Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 96: Ghostbusters

Episode Date: April 24, 2017

'80s kids couldn't help but grow up with a Ghostbusters fixation, even if the games based on this popular property were often as fun as drowning in a river of slime. On this episode of Retronauts, join Bob Mackey, Jeremy Parish, Kat Bailey, and Mikel Reparaz as the crew digs into every Ghostbusters game to see how well each one captures that essential ghostbusting spirit. And if you think all of these games are good, we're not ready to believe you!

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Before I go more into that, who is here with me today across the table, as usual, is Jeremy Parrish, the Winston Zedmore of Retronauts. Wow. That means you joined late and we disrespect you in every way. I'm the token minority, the token old guy. I guess that's true. Who else is here next to Jeremy? Michael Rapparos. I guess I'd sort of be like one of the extreme Ghostbusters that only shows up every once in a while, maybe the guy in the wheelchair.

Okay. I'm not familiar with that. And actually, we will not be talking about the Extreme Ghostbusters because they are not canon. Are those like the new monkeys? Sort of. Yeah, they're the very ugly late 90s cartoon characters. They're the Batman Beyond of Ghostbusters. Batman Beyond was much better than that.

People like Batman Beyond, so that's not a good... That's true. I don't think there's any fondness. If you've got fondness for Extreme Ghostbusters, write us a letter and then put it in the garbage. And who else is here with us today? Kat Bailey, the token lady, that the Ghostbusters have to save. That's right. Ghostbusters is all ladies now.

Oh, yeah. I've got to tell you, I've read several Breitbart articles that told me that men are more biologically prepared to be Ghostbusters. Science is true in this case. And we're going to talk about none of that because that was a joke. Actually, Steve Bannon looks just like Slimer, so I'm willing to believe it. Jeremy, Slimer keeps that shit together. He works out. He eats an entire hot dog cart, but he knows when to stop.

That's all I'm saying. So today's episode is all about Ghostbusters games. And there's a reason I'm doing this because it's a very special. episode for me because a Ghostbusters game episode was my first episode of Retronauts. It was episode 72, which was strangely enough Ghostbusters and Majora's mask. I don't know where that pairing came from. Could it be a Bob Mackey pairing? Let us summon Bob from the Ouija board.

They needed to get that Bob Mackey magic onto Retronauts, and some listeners have regretted it ever since. But yeah, it was a weird episode for me. I loved being on it, but it was a call-on episode. And I remember being in my tiny grad school office, which was literally, Half the size of this recording studio, if you can believe it. It was basically like a desk and a chair and bookcases that threaten to crush me at every moment. But I remember calling in and being extremely nervous having so many notes in front of me. And I've never stopped being nervous and I've never stopped having notes in front of me on Retronauts.

So, yeah, that's the history. That's still online. People always ask me in all of our one-up episodes that we don't own are all on Archive.org. Just type in Retronauts and you'll find all 200 plus of them. And you can look that one up. It's episode 72. Thank you, Jason Chen. Yes, exactly.

Who did it? Jason Chen's just like a guy who does a lot of archive. Okay, great. And that was him who did it or? No, I probably not. Okay, whoever did it, we'll put it up there. Thank you, so much. Somebody also archived Act of Time Babel, which was the RPG companion podcast, a retronauts.

Beck, I went up. And Bob, I think the first time we ever talked was when you called in to Active Time Babel to talk about Residents of Fate. That's right. And I think Final Fantasy 13 as well. So, yeah, all my first ones were Collins for some reason. That was the Colin era of, one up. I'm not sure what the initiative was there, but

we don't let anyone call us here because we don't want to hear your opinions. You'll hear ours. We literally had a phone on the wall that we would answer and pipe into the podcast. That's very strange. How very analog. Yeah. But we're going to be talking about Ghostbusters games, and I feel like, depending on how old

you are, the Ghostbusters entered your life in a different way. So I wanted to ask everybody before we start when did you find the Ghostbusters? When did they enter your life? And let's start with Jeremy, because I feel like Jeremy might have been the most age appropriate for the first Ghostbusters movie. When did you, like, get into Ghostbusters? Did you get into Ghostbusters? Yeah, so I found Ghostbusters when these two guys came to my house, they were wearing suits and they had bicycles and they said, if you heard the good news about the holy, oh, wait, no, that's a different kind of ghost. No, I actually.

Would you let us slime you, brother? I feel like I saw Ghostbusters in the theater during its initial run. You would have been like 10 probably? Yeah, maybe. No, you know, I don't think I saw it in theater. But I think, you know, it made the rounds on VHS shortly after. So I had seen it by the time I entered junior high school. So that was 1987 because I'm old.

So, yeah, I definitely saw it in its initial foray into the public consciousness before the cartoon. Were you on board with that immediately? Or did you love it? Did you fall in love with it? I thought it was funny and cool. And there was a giant marshmallow guy. and I didn't get any of the sexual jokes whatsoever. There's a lot of them in that movie.

