beat ghostbusters 360. vaguely enjoyable from a gaming perspective(lol), profoundly dissatisfying from any other sort of comedic or creative perspective. aykroyd and ramis have really LOST IT unfortunately. i didn't expect genius comedy, but i would probably say that the dialogue was the low point of the game, although that may be because i had at least moderate expectations for it.
i think what killed it for me was the fact that bill murray was clearly not given any sort of control over the dialogue. bill murray himself is actually not a particularly good actor, and doesn't really react well when it's just him reading other people's words without him injecting his own style into it. not to say he is untalented, but he's definitely more of a BRILLIANT PERFORMER than a GREAT ACTOR. peter cook and a few others have been like this throughout the years, but nobody has really been allowed to do their thing as much as murray has. either way, i think the game would have benefited GREATLY from letting murray record the dialogue FIRST and do whatever the shit he wanted with it before the cinematics and whatnot were made. for my money, it was always murray's humor that made ghostbusters what it was. the rest of the ghostbusters story was neat, and at times pretty clever, but the driving force i think was always the contrast between these serious scientists and the absurd charlatan they let hang around for unexplained reasons. there was no hint of this dynamic, and beyond the fact that it was the same cast and looked a lot like them, it didn't really feel like the ghostbusters.
also i still fucking hate the mute main character element, and this game does it about as worse as any i've played. in this game it felt like enormous fanservice to all the neckbearded idiots who wore their plastic proton packs into an age where most child psychologists would have been more than slightly concerned. i actually stopped playing for a month because i got so fucking sick of ernie hudson shouting GOOD JOB ROOK every time i went three steps without inadvertently killing myself. this gets exceptionally bad in the sections where they let you handle the obstacles, because THEY ALL SAY THAT SHIT IN UNISON. it made an already uncomfortably artificial team dynamic a lot more unconvincing and nauseating. it kinda worked OK when you were just following one of them around, but in a cluster it just felt wrong. definitely would have been a lot happier with the game had they just let you rotate between the existing characters rather than force this new, totally undeveloped character into the mix. the mute main character was useless and obligatory, and killed what little the game had going for it.
that said, it's not a TERRIBLE GAME. it manages to be fairly fun to play at parts, despite being a really chaotic and nonsensical most of the time. i'm actually not quite sure why i kinda enjoyed the gameplay, to be honest, but it more or less worked for me. the different weapon functions and all was surprisingly diverse, and fairly enjoyable to screw around with. the locations were for the most part fresh and stimulating, at times quite spectacular, which was a surprise. i didn't find myself getting bored of the game itself too terribly often, because the game was paced such that something mostly new would happen whenever what you were doing would get old.
oh, and i can't trash the dialogue entirely. max von sydow was oustanding, and everything he said as vigo was pretty funny and inventive. it was the type of wacky shit i would have hoped for from the rest of the game, really, not from the random side shit you can see within the first half hour of the game.
all in all, not so good game, but not terrible. it's probably great if you are a hopeless ghostbusters fanboy, but not so much if you've grown up and have some semblance of dignity. it got a free pass from me because i didn't physically pay for it, but it's not the sort of game you should buy yourself. con one of your idiot friends into buying it and borrow it from them if you're discerning and don't particularly like throwing money away on a game you can finish in a few hours.
i doubt i'll be playing anything else for a while. i reluctantly played through this because my brother wanted his copy back. i've got dead space gathering cobwebs on top of my 360, but i played a little bit of it and grew tired of it quickly. is it worth playing if I already found myself getting bored of it through the first two hours?
in defense of this game, I guess Raimi and Akroyd were only minor script doctors.
These guys..
Flint Dille
Patrick Hegarty
John Melchior
John Zuur Platten
were responsible for most of it.
The original Ghostbusters is definitely in my top 10 (not that I really have a top 10, but if I did, it would be there. My mom introduced it to me very early in my childhood (she had a copy recorded on BETA MAX and the quality was really bad but I watched the hell out of it). I just rewatched it for the first time in years the other day, and was delighted to pick up on quite a few jokes that went over my head as a kid.
I was definitely disappointed with the videogame. The characters were shadows of themselves and there was waaaaay too much repitition of settings and scenes from the movies. It's like they were so desperate to recapture the style of the original movie that they forgot to take the franchise anywhere new or actually write some original shit. Like, seriously, I could've actually done without visiting the Sedgewick, capturing Slimer in the SAME BALLROOM, and then stepping outside to battle Stay Puft. TOO much fanservice, you know?
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