The Ghostbusters, they’re coming.

I wasn’t planning on posting again till I had some rather involved reviews and critiques to post up, but I decided to make an exception for this particular game. Yes, it’s true, there is a new Ghostbusters game in the works for 2008, and as it’s receiving very little coverage in the gaming media and very few people seem to know about it, I decided to do a little preview…

I didn’t hear of it till about a month ago when I found the video below on one of my friend’s 1up blogs. Apparently, the game has been under development for a while, and has had a couple different prototypes built under a couple different developers.

After doing some digging online, it seems Destructoid reported on this build of the game back in January. These videos suddenly appeared online, with little idea about on where they came from. Apparently, the build originated from a European developer called Zootfly, and it was rumored to be a sort of proposal to publishers to get the game made.

Another clip of footage from the build shows the Ecto-1 (the Ghostbusters car) in action:

There were other videos around at the time of the Destructoid post, but they were taken down by Sony Pictures, and no traces of them seem to be left. The only other related material is this promo image:

While Peter and Winston are back, two new characters are shown wearing helmets and vests which are blatantly military inspired, as are the new machinegun-looking proton pack designs. Between that and the music in the driving footage, someone was obviously trying to make the franchise seem a little more “rough and tough” than the Ghostbusters we’re used to. Fortunately, this tactic seems to have been abandoned in later builds of the game.

I was pretty impressed by the above footage. Granted, what was shown was pretty limited, watching the player abuse the destructible environments got a little old, and the redesigned gear didn’t quite sit well with me, but the atmosphere was excellent, feeling very much like a New York City undergoing a supernatural apocalypse.

Recently, the project was picked up by Vivendi, and a new website has been launched. Dan Akroyd and Harold Ramis are writing the story for the new game, which is supposed to take place after the original movie and introduce new cast members to the Ghostbusters. However, the new trailer they’ve released, which is entirely composed of gameplay footage, only shows scenes taken directly from the movie:

Additionally, 1up has some screenshots which showed up too small to see properly on the official website:

While the new gameplay footage looks good, and very faithful to the movie (no more gatling gun proton packs), I can’t help but worry that the game seems to be retreading old territory too much.

It will probably be a fun novelty to revisit the old movie in videogame form, I tend to think that it would be much cooler to see a completely new story with completely new situations and completely new ghosts to bust. What if the game took place in a GTA-style free-roaming recreation of spooky 80’s New York, where you got calls and drove to different locations around the city, busting different weird new ghosts?

Thinking of the possibilities awakens the imagination of the 4-year-old in me, who wore red-rimmed sunglasses with the lenses popped-out in order to look like Egon, all those years ago.

What direction the game will truly take is unknown. Fortunately, the new Ghostbusters game is the cover story of Game Informer’s December issue, and hopefully we should finally be able to get some concrete info out of it.

~ by Julian Gnam on November 22, 2007.