Oh, yeah. Watching it as an adult, I realized that. I think as a kid, I was kind of aware that, you know, the ghost blowjob. I was like, that's inappropriate. Yeah. But I didn't totally get it, I don't think. Yeah. I mean, did you follow the Ghostbusters, the cartoon, the Ghostbusters 2?

I saw Ghostbusters 2 in the theater, and we all agreed, wow, that was really bad. And I did see some of the cartoon occasionally, but I was kind of too old by that point to see the cartoon. And so I, you know, I'm peripherally aware of it, but didn't really watch that much of it. I was baffled by Egon's hairstyle. I loved it. Oh, man. That doesn't look anything like he does in the TV and in the movie.

We'll talk more about it, but like stuff like that that's secretly anime. I think that was what sparked my love of anime. I was just like, I want all cartoons to look like this and why do certain ones look like this? And then I discovered later in life. Michael, how about you? What about Ghostbusters? When did you start to like it if you did like it? And how did you follow it through the course of its life?

I was kind of only dimly aware of the movie when it came out, but got really into it when the real Ghostbusters came out because as a kid I was like super into not just ghost stories, but like reading books on hauntings and stuff like that, quote unquote, real life ghosts. And so like this cartoon about paranormal investigators just sort of dovetailed with my own interests at the time. And I got obsessively into Ghostbusters, the point where like I was buying all the toys. I had the firehouse for a long time, which I just recently sold on eBay. A friend of mine had the firehouse. Did you sell it to buy the Lego Firehouse? No, I sold it because it's huge and I needed it out of my life. That thing was like $100 and it was the Holy Grail of many a child.

I sold it for like 150, so profit. As a slightly poor kid at that point, I was just like envious of any child who had the firehouse, any child who had the proton pack with the piece of foam attached to it. I had that. I also made one before then, like with scrapwood. in my dad's garage. That's amazing. Did you have a trap, though?

No, no. I did have friends who went and made the traps and who got the trap toy. But, yeah, I was like, I had a few friends who were into it. And then, like, within a few months, I think I was the only one who was into it. So I started getting made fun of constantly. Oh, man. Wow, went to cool, bad that fast, huh? Yeah, yeah.

Well, to the point where, like, anytime I had anything Ghostbusters related, like, there are these bully kids who would come up and go, like, oh, Ghostbusters. And then, like, razz me about it from a man. I mean into turtles, like times change fast. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That comes up to you fast. You know, now that I think about it, the main reason I didn't watch the Ghostbusters cartoon was an age. It was because I was really distracted by the fact that Peter Vinkman sounded exactly like Garfield. Oh, man.

I prefer, I guess we'll talk about it, but I prefer Lorenzo Music's version of Peter Bankman to Dave Coolyer doing Bill Murray and Caddyshack, basically. Yeah, that's basically how they change it. Let's not even talk about the slimer and the real Ghostbunk. I think we have to, Michael, but how about your quality terms? That's going to be comparable to most of the games that appear at this episode. Pretty much, pretty much. How about the movies? How do you feel?

Did you find those after the cartoon? Yeah, I did. After I think like a season or two of the cartoon, I finally watched the movie. My parents wouldn't let me watch it beforehand because of the sex jokes. Oh, okay. Then I was like, why doesn't the movie have this much swearing? Also, why does Peter look like Ray and Ray look like Peter? Yeah.

Yeah, interesting. That's a weird take. It is. But I had a similar take. But, Kat, how did you find the Ghostbusters? As far as I've known, I've always liked the Ghostbusters, as long as I can remember. Because I've been watching, I watched the cartoon from, like, one of my earliest memories. And I really loved it.

I adored it. And one day, my parents rented the movie, and I was like, really excited. And we put it in. I'm like, what's this? This isn't a cartoon. I understand. Egan cut his hair. And then I saw that it was live action.

My mind was completely blown. I was a little confused about where Winston was. They made a movie about the cartoon. But the first time I saw the Ecto 1 come out of that fire state house, oh, my God. I was all in, and I watched that movie about five million times. I was devastated when I watched that movie once I was older and realized, oh, the Ecto 1 isn't cool at all. It's a piece of garbage. Yeah, that's kind of the joke.

I was like, oh, but it's such a great car. It's like a hearse. It's covered on flashing lights and, like, weird technology and stuff. Oh, my God. It's the same thing as with the Millennium Falcon. And I thought that was the coolest ship. And it turns out, no, it's actually a piece of crap also. It's supposed to be like a space semi.

Yeah. So here's the thing about the real Ghostbusters cartoon. It was created by, well, it was run by a guy named Joe Michael Strachinsky, who also ran Babylon 5, a show, a show that I really enjoyed in the 90s. And I was aware of that because he did, like, lots of message board, like news group posts. And he talked at some length about running Ghostbusters the show. And the thing about that show is that he specifically aimed it both at a kid's audience and in a adult audience at a very early, like, from the start of its run. So he actually did not pull punches in terms of the horror aspect.

