I've talked a couple times on this blog about how the various Game Boy machines occasionally received great licensed games because developers had to do something different to get around the hardware limitations.
The Wii often received far shorter shrift, often lumbered with a low res PS2 port with some tacked on waggling to really hammer home how much of an afterthought Nintendo's machine was.
When Red Fly was given the task of porting Ghostbusters to the Will, however, they did not follow this path. This was a rare time when the Wii received a bespoke version of a widely released title… but was it worth the effort?
(Before I carry on - a quick lament for ‘Dogfight 1942’; the game that Selectron™ originally picked for me today but, when I discovered it didn't have flight stick support, I immediately uninstalled and deleted it from my spreadsheet. A slightly different way to decrease the backlog, but I guess it works.)
Ghostbusters is one of the earliest games I remember playing. In 1984 I had neither seen the film or really knew anything about it. But I had the game for the ZX Spectrum and rather enjoyed playing as those little stick-man paranormal investigators. The ‘Bank Account Number’ it gave you after finishing the game that enabled you to carry profits into your next play-through was pretty unique at the time, and added a bit of longevity to a pretty simplistic game.
Obviously by 2009 we had moved beyond such naive pleasures, and the 360 and PS3 version of this game endeavoured to put players into the most realistic shoes of a trainee Ghostbuster possible.
For Nintendo, however, developer Red Fly Studios (now sadly defunct) had shown a sure hand on the Wii with the underappreciated ‘Mushroom Men: The Spore Wars’ and took to this game in a very console-appropriate fashion.
Straight away the ‘realistic’ depictions of the cast from the PS3/360 version were replaced with caricatures, and all the environments were recreated in a cartoonish style.
Another Wii specific change was the ability to choose a female Ghostbuster, which tells you something about how far games have come in ten years.
Typically for Wii games at this time, additional motion controls were a must, and in a rare success, the implementation of them in Ghostbusters is a fantastic addition to the gameplay.
In an approach taken by far too few Wii developers the ‘look’ function, usually assigned to a right analogue stick, is taken care of with the Wiimote’s IR pointer: Move it towards the edge of the screen and your character will look in that direction.
The pointer also controls aim for your proton pack. When trying to catch a ghost you first wear the spectre down with constant fire and then slam it around with a little motion-QTE. These are mercifully brief and actually quite fun. The final act is a quick bowling motion with the nun-chuck to send out a trap that you then have to move the ghost into.
All this works really rather well; the feedback in what you see on screen relates perfectly to the motion controls, and it quickly feels very natural. It would take a pretty joyless player to insist that these controls were ‘pointless waggling’. The IR pointer in particular is an excellent way to control your proton beam and all the other motion controls only serve to embellish that further.
Apparently the script used in all versions of the game is the same, but the Wii version features some extra diversity in gameplay that lead certain publications at the time to claim this was the best version of the game.
Unfortunately I haven’t played the PS3/360 version in either it’s original or remastered form, so I don’t know if the issues in the Wii version are unique or shared on all systems.
I was personally a little disappointed that the 3 of first 4 ghosts, and both of the first two locations are lifted directly from the 1986 movie. The pitch is that this game is supposed to essentially be ‘Ghostbusters III’ so the reliance on these story beats feels like a deliberately nostalgic cop out.
But the biggest issue here is the pacing.
Despite being broken up into short 10 minute missions the game plays very slowly. The basic makeup of most levels involves tracking, and then trapping at least one ghost. Often the tracking, which involves checking your PKE antenna and goggles regularly, takes a long time and is basically walking - and then during the ‘trapping’ phase, the section where you shoot at the ghost to tire it, often outstays its welcome. There are also some peculiar delivery issues with the script that are not helped by some very odd musical cues.
Ghostbusters on the Wii does some brilliant things, and as an example of how the console’s motion controls could be implemented in an intuitive way it’s almost peerless.
Unfortunately the problems with pacing and polishing are just a bit too off-putting, and left me a little frustrated that I had to endure them to get to the fun parts.
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