THE SPECTRUM GAME DATABASE GHOSTBUSTERS PUBLISHER Activision AUTHOR David Crane YEAR 1985. DESCRIPTION Strange mixture of arcade action, puzzle, driving and management games all thrown into one. CONTROLS: Q - Up A - Down O - Left P - Right Z - Fire B - Drop Bait CAPS-ENTER - Return to vehicle chooser SYMBOL-ENTER - Return to control chooser INSTRUCTIONS The idea is to buy the best ghostbuster-mobile and equipment at the beginning, then to catch enough ghosts to make enough money to pay back the bank and defeat Zuul at the end. It's not *quite* as easy as it sounds. At the start, you must move the forklift truck driver around, loading pieces of equipment into your ca. You will not be able to afford much when the game first starts, but you can come back to base when you have made more money and buy some more. Most of the action takes place on a map of New York City where you must drive (by moving the Ghostbusters symbol) to the flashing houses and capture the ghosts. To catch the ghosts you must position two 'busters with their beams in the right place to trap the ghost above the trap, and then you must fire the trap, hopefully catching the ghost if it is directly above. Be careful since you can only move the Ghostbuster towards the middle, so don't move them too far. If you DON'T catch the ghost you have to go all the way back to HQ and hire another ghostbuster.. You also have to go back to HQ if all your traps get full. Between the houses you have to drive your Ecto-1 car along, catching "travelling" ghosts with the ghost-hoover you hopefully bought at the beginning of the game. If you didn't, the travellers will come together to form a Marshmallow man who will trample some of the city. The only way to beat HIM is to use the anti-marshmallow food thing, which hopefully you bought at the beginning too. CHEATS SEQUELS Ghostbusters 2 (surprisingly enough) also by Activision, but an altogether different game. SCORES RECEIVED URL ftp://ftp.dcc.uchile.cl/pub/OS/sinclair/snapshots/g/???????.zip GENERAL FACTS It was one of the first movie license games. NOTES Your Spectrum did an entire feature devoted to the programming involved in it, and how well compressed it all was. It also contained a version of the music (player by the computer in the intro) and the words (timed by a bouncing spot) of the theme song by Ray Parker Jnr.