And I remember actually being pretty freaked out by some of the stories, including one, about a boogeyman that, like, takes kids and turns them into basically itself. The Grundle. Yeah. Yeah, that whole thing is an allegory for child molesters. Yeah. I mean, there's an episode where the ghost pressures go to hell. And there's an episode where they get sucked into the containment unit and been put on trial for

their crimes against ghost. It was very, very dark storytelling. They did an episode that was basically like the poltergeist. Yeah. But then, of course, the executives got involved and discovered that Slimer was the most popular part of that show. And that was how we got into the Slimer and the real Ghostbusters era. Yeah. And as for me, similar to Cat, I watched the cartoon first, was obsessed with it. My friend, my friend Philip and I, my next door neighborhood, play Ghostbusters every day. And then Ghostbusters 2 came out. I was too young for Ghostbusters 1. It was not even on my radar. I'm like, oh, there's a Ghostbusters movie now. And I loved it later in life. I was like, it's not great. But it's weird that I was born in 82. So I saw

Back to the Future 2 and Ghostbusters 2 first. And I always had this sense until I was like a late teenager that, oh, the first movies were the boring ones. Like Ghostbusters 2 has slime and all these cool scenes. And Back to the Future 2 has all the cool future stuff. I don't want to watch a movie about the 50s. Who cares? So Ghostbusters 2 felt much more like it was influenced by the cartoon in a lot It really was. I mean, I think it was just made to capitalize on the success of the cartoon, which is why everyone is phoning it in because they're like, there's a lot of money on the table and we don't care, but we'll save these lines and rehash the first movie story.

It'll sell toys, sure. For some reason, in the late 80s, early 90s, everybody was obsessed with slime. Like, that was a thing. Like, Ghostbusters had slime, turtles had slime. Nickelodeon had slime. Well, it all started with, you can't do that on television. Yeah, and I do feel like gross out humor was a bigger thing in the, 80s and 90s like

Renan Stimpy gross cartoons and slime and being slimed and things like that. I don't know where it came from. Maybe the Clinton morals brought us all down to the slime level. Who knows? I'm being ironic, by the way.

But yeah, I mean, I just wanted to ask everybody how they found Ghostbusters. But talk about the games. This was really hard to research because there's two games called The Real Ghostbusters. There's two games called Ghostbusters. It's very hard to pin them down. There's also many versions of

many of these different games. But one thing I'm going to do, which might get tedious, who knows, we'll find out, is I'm going to play the version of the Ghostbusters theme found in each of these games, at least a little sample of it that we can react to, because some of them are good, some of them are not good. And you won't be able to get out of your head for the next month or so. You really won. I got to say, I think Ghostbusters won is a great movie, great performances, great story. I think the theme is instrumental in the success of the Ghostbusters. I don't know why. I can't pin this down, but I feel like having a titular theme song was a big 80s thing.

But it's such a great, great fun song that I think, like, it helped contribute to the success of the movie. Even if it did steal from Huey Lewis, we all know that story. You know, I Want a New Drug is basically the Ghostbusters theme in some way. There was a class act, no, not class action lawsuit, but there was a settlement involved in that. But, yeah, so I guess we can move on to the first game in our series here, which is just called Ghostbusters. It came out in Holiday of 1984 for the Commodore 64. There are 10 different versions of this game, many different computer platforms, but the version that I think most people played in America is the NES version,

which came out in 1988, which is actually a 1986 Famicom game. But I do want to play the Commodore 64 theme and then the NES theme, because they're a bit different. So here's Commodore 64. Ghostbusters! We get that nice little sample. So it's okay. One sound channel.

Yeah, I should say that, depending on which version you had, it had like a bouncing ball lyrics. Yeah, I think the master system version did. Well, here's the NES theme. It's much, much dinkier. This is a very bad port, by the way. Michael's totally right. This is the NES theme. I'll skip forward to the actual beat of the song.

It's so bad. It's only using two channels. I know. It's like, dudes, you have four channels on the NES, but yeah. And then it plays through the entirety of the game. That's all you hear in the entire game. I mean, I don't think the C-64 game even had music after that intro scene, but, yeah, so this game was created by David Crane. very famous developer.

He made Pitfall, a Grand Prix, Freeway, and Fishing Derby for the Atari's 2600 amongst other games. He made a boy

in his blob, didn't he? That too, yeah, and little computer people. So he's a very notable designer, and this game

is very good in advance for the time. It is a very, very primitive and simple game now, and it was an 88 for the NES, but this is a 1984 computer game.

And it is pretty interesting in a weird like action slash simulation context. There's action scenes, but you are running a business at the same time. Yeah. And the concede is that, yeah, you're running the Ghostbusters at the beginning of the game. You get $10,000 from the bank that you can spend on equipment and you have to kind of trick out your car, decide what you want to take into battle. And the battle is just like, position two Ghostbusters on either side of the screen. Pretty much, yeah. Try to get the ghosts in your streams over the trap and then trap them and you make money. And all the ghosts are basically the same icon, which they did not change for the NES version, although they could have by that time made new sprites.

