The PSP finally gets its turn at busting ghosts five months after the game was released on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PS2, PC, Nintendo Wii and DS. The PSP version of the game was developed by Red Fly Studio, so it should be relatively similar to the PS2 and Wii versions, sharing the same single-player campaign as the other console iterations.

If I had to hazard a guess as to why it has taken this long for the game to be ported to the PSP, I’d say somebody was waiting for a time when the release of the PSPgo sparked renewed interest in Sony’s handheld. We’ll see how that works out for them.

Because while the individual SKUs of the game may not have performed as well as many would have predicted, the game released on a lot of consoles. Seven, to be exact. 360, PS3, PS2, Wii, DS, PSP and PC. And according to developers Terminal Reality, when those sales are combined the game has sold over a million units.

Add in the fact the game will probably have a long tail, that it’s outsold any other movie tie-in for 2009 and that in PAL territories it’s not out on 360, Wii, DS or PC yet, and thing’s are looking just fine for Ghostbusters, thanks.

When it came to producing a video game that was exciting and captured the spirit of ‘Ghostbusters,’ a Lewisville outfit got the call [Star Telegram]

The Fort Worth Star Telegram fingered the cost of development for the game at $US15 million to $US20 million.

The budget figure ran in a profile of lead Ghostbusters development studio Terminal Reality, which earned the opportunity to make a Ghostbusters game after one of its militiary-shooter prototypes impressed Vivendi Universal in 2006.

Ghostbusters film and game actor and co-writer Dan Aykroyd has also talked about the budget to the press, estimating in a June interview with the magazine If that the game’s publishers spent “like $US12 or $US15 million” to make the game.

Last month, the CEO of Ubisoft said he expected the average video game budget to swell to $US60 million in the next gaming hardware generation.

Vivendi, which merged with Activision, did not publish the game when it was released in June. In the U.S., Atari did. But a representative from the publisher did not respond to a request about these budget figures by press time. Kotaku has also inquired directly with Terminal Reality and will let readers know if they can shed any more light on the cost to make the game.

When it came to producing a video game that was exciting and captured the spirit of ‘Ghostbusters, a Lewisville outfit got the call [Fort Worth Star-Telegram]

The presence of Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, the film’s original writers and two of its leading actors, lent weight to the game as more than just a supernatural shooter involving familiar faux-technology. But we’ve seen impressive star power in movie adaptations before. So is Ghostbusters: The Video Game just a bunch of friends getting the band back together, or are we in for something more, a canonical sequel in its own right?

Loved
Multiplayer: This made me love the game all over again. It’s deep and fun enough to keep you involved with Ghostbusters for well more than, say any rental period. You get instant action or cooperative campaigns – action being one “job” and campaigns being a series of them. Job types range from survival (destroy ghosts) to containment (trap them) to protection (protect a series of positions) and “thief” (a reverse-capture-the-flag, ghosts against you.) The ranking, achievements, and “most wanted” ghosts you encounter provide plenty of incentive to hang in there and pile up your score. The weapon enhancements you accumulate lend a semi-MMO quality to your online career. But mostly, it’s just nonstop ghostbusting action, which is probably what made you reach for the game in the first place. I promised my review copy to a friend, and after finishing my first campaign, mailed it to him and raced back out to buy myself a copy so we could play together. That’s how good the multiplayer is: It’s $US60 impulse-buy good, for someone who had the game for free.

Ghosts in a Ghost Land: Visually, Ghostbusters: The Video Game hits the original movie’s art direction right on the screws. The phantasms carry on the themes of the original films, presenting the spirits as gross caricatures of their emotions and motivations. Not only is their look consistent, so is their behaviour, and their ghostly swooping and darting, heedless of aerodynamics – as it should be. The more warped intersections of our world with the beyond are very impressively rendered; walls and ceilings disintegrate, the rubble drifting away into infinite, swirling backgrounds.

PKE Performance: Quite subtly, this game lets you decide what kind of Ghostbuster you want to be. If you want to blast your way through the game like a paranormal firefighter, go for it. But if you want to investigate a scene before cleaning it up, the PKE Meter is your tool. It exposes collectibles (worth money for upgrades) and scans ghosts, giving you some extra cash and filling up your notebook with some amusing histories. This should appeal to completionists, and very much extends the campaign mode’s lifespan.

