Post for: #Ghostbusters ^{(10 Posts)}

One thing a lot of fans and critics have said about Ghostbusters Frozen Empire is that it has too many characters with too little focus on each, and too many plotlines for one movie. There have been interviews with the director where it's been said they looked towards The Real Ghostbusters cartoon on how they wanted this movie to feel, but I think they should have made it feel like only ONE episode of Real Ghostbusters. This movie has so much crammed into it that I feel they could have taken any number of scenes and plots from this movie and made it into its own sequel. Spoiler warning for those that haven't seen the new movie yet!

Take the possessor ghost, for instance. In its normal form, the possessor ghost looks kind of like a red orb. But it's constantly possessing things and making them move around. It possesses the lion statue outside the New York Public Library, as well as the Ecto-1 and even a proton pack briefly. This felt very close to an episode of The Real Ghostbusters from season 3, The Copycat. Instead of possessing items, this ghost can copy anything it sees, such as a lamp, a dog, or even one of the ghostbusters! A ghost like the possessor getting free and being able to control anything it touches could have been a pretty solid story for an hour and a half adventure. It could even have possessed the Ecto-1 and proton packs at key moments to make the ghostbusters cause some real damage and take the blame for its mischief!

I thought it might be fun to talk a bit more about games that I'm playing as I'm playing them. After all, I think I play more games than I realize, and it seems my memory is such that if I played something a week ago, it might as well have been ten years, I'll just forget. Also, sometimes I'll look back and think that it would have been nice to talk about things as I was playing them, and see what I was thinking then. If you go back far enough in this blog, back when it was hosted on a different service, you can see that I put up a blog post on the day of the Wii launch. But I thought I would be cheeky and not talk at all about my thoughts on the Wii, or Wii Sports, or The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. No, instead I wrote up a post on Sneak King, the Burger King stealth title for Xbox 360, which launched on the very day of the Wii release. That was fun and all, but maybe I should have talked about how awesome Wii Sports was! Or heck, talked about the launch, since I was working at GameStop at the time!

Just in time for Halloween, let's look at five of my favorite episodes of The Real Ghostbusters!

Collect Call of Cathulhu

While the other episodes on this list are favorites from my childhood, this is one that I only have the vaguest recollection of as a kid, but now, as an adult and a lover of H.P. Lovecraft's writing, this is a real standout episode. The Necronomicon is being loaned to the New York Public Library from Arkham University, and is stolen by Cathulhu worshipers. It's later revealed by Egon and Ray that Cathulhu is one of several 'ancient ones' that writers like H.P. Lovecraft used as the basis for their stories. This episode is a real treat for Lovecraft fans by bringing in several elements of the Cthulhu mythos, and simply saying they were real elements that Lovecraft simply weaved into his stories. We get some great creepy character designs of the [find what they were], and a pretty great looking Cathulhu himself in the end. This is a really well-written episode that is fast paced and packed with action, intrigue and comedy.

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.

Long ago, Illfonic made a game based on the Friday the 13th series, turning it into an asynchronous online multiplayer game. It clearly had a love of passion and love for the franchise put in to the game, and although it was riddled with bugs and glitches, it was still a pretty fun game. Now, Illfonic has made a game based on the Ghostbusters series, turning it into an asynchronous multiplayer game, and while the game is littered with glitches and bugs, the passion for the license shines through and it's still a pretty fun game.

I've played with game makers in the past, but really haven't done anything beyond the tutorials offered. I've been using a new program called Construct 2, which makes your game in HTML 5 and it's pretty easy to use. I had a good time making this admittedly pretty bad game, and that's what really counts. Basically I made a little Ghostbusters rip off, where you control the proton gun on the bottom of the screen.