It's just like this smiling ghost icon that is the only ghost in the game, basically. And I want to say, like, I played the crap out of this on Apple 2 when I was a kid. I loved it. It was one of my favorite games. And I played the NES one for the first time yesterday. And it's like it took everything and made it quantifiably worse. Like, it looks like it's for the Intellivision. And just the way that it's structured, like in the other versions, you get $10,000 at first, and then you go through a shop screen, you buy all the equipment that you want, and you go out into the world to bust ghosts.

And in this one, first thing you have to do is go all the way across town to the shop icon, buy all the equipment that you mean, including proton packs, which you don't have to buy in the other versions. And then you go around and start busting ghosts. The only thing that it really has to recommend it over the other versions is that you can adjust the angle of your streams. That's right. And there is a true final level. We'll get to that soon. But, yeah, Michael is right. It is a business game where you are setting up a Ghostbusters franchise.

In fact, the computer versions have you enter your name at the beginning. So it's like, I'm this guy. You're not playing as the actual Ghostbusters. And essentially, this game is, there's a world map. You are a floating Ghostbusters icon. When Ghost Attack a building, you drag the icon over to that building, click on it. And then there's a driving scene where you drive to the thing and you dodge

ghosts. You pick up gas and money I think. And you have to dodge like every drunk driver in New York. Lots of drunk drivers. It was before Giuliani cracked down on them. But yeah, but essentially I found in playing this game, the entire game is about building up enough resources for the final battle.

That is not the same in the C64 version. I'm not sure about the other computer versions, but there is no final boss in the C64 version. Once you reach the final encounter, you have to send two or three Ghostbusters into the building by running in between the State Puff marshmallow man's legs. Yeah, he's jumping up and down. Yeah, and once you get two into the building, they run up and it's over. That's basically it.

It just has to be enough to cross the streams. Yeah. And it should be noted I'm bearing the lead here that this was a previously existing David Crane project named Car Wars. They got the license kind of late, and they were like, we need this out by Christmas. were not sure if anyone will care about Ghostbusters by then. Obviously, they didn't know it would be such a hit that people loved and would attach themselves to, but this game was really rushed development. So the C-64 version has, you can definitely tell like,

oh, there's no ending. A lot of things are kind of slight, but they still made the most of what they had with this design that they had for it. I played the NES game, and, I mean, at the time, you know, the box was just the logo, and I was like, oh, that's exciting. But then, you know, you actually start playing it, And it's like you have the Ghostbusters logo and it's kind of in a city or something. You know, I was not that old.

And I had no idea what the hell was going on. Yeah, there's no explanation. You're just like, bam, on the world map with no, like, what, I'm an icon now? Yeah. And I didn't really know how to play these kinds of games, right? Like this idea of building up your resources to be able to take on Zool, et cetera. Like I was used to the straight ahead action games like Mega Man 2 and Mario and all that stuff. This was actually kind of a common problem with license games of the time.

where it's like, what the hell's going on? What am I doing? Like, why are these mechanics so bad? I didn't really understand the concept of a bad game or why a game would be bad. I just knew it was like... It was just like, this game, like, I don't understand it. Like, I mean, but at least it wasn't as bad as the Back to the Future games, which freaking really did make no sense whatsoever.

Also, yeah, in the NES version, your car ran out of gas constantly. Like, you can manage one and a half trips on average before it could... It ran out of gas. So if I'm remembering the NES version, right, I did play it, I borrowed it from a friend. You have to climb a building at the end, right? It's like the prequel to the Shenra building if you take that option in Final Fantasy 7. It's actually a sort of take on the scene in the Ghostbusters where they're running up the stairs and they're all very tired because they're middle-aged men carrying these heavy proton packs. Which is funny when it's just like, you know, a scene in the movie of people being exhausted, but less entertaining when you actually have to do that climb yourself.

and it's very tedious, and it's insanely hard. It's a miserable level. And as I said, so you're trying to earn money to buy things, upgrade your car, but really the three most expensive items or the three most vital items, one is very expensive, are items just for the final level. One is bait that will distract ghosts. One is armor that will protect you for more hits from the ghost when you're climbing that tower, and one does something else, but they're all related to that final level.

So most of the game is just like building yourself up for that final encounter. So in the NES game, perhaps in other versions, I'm not sure, but in the NES game, for sure, you climb that tower. And the final encounter is with a seemingly topless gozer, localized as Gorsa. And it's sort of, you're dodging things from the two dogs on the side of her, like, bullet hell shooter style. And you're just shooting her as you're standing side by side with two of the Ghostbusters. Who knows what happened to the third one that came up with you? I don't know if he jumped out the window or something, but that is the final boss fight. It was probably Winston.

You just hit a button to alternate between the two. too. So if they added a third one, it might get confused. Yeah, that would be too much. It's Gorsa in the Sega Master System version also, which is, I think, the best version that I've played. So I remember, I'm glad I never asked my mom for a master system, but in the department store Hills, the now defunct department store, they always had a master system on display, and it was always playing Ghostbusters.

And I would just walk up to it and just have no idea what to do, but it looks so cool, and I knew what the Ghostbusters were. And I think it is still the best-looking version of this game. I don't know if it has that final level in it, but the NES one definitely does. Yeah. But yeah, there's no likeness rights in this game. That would be a common thread throughout these games for the most part. Just three white Ghostbusters.