Doing damage: Destruction is an art in Ghostbusters, and the proton stream is your medium. Nearly everything in this game is destructible – most of it quite pointlessly, but that was Ghostbusters, wasn’t it? A running dollar-figure arbitrarily totals up, the damage you do in your career. It’s just a score, this has no effect on your in-game funds. Large insurance policies taken out by the city cover all the cleanup, and since this is set 14 years before Hurricane Katrina, you know they’ll pay up. So go ahead and rake those priceless works of art with your slime blower. And after you finish a prolonged bout with all four Ghostbusters wrangling a platoon of spookies in a library basement, be sure to take a look around and admire your tableau of flickering scorch trails and slime puddles. It would make Jackson Pollack proud.

Ghost wrangling: On harder difficulties, the ghosts soar higher, and slamming them into the ground or walls takes greater effort. The venting option, too, is brilliant, forcing a reload-type mechanic on you without violating the infinite-ammo supply of a canonical proton pack. You’ll have to develop your own methodology, when to deploy a capture stream, how to use it, and when to let go and vent the pack. Sometimes it can feel like you’re not connected to anything on the other end. But sitting here writing this I’m still lured in by the whirring sound of the trap and the satisfaction of dragging some struggling ghoul down a flight of stairs, through stacks of books, and into confinement. Every one is a battle in its own right, rarely repetitive. I relished having ghosts to trap, even though they took much more work than those I blasted into infinity.

Dialogue: People speculated this game couldn’t possibly be as funny as the film because Bill Murray’s celebrated ad-libbing, said to be the source of so many quotable lines, isn’t feasible in a mo-capped production. In a way, they’re wrong. At times, the in-game banter substitutes for this ad-libbing, and some of the lines are bona fide howlers. Winston Zeddemore’s obvious, yet subtly stated agitation at having to fight Confederate ghosts cracked me up so bad I had to hit pause. “I wish these traps had windows,” he said, “it’d be like a little Vicksburg snow globe.” Even the little things show you this was not some thrown-together script. In the game’s first sequence, New York is rocked by a pulse of energy, passing through the Ghostbusters headquarters. Everyone staggers. A lesser writer would script out “What the hell was that?” or some other useless exclamation. Here, Harold Ramis calls for Egon to say, deadpan, “Was that us?” Just three words, but they instantly brought me back into the world of the Ghostbusters.

Hated:
Errata: For all of the above, Ghostbusters is not a perfect game. Here’s an omnibus paragraph buttoning up the flaws, none of which on their own are enough to spoil the game but need to be mentioned. Single-player load times are a bitch, especially after repeatedly failing a mission. The single-player campaign upgrades are nice, but you’ll have bought them all by the middle of the game, diminishing the incentive to do extras to earn them. For another reason, I felt a twang of disappointment midway through; the mystery seemed to be building up for an incredibly long experience, and then the story abruptly and conspicuously lurched into its resolution phase. Finally, in parts the game really could have used a map, or at least some way to highlight your next objective. In dimly lit environments it is not always obvious how to overcome the obstacle in front of you.

Ghostbusters: The Video Game is what a film adaptation should be – true to everything that made a movie a hit and a thrill ride in the first place, without shamefully exploiting itself. It’s not the first good game of the season; but in a way you’ll feel like summer has truly begun once you play Ghostbusters, a game that very much honors its blockbuster heritage.

Some might think that a game that brings in the entire core cast (minus one), two of whom are the original writers, should be a success born on third base. If so, why hasn’t it been done until now? Because for everything in the gameplay and set design expected of a AAA title, that’s what puts the shine on this experience. You want to be a Ghostbuster? Strap on the pack, because you are going to run with the real Ghostbusters. “This team plays to win!” Winston said, right before the finale, and I swear I swelled up with pride.

Ghostbusters: The Video Game was developed by Terminal Reality and published by Atari for the PlayStation 3, PC, and Xbox 360. Multiplayer developed by Threewave Software. A substantially different version is available for Wii and PS2, developed by Red Fly; Released on June 16. Retails for $US59.99 PS3 and 360, $US49.99 PC. Played the Xbox 360 version. Completed singleplayer campaign on “casual” difficulty; retested several levels of singleplayer on all difficulties; Played all online multiplayer modes.

Kotaku AU Note: Ghostbusters is published by Sony in Europe and Australia. It will be released for PS3 on June 25. A substantially different version will be available for PS2 on July 2. The Xbox 360, PC and Wii versions will be published by Atari later this year.

