Ghostbusters: The Video Game (2009)

After letting the days settle back in and getting to play some old games that I got for Christmas, I do have to say that if one is a fan of the Ghostbusters, get Ghostbusters: The Video Game. Preferably on the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, as it is the "Realistic" version of the game while the Wii and PlayStation 2 have a rather cartoony look about them that I think looks so unlike the Ghostbusters I'd rather have played the same game with the Real Ghostbusters cartoon versions.

This is going to be a breakdown between the "Realistic" version and the "Stylistic" version of Ghostbusters: The Video Game. And for more preface, I'm comparing the Xbox 360's Realistic version and the PlayStation 2's Stylistic version of the game.

Overall Pros for both versions
- Voice acting. It has all the old team back (sans Rick Moranis): Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Raimis, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts, and William Atherton.
- The Story. It connects the movies together pretty well, with cameos from Vigo, nods towards Gozer, and the return of some old ghosts as well as new ones.

Overall Cons
- Repetition. The only area that this doesn't come to fruition is on the PlayStation 2/Wii versions. Otherwise, it just feels like the same exact thing over and over again with different maps...


Realistic's Pros
- Feels like you're more in control over things such as PKE Meter scans and actually using the Proton Stream.
- It actually looks like the team from the late 80s, early 90s era (namely before Harold Raimis gained a few pounds and grew a beard).
- Xbox Live/PlayStation Network. You can play with other people in a special multiplayer mode. As well as getting to choose your Ghostbuster.
- Seems like you're actually following the rules from the movies. Namely not looking directly into the traps, wrangling the ghosts into the trap, and even the little light and smoke effects the traps make after a successful trap.

Realistic Cons
- Sometimes the animation looks a little off. I can't really explain it, but at times the animation for the speaking and facial expressions of the characters seems a bit strange.
- The Ghostbusters seem to go down a lot more than you'd expect for paranormal investigators and eliminators that have had about 10 or so years of practice under their belt.
- The auto save system seems to skip cut scenes if you quit after completing a mission.

Stylistic Pros
- Unlockables. If my reading of the code book is correct, once you get 100 percent you can unlock a never-overheat proton pack, and once you finish the game on the hardest difficulty, you can get invincibility, basically.

Stylistic Cons
- The cartoony look. It just doesn't sit right with me for some reason.
- Controls. It seems like they took the Wii's control scheme and decided to make it universal for both the Wii and the PS2. Moving things out of your path seem to
- Lack of control over things. Namely the ghost trapping. You can't do any of the things you can do in the realistic version, namely "Slam Dunking" the ghosts into the traps, wrangling them in and keeping them in the trap's range, and it just seems anticlimactic when you put a ghost into the trap in this version.



If you haven't figured it out by now, I'm severely biased towards the more advanced console versions.

Up and coming reviews

Okay, in no particular order, I'm going to review these things in the near future:

Movies
- Alone in the Dark
- Street Fighter
- Dragonball Evolution
- G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
- The Blues Brothers
- Quarantine

TV Shows/Anime
- Nerima Daikon Brothers (three reviews on each respective volumes)
- Dead Leaves
- FLCL
- Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie

Video Games
- Street Fighter IV
- Left 4 Dead (with Crash Course)
- Left 4 Dead 2 (with The Passing)
- Resident Evil 5
- Pokemon Soul Silver
- Dragon Age Origins

Comic Books
- Overall view of Blackest Night (individual reviews on main series, Green Lantern Corps, Adventure Comics, & individual heroes like Green Lantern, Batman, & The Flash)
- Brightest Day #0
- Ultimate Spider-Man

Discussions
- Why I'm looking forward to Pokemon Black & White
- My thoughts on the vampire craze
- Why I think Ryu's moveset is the best moveset in the history of gaming

Finally, a secret set of reviews will arrive, one in the summer, another set in October, and one hopefully soon.

Updates and conventions

First off, the update: School. School, school, school, school, school. That is all that has been happening. I'm that lame.

Second, there is a 70 percent chance that I will make it to Anime Detour this year, hopefully being one of the 400 that can get a pass at the door. Second, I'm going to go to SpringCon and see if I can scout out any comics that I might know of or see a writer/inker/artist that I might have a chance to get an autograph from.

Oh, and since this is a review blog, I'm going to go and review three relatively old modern games sometime soon: Resident Evil 5, Street Fighter IV, and the two Left 4 Dead games.

On Comic Books

I read a lot of comic books. I make trips up to the Source Comics & Games to see the newest releases. And I've read a lot of good comics and a lot of bad comics. Here is my thoughts on three Marvel storylines and three DC storylines. And as a further note, I love both Marvel and DC, but they both have had their fair share of terrible crossover events.