Again, in the 664 version, you put your name in, but the NES version just drops you onto a world map. And this game is one of the more infamous and sad localizations where the ending is the most you could mess up the word, congratulations. So in a previous or future episode, we mentioned how the California Raisins game gave you the text, Congraturaisans. That was made by Americans. That's fine, but still angering. So the NES ending says, Conglaturation, not conglat.

Like, how does it even, congratulations. I'm forgetting what the original word is. This is so bad. Congratulations. Instead of congratulations, it's congratulation. Singular. Yeah, singular. You have completed a great game and proved with two O's the justice of our culture.

Now, go and rest, our heroes. I love that it said, you have completed a great game. Like, it's self-advertising. At the end of the game that you just finished. The localization was so bad. I forgot the word. I just did it again. Congratulations.

Okay, I'm going to forget that word because I keep seeing congratulation in front of my eyes. Forgive me, like, the first time I saw the end of this game was from, the angry video game nerd, and he, like, didn't even know how to finish, like, get up the stairs because it was so bad. Yeah, I mean, he couldn't dodge those ghosts. I think that self-congratulatory, congratulatory ending was kind of a thing back then, because when you beat Goonies 2, any of the roommate says, hooray for Konami and the Goody's 2. That was.

Two was full of Konami references. It was great, but yeah, very self-refered. But, yeah, in that final battle, obviously, the stairway track, the controls are different, too. You tap the A button to advance the Ghostbusters. You don't move them with the control stick. And the ghosts come in at awkward angles. Yeah, it's needlessly complex and just punishing. And, again, the entire game in this NES version is just building yourself up for that final battle with GORSA.

Who was the developer? I think Bits Laboratory or something like that. I don't know. Maybe Jeremy can tell us what else they worked on, but I don't know. I can't remember. They're like sub-micronics in terms of ports, I don't know about that. Oh, no, no. Mycronics is like

is like Nintendo EAD compared to Bits Laboratory, I think. But yeah, that is Ghostbusters. Any final thoughts before we move on? I mean, it's again, we're coming down hard on it, but the original version was great for 84. The N.S. version was a bad port in too simple and 88. I think that's really the

I think the non-NES versions are still pretty playable if you can get them to work. Again, the master system one is still fun. But, yeah, the NES one, please don't judge this game by the NES. This is kind of a theme with the Ghostbusters games in general. It's no matter what the quality, at least it faintly resembles the actual source material, which is actually kind of a hit and miss thing with games of that vintage. No, you're right, Kat. This has the fundamental act of catching and trapping ghosts,

which a lot of games would miss, which is a very satisfying kind of action to do. Like, you're pulling them in and then you're pulling them down into the trap. I feel like... It's like Pokemon, but without the ability to make ghosts your party members. Exactly. And maybe like in Dragon Quest,

God damn it, Ghostbusters, monsters, you could if there was an RPG. I also like that the non-NES versions kind of were about teaching kids to work with in a budget because you could pick four different cars in the other versions. And like, they each had like the cheaper ones were slower and had fewer storage slots, but they let you spend more money on equipment. It kind of sounds like Oregon Trail.

Kind of, yeah. Which character do you want to start as? There's definitely some similarities. Yeah, I think I got to track down. I have to track down the C-64 bird because I'm clearly missing something. But we should move on to the next game, the real Ghostbusters. So the Real Ghostbusters is a 1987 arcade game that came to various computer platforms.

This was in my local arcade. I don't know about you guys, but this is a Data East game that is based on another game that's called Make You Hunter G which is Labyrinth Hunter G That game is much more complex We can talk about what this game is This game reminds me a lot of the Moonwalker arcade game and that

It is a isometric-ish Shooter with three characters who are all identical Instead of playing three Michael Jackson's You play as three White Ghostbusters Not named I mean They had the license for the real Ghostbusters

They could have used those character designs but I think it was too much work to add all of those individual sprites to this kind of port of, not port, but kind of like rom hack of a previous game. I don't know. Are they ambiguous enough that you can pretend one is Kate McKinnon? They're all white men. They're all white dudes with, I think, dark hair. Yeah, pretty much. I mean, I play this in the arcade just because I love the cartoon.

Did anyone but me play this game? I feel like I played the crap out of this. Oh, you did. Okay. I always wish that there would be an N.S port. There never was. But, yeah, I thought it was a lot of fun. I played every chance I got when I was a kid.

And one thing I like, I think that's different from the original Make You Hunter G. Like you have two types of weapons. You have the shots and the capture beam. Yeah. And the idea is that like you're facing all these physical monsters. You wear them down with the shots. And then you reel in the ghost with the capture beam. And I think you have like a limited amount of energy there.

You do, yeah, for your capture beam. And Slimer is in this game and not in Labyrinth, G, obviously. He is like a sort of a shield or something. You pick up slimer as a power-up. That is the one real tie to the cartoon. Also, I feel the enemies are kind of directly tied to the cartoon. They have that kind of grotesque, garbage-pail kid overly complex and gross ways designed to them. Lots of weird bulbous shapes.

