The NES Cat: Review #7: There's something strange, in the neighborhood, who you gonna call?

New Ghostbusters II box art

Ghostbusters!

So Ghostbusters it is for today's review, "The new Ghostbusters II" by HAL Laboratory in particular, a game that many of the US NES players haven't heard of, as it was only released in Europe and Japan. The States never saw the game because of licensing problems with Activision, that already had released "Ghostbusters II" for the NES.

The back of the game's box

This game is way better than Activision's version and much more addictive. It features a Zelda-style top-down view, instead of the side scroller in the US version. The player is presented with four Ghostbusters to choose from: Peter, Ray, Egon, Winston and their accountant Louis. The Famicom version does not feature Louis, as the fifth playable character.

The objective of the game is simple. Catch all the ghosts in one area to move on to the next one. It features 6 levels (Courthouse, Abandoned subway tunnel, Dana's place, Drainage system, Art museum, Vigo the Carpathian) with a boss fight in the end of each one.

While the action can be performed by oneself, a secondary player may join the game with the ability to press B on a second controller to release a ghost-catching trap.

The graphics of the game are very high quality, with some nice touches like Louis' hair stands on end after a few ghost encounters. The bright colors give a nice cartoon-ish look while the music serves the game right and is not boring or repetitive.

Conclusion: The game is really fun to play with, has very nice graphics and sound and if we compare it to the US counterpart its like comparing Gyromite with Super Mario Bros 3 (NGB2 being the SMB3). The only downside I found on this game is the lack of difficulty. It's not even on the NES rarity list so that makes it quite rare. You can get it on eBay for about 130$ complete with box and manual. A must for every NES collector. US players should region free their NES just to play this game.

-NESCat