Marvel Comics
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1. Marvel Zombies. The series that got me back into the Marvel Comic books (and introduced me to the Army of Darkness comics). And oh dear God how the mighty have fallen. 1, 2, Dead Days, and vs. Army of Darkness were the superior volumes, and 3 was incredible (Machine Man is now my favorite Marvel Character). 4 was meh, but it served its purpose, and that was to finish the Marvel Zombies 3 storyline (and bring back Garth the Zombie into the story. That was cool.).

Marvel Zombies Return. I consider this the "One More Day" of the Marvel Zombies comics. For one: all the original zombies, despite losing their hunger completely at the end of Marvel Zombies 2, have gained their hunger back and go on a rampage for a bit. And speaking of One More Day...

2. One More Day. I get that they wanted to revamp the Spider-Man mythos for a newer generation. BUT GODFUCKINGDAMNITSONOFABITCHCUNTFUCKERS!!!! Why sacrifice your marriage that could last for several years over your goddamn aunt that has been around since the original Spider-Man stories? Not to mention your aunt being shot was your own goddamn fault because you gave away your secret identity in front of the whole world! Furthermore, she was old, so she was going to die of old age eventually (unless during one of the many crossover events with DC, Aunt May fell into a Lazarus Pit or something).

And as Linkara so aptly put it: Spider-Man makes a deal with the devil.

3. Dark Reign. Giving the former Green Goblin a place of power, giving him complete control of a team of former supervillains, making Tony Stark into the most hated person in the Marvel Universe, and the overall lameness of the story.

DC Comics
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1. Amazons Attack. Terrible crossover event that serves as a prelude to another terrible crossover event (Countdown) that was another prelude to the crossover (Final Crisis) that only had one memorable event. That's it.

2. Final Crisis. Nothing "Final" about it (unless you count Bruce Wayne, which is where he dies). I tried to read it in the hardcover collector's edition and I honestly got lost in the story and I found myself turning back a few pages in order to try to find out what the fuck happened. And honestly, I found myself being bored with it. Batman's death was rather anticlimactic. Wonder Woman's transformation into an agent of Darkseid was rather stupid.

3. Blackest Night. The sole crossover event that made me love DC Comics again. Unlike their earlier crossovers (and unlike Dark Reign), it has an awesome premise: Black Lantern rings come down to Earth, ressurrect the dead, and the still-living are trying to find out why. I won't give away too much spoilers because it's still ongoing (nearing it's end), but it had the overall awesomeness of these events:
- The death and resurrection of Kyle Rayner
- The return of Parallax
- Black Lantern Batman
- The most twisted death scene I've ever seen (The death of Gehenna)
- The Blackest Night falls from the skies. The darkness grows as all light dies. We crave your hearts and your demise. By my Black Hand, the dead shall rise! (Coolest Lantern oath ever)
- The rings that came with various comics.
- Red Lantern Guy Gardner
- Mogo gets into the fray. The Green Lantern planet gets into the fray.

Basically, I love Blackest Night. Dark Reign can go and suck it. I'm looking forward to the end of Blackest Night and the setup for Brightest Day.

The Best Video Games I've Played: Nintendo Edition

I've always been a Nintendo child. With an NES, born and raised, with Mario is where I spent most of my days. (Had to do it... sorry) Okay, I think it was a Game Boy... I don't remember. As the years went by, as systems broke and gave out and I upgraded, I stayed a Nintendo child at heart. So here are some lists for the best Nintendo games I've played.

Here are my top 10 games for the Nintendo Entertainment System:
1. Super Mario Bros. 3
2. The Legend of Zelda
3. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
4. Baseball
5. Batman
6. Super Mario Bros.
7. Duck Hunt
8. Ghostbusters (I enjoy this game, actually)
9. 1942
10. Double Dragon II

My top 10 Nintendo Game Boy games:
1. Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins
2. Pokemon Red/Blue/Yellow
3. Animaniacs
4. Pokemon Gold/Silver
5. Donkey Kong
6. Tetris
7. Centipede/Millipede
8. Super Mario Land
9. Dr. Mario
10. Kirby's Block Ball

My top 10 Nintendo GameCube games:
1. Sonic Adventure 2: Battle
2. Luigi's Mansion
3. Sonic Heroes
4. Super Mario Sunshine
5. Yu-Gi-Oh! The Falsebound Kingdom
6. Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee
7. Medal of Honor: Rising Sun
8. Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex
9. Sonic Adventure DX: Director's Cut
10. Pokemon Colosseum

My top 10 Nintendo Game Boy Advance games:
1. Pokemon FireRed/LeafGreen
2. DragonBall Z: The Legacy of Goku II
3. Sonic Battle
4. Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald
5. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past/Four Swords
6. Super Mario World/Mario Bros. Arcade
7. Crash Bandicoot: The Huge Adventure
8. Crash Bandicoot 2: N-Tranced
9. Frogger's Adventures: Temple of the Frog
10. Kirby: Nightmare in Dream Land

I have only played one game on the Wii, and that is Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles. And I have only played three games on the DS: Pokemon Pearl, Pokemon Ranger, and a demo of Fossil Fighters.