Yeah, lots of like big lips and tongues hanging out and things like that. Unfortunately, in doing research, I learned Make You Hunter G is a much more complex game in that there are six kinds of guns in that game instead of just having the two. variants of your shooter in Ghostbusters arcade game and it looks a hell of a lot like a Ghostbusters game Make you Henry G right down to certain enemies

like layouts like they didn't work very hard to convert this to Ghostbusters I feel like they got the license it was just a quick fix maybe a few weeks of altering sprites and altering level layouts but it really is like a maze style game real Ghostbusters for the arcade which ties into the

Labyrinth Hunter arcade game and I did play a lot of this but let's hear Oh, is it kind of like an alien syndrome-ish experience? A bit. I don't think there's any backtracking like there is an alien syndrome. Sort of like something like Ikari Warriors, where it's like the screen is constantly scrolling upward. Yeah. Yeah, you're always moving in one direction, but you're picking up keys to open doors, and it's all very of that kind of game.

It's not that great. It's not terrible. Let's hear the theme and see how they pulled it off. I think it's not that great. It's kind of all over the place. They're really trying to add a lot. Just like so much. It doesn't really work.

It's really messy. Yeah, it's not recognizable. It feels like... How do you mess up an FM synthesis version of the Ghostbusters thing? I don't know. They didn't get the sheet music from Ray Parker, I guess. Very, very upbeat, though. It really is.

I think one of the things that makes this game kind of hard to play now if you're like trying to emulate it is, But the arcade had those clicky sticks that you could turn, like you Carri Warriors had. Yeah. Oh, I forgot about that. And I played so much of this. You're right, Michael. So, like, if you're playing it on maim, you have to, like, hit two shoulder buttons, basically, to rotate your character.

It's a little awkward. Yeah. Yeah, I forgot about the clicky buttons. But if you can find it, play it for, I don't know, a dollar's worth of your money. It's just a weird element of Ghostbusters that is not an original Ghostbusters game, but it's still okay. It's not great. but I experienced it at least once. It's the same with Moonwalker.

Moonwalker is not great either, but it's just a fun oddity to play, I think. So we're moving on to why Kat Bailey is here because she is known for this game, I think, the most. Am I? More than your love of RPGs and Madden. You were known as... Ghostbusters Gundam? Ghostbusters Gundam. Ghostbusters Moosso.

Ghostbusters 2 for the NES, released in April of 1990. Before we move on, let's hear the theme. This is much better than the NES theme by far. Pretty creepy. Yeah. See, they're using the sound channel. This is pretty good. We're getting there.

It's all coming back now. The nightmares. The nightmares are coming back. This one sounds more like a boy in his blob than the original by David Crane. It really does. But, Kat, I find this game to be an indefensible piece of shit. I agree, Bob. It is, like, it would be tried at Nuremberg if I had my way, but it's, it's a war crime of a game.

There's way worse games on the NES. I'm sorry. Not many of them try to kill you immediately for walking right. I mean, okay. First of all, that spider, like, it doesn't really, it's, it doesn't really matter because you run forward pretty fast and it, like, gets off the screen immediately and whatever. So, okay, so I guess I should go over my history with the game really quickly. It was the first game I bought on the NES.

I was in a store, I saw the box, it was Ghostbusters 2, and I'm like... The real actual live action actors on the box, right? Yes, it does. They're all pointing their proton beams. Yeah, with the, over the logo with the two. And also I got Afterburner from Tangan, which was a whole different story. But I took it home and I started playing it. And, of course, it was insanely hard because there's so much garbage on that screen at all times.

There are stuff like, there are these, like, guillotine things that are coming down really fast. and they're like these monsters that are kind of bouncing really awkwardly. Bouncing heads. Bouncing heads that you have to let them jump kind of over you. They're the slimer, but he's dropped, he's kind of pooping slime, but it doesn't hurt you. It just slows you down, but that's really annoying. This is what I call the Bart versus the Space Mutant School of Level Design, where it's just like, no rhyme or reason, just crazy crap swirling around the screen. You might get hit, you might not.

Your hipbox is awful. Who cares? Like, every level, there's no design to it, just like a gauntlet of hell. It's just like, yeah, a bunch of random crap showing. And you're shooting, and everything is reversed. So you're going left. This is an odd, like, this is the thing that everybody's always talking about. And you're pressing A to shoot instead of B to shoot.

Immediately, it breaks every rule. You're running the wrong direction and hitting the wrong buttons. They messed up big time. And you're using a slime cannon instead of a proton. Yeah. It's a shooter. But it was Ghostbusters, too, right? So I don't know.

But, I mean, I mean, it was very faithful to the source material. For an NES game, it looked good. It had a variety of gameplay modes that were fairly competently executed. Okay, like the driving stuff, the driving stuff, I will go on a limb to say it's... Driving is the best part of the game, but it's not great. It's better than, like, the speeder bike stuff. Like, it was actually pretty enjoyable. I think the worst level in that game is actually the courthouse, because that game took forever to finally beat.

