(Yeah, this is a day late. Sorreh. Was having site issues most of yesterday and then had to work all day. Anyways, let’s cut to the chase:)

You’d think that a repetitive game with even more repetitive music (the Ghostbusters theme song on loop) wouldn’t be very exciting, but then, you’ve probably never played Ghostbusters.

And honestly, if you’ve never heard the theme song belted out in glorious SID, then you’re missing out on some Serious Awesomeality. (Awesomeality is now a word.)

And you gotta admit: getting those voices to come out of a Commodore 64 is impressive.

So let’s talk about the gameplay. You start out by building your own ghostbusting car pretty much from scratch– if you’ve beaten the game enough times you have enough virtual dough to get shinier cars, giving this game a very early form of replay value– and then you are plunked onto a map of the city:

Where your new goal is to drive around to the blinking buildings and trap ghosts. (Don’t cross the streams!) Every so often your ghost traps fill up and you have to go back to Headquarters to clear ’em out, but other than that… it’s blinking buildings for you, buddy.

This is basically how the game goes for quite some time. It starts out fairly tame, but gets more difficult as time goes on and you have to juggle more and more blinking buildings. Things REALLY get exciting when the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man decides to stomp all over everything. He can be stopped if you’re really quick– like, “jam the correct key on your keyboard within a half second when you realize what’s going on” quick– and this is enough to set you on MASSIVE TWITCH MODE for the entire second half of the game because the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man could show up ANY SECOND NOW.

The game gets more and more fastpaced and frenzied as a key and lock start chasing each other around the map. Eventually they get to Zuul, and you have to run your guys to safety underneath the bouncing Marshmallow Man. Have fun with this, because the hit detection is basically random and if you don’t get at least two of three guys through then you go directly to Game Over, do not pass Go, do not collect $200.

I always died at that part, by the way.

Stupid Marshmallow Man.

PIKE’S VERDICT: Classic Commodore 64 gaming. Good times. <3 P.S. "HE SLIMED ME!"