Ghostbusters II

The Good
Considering how lame videogames adapting a movie of the season often were, "Ghostbusters II" felt quite refreshing at the time. Like many adaptations do, it takes a few key scenes of the movie and expands them in the shape of mini-games. Surprisingly, only three scenes were adapted, but the results are otherwise very good.

• In Van Nuys, you get to control Ray as he descends into the subterranean river of slime to get a sample. You need to maneuver through the obstacles, deal with different enemies, the most annoying of them hands who try to sever Ray's cable, and obtain the different pieces of equipment to take the samples.

• In Broadway, you need to escort the Liberty Statue and the citizens who have joined her in her parade and defend them from the ghosts, while recovering as much slime as possible.

• Finally, in the Museum, you need to control all four ghostbusters in order to rescue Dana's baby and defeat Vigo.

All stages feature very good graphics and adequate sounds, while the music and stills from the movie are used sparsely to recreate the plot.

The Bad
Although the three sub-games are great, and long enough to please even the hardcore gamers, there's probably people out there who would have preferred different stages or just more of them. I'm not one of them, but I still think their point of view is valid.

Plus I never knew what to do in Stage 3 after Vigo possessed some of the Ghostbusters. That was annoying.

The Bottom Line
I've spoken before in various occasions about how I feel about movie to videogame adaptations of the era. Ocean made a few great ones, such as "Robocop" and "Batman - The movie" but once they settled into a model they became increasingly similar.

The licenses that fell into other hands are more of a mixed bag, mostly forgotten games such as "Jaws" or "Dick Tracy" that well deserve the oblivion.

But luckily "Ghostbusters II" is not one of those games. It's fun, exciting, original and uses very well the limited capabilities of the Amstrad CPC, something that became increasingly rare in this era, when manufacturers started planning their games for 16 bit computers such as the Atari ST or the Amiga and lowered their standards regarding the 8 bits computers.