It was ridiculously hard. There's so much crap on the screen. It took me literally years to get to the Statue of Liberty level, which actually had... as the higher and higher, like, it was actually licensed, apparently. It was. I was looking at the credits. So, Chris, I talked about this with Chris Antista, and I guess he thought they kind of stole it because, you know, you can get away with that at the time. But in the credits, I was surprised to see them name check the writer, like, use with permission, whatever.

They paid to use higher and higher from that famous scene from the movie. Yes, they did. Yeah. Is that the Bobby Brown song? No. Too cold to hold. They're called the ghost buzzers and they're in control, have a throw party for a bunch of children because all the while, Islam is under the building. The best part of that song is it tells you the entire plot of the movie,

beat by beat so you don't have to watch it. I found the driving sequences really disturbing because when you get hit, like, your car melts. It's covered in slime and like it gets wrecked, but the slime, I think especially like in the opening demo mode more than in the actual game, is bright red. So it looks like the car is covered in the Ghostbusters blood. It's funny you mention that because the attract screen demo is someone really screwing up

in one of those driving levels. Just someone just eating shit constantly, yeah. Running into barricades and stuff. You run into a barricade. Unlike Battle Toads, you do not die immediately. You just take damage. And actually, it looks pretty good. Like, when the Acto 1 hits the barricade, like, it actually kind of goes,

and then the hood kind of crumples a little bit, and it flashes, and then you keep going. Yeah. And to talk about who designed this, it's designed by Dan Kitchin, brother of Gary Kitchen game developer. He developed crackpots for Atari 2,600, one of my favorite games. but mostly he's known for founding absolute entertainment with his brother and making a lot of really bad games, like a lot of the Renan Stimpy and Simpsons games that are just god-awful. I'm sorry, dude, but they're bad.

It's not. Yeah, just like, you can see the bad Simpsons games in Ghostbusters 2 for sure, I think. I think so. Look, I'm never going to say that this is the best game on the NES, not by a long shot. I'm here to it so I can attack you about this game. I would never even say that it's a good game, but I think people get too hung up on the left-to-right thing or the right to left, whatever, and also the reversal, just because, I mean, yeah, it's different from everything else, but you get used to it pretty quickly.

And to be honest, I replayed this game at GamePro in 2011, and I was actually shocked and legitimately terrified by how the muscle memory completely came back. Wow. I got all the way to the final level, just the art museum, where you have to run all four Ghostbusters through the giant gauntlet so they can get to Vigo. And then there is actually no final boss. Yeah, you get to the painting and it's just like, yay, congratulations. You just get a variation on the cutscene. It forces you to sit through every time you die. Yeah, which is actually Vigo looks like Vigo.

I was always a little confused because it was said, you have to beat this game before a certain time. And I'm like, what? So I have a time limit. There is a little clock in the UI. Yeah, exactly. But it doesn't pass in real time. It just is like every level is a new hour maybe.

I don't know. I guess. You have to beat it before midnight because Vigo will resurrect at midnight. It confused me, but I got a lot of enjoyment out of this game. It also frustrated the hell out of me, but whatever. There are such worst licensed games than the NES. I'm sorry. I mean, so most of the game is this bad shooter slash platformer and some of it's driving.

And looking at, I watched a long play of this, which is not very long, by the way. No, it's very short. 40% of this game, I would say, is that Statue of Liberty sequence. It is like the brunt of the game. It takes up the entire middle. It's also the worst level, too. It is really bad. But it's basically like it's more or less the same as the shooting bits, the running and shooting bits, except that you're just piloting a Statue of Liberty that's only ever seen from the way stuff.

Yeah, it's more like a space invadersy kind of shooter, I think. So even if you can just answer the question of whether or not she wears underwear. Nope. You can aim the arm and you're shooting flames, I guess, at the ghosts that are coming at you. And they're coming at you very fast. And if they hit you, like at a certain point, the statue will just go and sink in. into the waves. Oh.

Yeah. But there's actually like a cutscene. I think you see the foot stepping up to the art museum. You do just, just the foot. Like, we can't animate anymore, but here's a foot coming down. Yes, it's very Monty Python, but very much, much smaller. So what I couldn't get to in that previous episode from eight years ago is that there are computer versions that are much different.

So most of them have a whopping three levels, which was kind of standard for some kinds of games on the computers at that. that time on the computers. I sound like Can't Kill or something. But I'm sorry. So one level is Ray being lowered through the sewers. You're dodging things. You're shooting things.

It's a very big, beautiful sprite, especially on the Amiga version. Another level, the middle level, is that Statue of Liberty section with the kind of shoot them up. And the final one is an isometric battle against Vigo where you're kind of like real-time Final Fantasy tacticsing, like moving around Vigo to shoot him with all your proton beams at once. It's very strange. If you watch videos of this, I'm like, this.

does not look fun or intuitive at all, and this is way too ambitious to actually for me to want to play it. Weird thing about the PC version, though, is that you're controlling the Statue of Liberty from that first person perspective, looking at her feet, holding an NES controller. That's actually the DOS version, Michael, which is unique to all the computer versions, and that is a unique level where you are, it's a first person one, you're holding an NES regular controller, not the advantage they use in the movie, not the dog bone. So it's doubly weird.