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600

Gameplay: 2/5
Graphics: 2/5 (It's an Atari 2600, not an Xbox, but still)
Replay Value: 1/5 (just to finish it)
Challenge: 3/5

Pros:
- It's E.T. the Extra Terrestrial.
- It's on the Atari 2600, one of the longest living consoles in the history of gaming.
- Simple control scheme

Cons
- The pits. Oh dear GOD the pits. (Every joke you could make with THIS IS ET/SPARTA/CRAPPY/any other variation of that joke will get old.)
- Clunky controls (RUN E.T. RUN!!! NO NOT STRETCH YOUR F*CKING NECK!!! RUN!!!!! FLOAT!!! GET OUT OF THE F*CKING PIT!!!!!!!!)
- Annoying enemies
- Life dwindling away with EVERY MOVE YOU MAKE!! (every bond you break, every step you take - I'll be watching you. Had to make a joke here)
- You can be resurrected 3 times after death. Normally, that's a good thing, but here...

The Review/Some Backstory
E.T. the Extra Terrestrial for the Atari 2600 was one of the first games based on a blockbuster film (the other I knew about was Raiders of the Lost Ark). However, the developers were only given 6 weeks to complete this game, as a normal Atari 2600 game took 3-4 months to develop and program. Scheduling was so bad, it took them the entire last week of the project to develop the title screen. THE TITLE SCREEN. And furthermore, there were more copies of the game made than there were Atari consoles to play it on.

Critically, E.T. on the Atari was a major failure. Sales were so bad, almost all of the copies they made were sent back to Atari. They couldn't sell their massive amounts of overstocked Atari games (nearly 4 million plus E.T. cartridges, several million Pac-Man cartridges, broken consoles, etc) in their warehouse in El Paso so they got a contract with a landfill, and crushed several million copies of E.T. and other games, encased them in concrete, and buried them in the middle of the New Mexico desert. (http://www.snopes.com/business/market/atari.asp)

Lovely. Now, I played this game on a web-based emulator (http://www.2600online.com/et.html), and the controls are simple, yet clunky and God-awful. The pits are a bigger nuisance than a cockroach infestation, yet you have to fall into the pits to find the 3 radio bits to help E.T. phone home. All the while, you have to face off against an FBI agent who apparently tries to make E.T. miserable because he TAKES YOUR RADIO BITS AND YOUR REESES PIECES!!!!!! Also, you have to face the scientist who drags you away to a building you can just walk out of. Did I mention you're dying slowly? Not just you personally, but E.T. himself is dying with every action you do. And when you get dragged away by the scientist, you lose health. And once you get to phone home, the scientist can still kidnap you before your ship picks you up, so you have to go and recollect the radio bits ('cause the FBI guy probably stole them). However, I didn't get that far, because I didn't even get two radio bits. Oh, and the whole "you can't die" thing? Once your life reaches 0, Elliot (the kid) comes and resurrects you for 1500 health. Okay, once you die three times, that's it.

I found myself bottling back some rage when I first played this, and I realize I shouldn't have 'cause I spent the next few hours raging about it. But this game is truly a test in torture. If you find a copy, and you're not a collector like I am, don't buy it. Don't even consider it.

Overall Verdict: 1/5. Deplorable. The very game that single-handedly killed the Atari 2600, according to Seanbaby, and I agree with him.

Daybreakers

I went to see the newest vampire action flick, Daybreakers, and I was genuinely surprised. It was a good movie. It had a great premise, being that the whole world has been overrun by vampires (and no, not the prissy ones of Twilight though the main character is named Edward, but the Dracula-esque vampires, the ones who rip people apart for their blood) and the remaining 5 percent of the human population is being farmed for their blood. That's as far as I'm willing to go plot-wise.

Seeing how the characters evolved and seeing how some plot holes got resolved worked really well. However, I felt like some plot points were closed too cheaply, like the plot point with Sam Neill and his daughter in the movie.

Overall, I'm happy to say it's a good movie. Go see it.