At seven years old, days with my Grandmother were dull. Nothing to talk about, no-one to play with... until my Uncle moved in to Grannies house.
He had lots of interesting things in his room: some records, magazines (pictures of girlies- I wasn't that interested in those days), but most exciting of all, he had a computer.
The Spectrum 128K it was called- a tape-player plugged into a black keyboard- and his huge array of gaming tapes quite startled me. One game stands upmost in my mind from all my visits to my wrinkly relatives: 'Ghostbusters'.
Although the movie scared me, that sampled 'GHOSTBUSTERS- HAHAHAHA!!' voice at the start- although very realistic for a 128k- made my leap nine feet into the air EVRYTIME I played. Thankfully, I quite liked the Ghostbusters theme tune. Good luck too, cos the bugger gets looped around for the entire time (play a MIDI file round and round for 3 hours- you'll get the idea).
Graphicly though- the game sucked. You'd struggle to find any GFX above the level of stickmen, and this is indeed what 'you' are. Three ickle men with blasters... and that wierd grapply thingy.
Anywho, the object of the game is to save the world, whilst making as much money as possible (you are a business, after all). Plonked in the middle of New York, you try and de-louse as many infected buildings as possible, before the Key and the Gate arrive in the middle of NY (Kulu, I think it's called).
Before you zoomed off into the middle of the big Apple, you had to get kitted out. As a new Ghostbusters francaise, your loverly bank loans you $10,000 for all your equipment. This is where some amount of thinking was involved. You were on a tight budget, and buying too fast a car left little dosh for anymore than the basics. This would mean me in some cases arming myself with a calculator, desperate to get the best deal.
The actual gameplay was very simple. Once you arrive at a haunted house, you have to lay down your power-packy-ghost-grabbing-thingy (wassit called?), and postion your two men. Then you let fire with your streamers, and try and guide the ghost into the path of the grabber. Then let fly with the grabber, and stash away your ghost- collecting $600 in the process. Any amount of failure meant that one of your men gets slimed! If that happens again- or you run out of streaming power- then it's back to GHQ.
Now that I think about it, there was a awful lot of waiting around in Ghostbusters for these events to occcur. You watched all the ghosts flying around NY, whilst you were on the look out for a red flashing building- meaning it had been infected by ghouls. But once the PK meter started to notch up, and the Key and Gate began to hang out near Kulu.. it was GhostBusting time ! :)
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And so on it went, poping back to GHQ, Ghostbusting and Mashmellow melting, until you go and fight it out for the last time to save the world......always made my Sunday afternoons entertaining, anyway... |
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