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.

