to do with the license that it was actually just a Mickey Mouse puzzle platformer that they changed the character art in.

So, I thought it would be fun to take a look at a few Ghostbusters games that fans have either taken it upon themselves to make entirely from scratch or tweaked other existing Ghostbusters games to improve them in some way.

I've been wanting to write a blog post about Game Center CX for a while now. After all, it's one of my favorite shows of all-time, and something I still look forward to whenever a new fansubbed episode is dropped. But I get overwhelmed, because the show is so big. It's been going on in Japan for 20 years now! And I'm pretty sure that I've been watching it for almost as long! If I had to guess, I believe the first fansubs started popping up around 2007 by a group called TV-Nihon.

The Game Boy Camera was a super underpowered camera add-on to the Game Boy that released in the late 90s. Even when the peripheral was new, the camera tech in it was very outdated, with all your pictures coming out in very low quality black and white pixelated images. And yet it was still awesome to play around with. The limitations also gave the photos a unique look to them, and you'll still find people playing around with Game Boy Cameras today.

I'm always on the lookout for an interesting new rom hack of a Super Mario title. Some of them give you new levels with some graphical changes and it makes it feel like you found some DLC for a classic game, while others make big changes like new powerups and abilities that make it seem like this could almost pass for a sequel that just never got released. Celeste Mario's Zap & Dash! is another category, in which so much as been changed that it's not even a sequel to Mario 1, it's an entirely different game!

Well man, McDonald's marketing really seemed to work this time, didn't it? I wrote about that Grimace's Birthday Game Boy Color game, and so did a whole lot of others! Seems everyone was talking about Grimace in some form or another for weeks! So it didn't take long for me to get the craving for my own taste of just what Grimace's birthday meal was.

In a word? Underwhelming! I feel like if they are going to go all out in this way, they could have jazzed up the meal just a bit! First of all, I will say I didn't really know what to expect. I knew there was a meal, and that it came with a Grimace purple shake (like the ones I collected in that fun video game!), but that was really it. Initial impressions were pretty good. The meal came in a special bag and so did the Big Mac, with a Grimace's Birthday logo on it and some fun confetti imagery printed around it. How celebratory!

About a month ago I was introduced to the YouTube channel of Hungry Goriya, and I honestly don't know how I hadn't heard of them before (proof that the YouTube algorithm must be awful)! They had a video called 9 NES Favorites (So far), and the way she spoke of these games made me want to really try them for myself. Not try as in fire up the emulator and play for a few minutes and put them away kind of try, but really sit down and try to learn these games. Two of them on the list I had finished already, Kid Icarus and Darkwing Duck, and I'd only played a few of the others.