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Game blog Lens of Truth put both the PS3 and 360 versions of the game under the their… lens of truth, achieving results that show the PlayStation 3 version appears to be filtered through a fine film of ectoplasmic residue. What does that mean in technical terms? Decreased texture quality, lower resolution and missing shadowing and lighting effects.

The blog’s side-by-side comparison isn’t favourable to the PS3 version, which they point out carries with it a substantial hard drive installation to little perceived benefit.

A similar test was run by Digital Foundry’s Richard Leadbetter, who handles head-to-head console comparisons for Eurogamer. Two of his findings highlighting the quality differences can be seen here and here. He also tweeted earlier this week “At the gutter end of Face-Off 20 with Ghostbusters: The Video Game. It’s like time-warping back to the dawn of PS3 development.” We’ll assume that’s a reference to previous quality differences between Xbox 360 games and their PlayStation 3 counterparts.

We’ve contacted Atari, its third-party PR firm and Ghostbusters developers Terminal Reality but have yet (checks again) to receive a response to our inquiries about the differences.

Head2Head: Ghostbusters [Lens of Truth]

That’s right. According to Destructoid, Atari has set free Ghostbusters: The Video Game from its region-specific encoding, which would allow our friends across the Atlantic a chance to play the game on the console of their choice. Well, as long as your console of choice is either an Xbox 360 or starts with the word PlayStation.

Good move.

Xbox 360 version of Ghostbusters not region locked [Destructoid]

Humour is hard in games. So, as excited as the Giant Bomb podcast hosts sound about the new Ghostbusters game — and they do spent several minutes talking about how much fun they’re having with a build of it — they are resigned to it not being as funny as the movie that spawned it.

Here’s their key exchange, at 51 minutes, 40 seconds of this week’s episode:

Ryan Davis: I think the issue is… the thing about Ghostbusters is the source material is so funny. And doing humour in games is really hard, especially when you have something that people like me revere so much. Trying to make something that is going to hit those same levels is next to impossible, particularly in a video game. Particularly when it’s like 25 years after the movie came out.

Jeff Gerstmann: Especially when it’s something like an action game, not the most story-heavy genre in the world.

Davis: I think the voices are ok. It’s just the things they’re saying aren’t as funny.

Vinny Caravella: The humour in Ghostbusters… it’s in the writing but it’s also in the characters who are delivering it. It’s pretty subtle. There’s good facial expressions. And turns and winks and nods.

Davis: Yeah, and you don’t get any of that with the CG model versions. Everyone has very cartoonish expressions. I’m playing the Xbox 360 version… The Wii version will be much more stylised… but the 360 version they look a lot more realistically proportioned but their animations are still over-the-top. That stuff just looks weird.

Ghostbusters is out this June on all major platforms.

05-19-2009 Giant Bombcast

There’s a great deal of stream crossing going on in this multiplayer trailer for Atari’s upcoming Ghostbusters: The Video Game.

And it isn’t just proton streams being crossed either. The developers have lined up a bevy of backpack-centric weapons for the Ghostbusting team to bust out in multiplayer, including a thin green ray and a… blue ray. Bout time they upgraded to blue ray, isn’t it?

It certainly looks like fun though. I just worry about the “Play as Your favourite Ghostbuster” bit. I never imagined I would one day consider fighting over getting to be Peter Venkman, but now it seems inevitable.

Atari’s being very clear about this with the game’s box art. The Wii, PlayStation 2 and Nintendo DS versions get the caricature version seen on the left, while the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC versions get the more photo realistic version on the right. The aesthetic even applies to the game’s cover specters, with slightly less menacing ghosts featured on the lower-definition, E-10+ rated version.

Not totally unexpected, but a rare instance of a publisher being so forthcoming about the platform differences on the box art.

Normally, the ESRB is a great resource for leaked information, such as the unannounced PSP version of Atari’s Ghostbusters: The Videogame it rated the other day. Sometimes it’s not such a great resource.

Case in point: Atari has denied that Ghostbusters: The Videogame is actually coming to the PSP and the Entertainment Software Ratings Board has since pulled the platform from its rating of the game. Atari reps tell Eurogamer that a PSP port of the ghostbustin’ game is “not true.”

You shouldn’t be left wanting for platforms to play it on, though. It’s coming to every other platform under the sun. Just not the PSP, says Atari.

Ghostbusters not coming to PSP – Atari [Eurogamer]