One of the first games that I played until it was way past bedtime.
Ghostbusters
In 1984 Activision released their adaptation of the classic movie Ghostbusters. I was 12 and remember after seeing the movie wanting the game more than George Michael's Careless Whisper which, in hindsight, was quite a sensible choice. Ghostbusters 1984 game The ghost of pixels past As Ray Parker Junior says "I ain't ' …
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Wednesday 29th August 2012 10:31 GMT FartingHippo
Re: Had the C64 version...
"And it talked"
Ahem. The Spectrum version talked too. Kind of. If you heard a chap say "he slimed me" with a mouth full of porridge and hula-hoops in another room, you'd get the idea. Still, clever stuff from a single sound channel which could emit only beeps.
Halcyon days, rose spectacles, etc, etc. Man, I miss Trans Am.
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Wednesday 29th August 2012 18:38 GMT Ilgaz
Re: Had the C64 version...
It must be hard for anyone who didn't born in 70s to understand the amazing thing. It talked.
Man, poor other 8 bit computer users, it was a shocking upperhand came from nowhere. "my Atari has 256 colors", "my game talks". Instant mute.
Also,c64 tape loading (thanks to turbo code) was light speed compared to Atari, spectrum etc. Weak machine on specifications, better developers...
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Wednesday 29th August 2012 08:01 GMT Andee
That's right; I had it on the Amstrad, and I always assumed that getting past Stay Puft was the climactic battle, and then when I played it on my friend's Master System, I was shocked to see that there was still more to do!
And who could forget the classic NES version's "ending sequence":
CONGLATURATION !!!
YOU HAVE COMPLETED A GREAT GAME.
AND PROOVED THE JUSTICE OF OUR CULTURE.
NOW GO AND REST OUR HEROES !
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Wednesday 29th August 2012 07:36 GMT Anonymous Coward
Press Space on Intro
Had the C64 version
The Intro was a SID version of the Ghostbusters theme, with kareoke lyrics! Pressing Space on got it to say "Ghostbusters!"
I never did finish it, though I tended to buy the VW Beetle instead of the ambulance/hearse.
I recall getting to a ghost scene was a bit of a top down racing game where you had to catch ghosts.
And if you failed to catch a ghost, another bit of speech - "He slimed me!" revolutionary at the time!
One of the best film-to-game conversions until Goldeneye!
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Wednesday 29th August 2012 09:36 GMT gw0udm
ZX Spectrum
This article relates to the Spectrum version of the game. The endgame on this platform did indeed consist merely of trying to get past Stay-Puft and that was it. I did download a snapshot of the end sequence once as although I did reach it once I didn't get past it. It was very disappointing... just a brief message.
I believe that other 8-bit platforms had a longer and more elaborate ending... but I've never seen those either
As always the best thing (especially the 128k version) was the music!
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Wednesday 29th August 2012 11:14 GMT juice
Toasted marshmellow
It's worth bearing in mind that the original Ghostbusters game (for the C64) was rushed out in 6 weeks [*] - not quite as bad as the infamously short dev time for Atari's ET game, but still pretty bad.
Even so, it was surprisingly fun to play, though the gameplay was somewhat unbalanced - the driving/ghost-hoovering element quickly became repetitive and once you'd earned enough cash, you just had to sit and wait for the EP levels to reach maximum and trigger the end-game: you couldn't even go back to the shop to upgrade your equipment.
(though for Spectrum gamers (and possibly others - I haven't checked), there was a glitch/easter egg which could save you some cash during the initial game: entering "0" as the car-type gave you a solid black rectangle which was cheaper than the rest of the options!)
It's also worth noting that a nice person produced a remake of the Ghostbusters game - http://www.classic-retro-games.com/GhostBusters_193.html
Unfortunately, they then suffered a HDD failure and lost all of the source-code, which killed dead any chance of further updates and improvements...
[*] Wikipedia claims 8 months; David Crane states six weeks - http://www.edge-online.com/features/making-ghostbusters . Take yer pick ;)
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Wednesday 29th August 2012 14:01 GMT IR
Re: Toasted marshmellow
"(though for Spectrum gamers (and possibly others - I haven't checked), there was a glitch/easter egg which could save you some cash during the initial game: entering "0" as the car-type gave you a solid black rectangle which was cheaper than the rest of the options!)"
The problem with that was that you couldn't suck up any ghosts!
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Wednesday 29th August 2012 18:12 GMT Gerhard den Hollander
Re: Toasted marshmellow
but what you could do was at the end of the game get a magic string (forgot if it was just a string or a username/passwd combo), and if you typed that magic string at startup of a new game, you did not start with $10K, but with the amount of money you ended the previous game with.
And then you could buy the hearse and all the other goodies, and earn more money and .....
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Wednesday 29th August 2012 13:51 GMT Si 1
Re: Just when you thought it was safe to make a cup of tea....
Yes, just what I was going to say! I remember Invade-a-load popping up the first time the game was loading and thinking it was an utterly brilliant way to deal with the long load times. Anyone know if it was C64 only or if the Speccy version had it too?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqCR6xnv1kE
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Thursday 30th August 2012 02:00 GMT ThomH
Re: Just when you thought it was safe to make a cup of tea....
It won't have been on the Spectrum; the C64 had specialised tape hardware that generated interrupts to signify incoming data. So the CPU sat there mostly idle, waiting to be alerted to input. The Spectrum essentially just had a 1-bit analogue-to-digial converter, so to load data the CPU ran a continuous polling loop, incrementing internal counters for timing. So if you want to spend CPU time on anything other than just watching the tape, you have to engineer suitable opportunities into your data stream, which means lowering the loading speed. So Spectrum games usually just left a static screen up and almost never went beyond a ticking counter. You could do a full game but then you'd need to ensure incoming tape data was really very slow indeed.
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Thursday 30th August 2012 05:15 GMT Steven Roper
Fond memories
I bought the C64 version of Ghostbusters from a local department store, and I remember it as my first crack. A friend had shown me how to use the Hesmon assembler cartridge (this was before the days of Datel's Action Replay and push-button cracking!) to step through a game's code and track down the part that checked for errors on the disk - this was inevitably a copy-protection scheme (DRM on the C64 mainly consisted of deliberately writing errors on the disk and then checking for them, since an error wouldn't be copied by most disk copiers of the day.) He'd walked me through cracking Beach Head, but Ghostbusters was my first solo crack.
I still remember dancing with excitement around my bedroom after finally locating the disk-error-check code and replacing it all with NOP instructions, saving out the memory along with the auto-start pointer, and cheekily replacing the "Copyright 1984 Activision" message with a cracked-by notice, saving it all out to disk, and getting it working.
Especially considering the error-based copy-protection hammered the 1541 disk drive head out of alignment (but since when did DRM fucks ever give a shit about making your life hard or destroying your equipment if it means saving their precious intellectual property?) it meant that I would crack every game I bought thereafter, not only for the thrill but also to save my disk drive!
Fun times indeed...
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