Yeah, actually, actually it's a, which one is the big giant arcade stick kind of thing? That's the NES advantage. That's advantage. What's the dog bone? The dog bone is the one that came out with the remodeled second version of the arcade. But, yeah, they were using the advantage in the movie. I was so excited to see that NES advantage. Oh, my God.

Any reference to Nintendo? The ghost boasts is like NES, so do I. It's that same impulse that made us go and watch the wizard. And Louis Tully, like, making reference to Super Mario Brothers. Yeah. Instead of wanting to make out with Janine, which, um. There's no argument there for me. But, oh, God, I'm disgusting.

But let's move on. So the DOS version is very much like a, like, a cabal kind of shooter where you're seeing the backs of the Ghostbusters and you're aiming a cursor and they're shooting everything. It's more of a shooter game of that era. But then it also does the different level design thing where, like, you have to go and scoop slime from the sewers? Yeah, you're also building up resources to do things with said resources. I was just watching a video that was not narrated.

I wasn't sure what the sort of interstitial slime collecting levels were doing, but you're like gathering slime, testing it, maybe buying things with the product of that. I don't know, but... You can play this one on Internet Archive. It's very difficult to control because it's like mouse only. This game sounds very, very heavily influenced by cinemaware. Oh, no, you're totally right. I can totally see that.

This, you know, kind of in the days before 3D graphics and polygons sort of unified everything where you can have multiple views seamlessly and switch back and forth. Like different game modes. Yeah, they like create all these different modes. And the idea is just like, we've got to recreate the movie experience. And, you know, no one view properly gets the experience across. So let's just do everything.

And you get these really, really sort of multiple split personality games. Yeah, like Defender of the Crown. They're mini game collections, basically. Yeah, there's three stooges. And I like that the DOS version, like, added a thing where, like, if all the Ghostbusters were incapacitated, like, you had to break them out of the asylum. And they had to, like, repel down the side of this hostel. Oh, I didn't see this part. That's interesting.

Yeah. That's a nice touch. But, I mean, overall, the biggest flaw of every version of the Ghostbusters 2 game is that there is no trapping of ghosts, which, again, I feel like. Oh, no, that's not true. You can shoot out a trap and Ghostbusters 2. You can? That's actually one of the key strategies is there's a giant. giant like slimer thing in the

courthouse, you can like actually shoot out a trap. Weird. In the long play I watched there was no trapping, so I guess I'm wrong, but I guess it's not as essential then. It's more of a shooter. Is that correct? Yeah, it's definitely much more a shooter. If anything, one of the themes that I'm kind of getting from this is that developers really didn't know how to translate

Ghostbusters into a video game because at that time, like so much stuff was platforming or shooting or whatever. So they're like oh, let's turn the slime cannon into kind of a shooter. like an actual projectile thing. They didn't know how to kind of render this one giant beam

that would like grab onto the ghost rather than just blowing them up. I'm sure that was a physics nightmare. Yeah, a bit too complex for the NES or older computers to handle. But we're going to take a brief break. We'll come back with Ghostbusters for the Genesis. We'll see you then. Thank you. this week's retronaut is sponsored by barkbox i know what you're thinking jeremy why would i need a box of memorabilia a failed supreme court nominee robert bork

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So we're back from our break and we're here to talk about the next game on our list in chronological order, which is the Ghostbusters Genesis game, just titled Ghostbusters. So it's the second game that is just titled Ghostbusters. So this was developed by Sega and compile. I'm not sure how much Sega had to do with this. This could be just compile, but it's unclear as most games are from this era because lots of credits are pseudonyms, lots of credits are unspoken. But for some reason, this game gives credit to Activision in the opening titles, like, because maybe they bought the license from Activision or they needed permission.

I don't know how this worked. But it's really weird timing because this game is almost exactly a year after Ghostbusters 2, several years after the cartoon, but it's based on neither one of those. Instead, it's an interquel just called Ghostbusters that is being released as the Ghostbusters brand is sort of dying on the vine. Like, as we talked about before, executives were brought into the cartoon, and they sort of ruined it. There were no more movies announced or no more plans for movies. I think no one wanted to do another movie. And it was an odd time for an original Ghostbusters game based on that first movie. Did anyone play this Genesis game when it was contemporary?

Not at the time. I remember seeing it in EGM. Yeah. I mean, I think this is the first playable and modern day Ghostbusters game we're talking about, like something that's fun to play now. It's like, it resembles an actual video game that you can enjoy in some way. Excuse me, Ghostbusters 2 and the NES is fun to play now.

No, it's not cat. So my, my Ghostbusters... That's your Stockholm Syndrome talk. My Ghostbusters story is that I borrowed the NES Ghostbusters from a friend and decided never to play another Ghostbusters game again. Jesus, Jeremy. It was so bad. You missed out, Jeremy, because everybody knows me huge weeb.

This is the anime Ghostbusters game because it's basically SD Ghostbusters. Oh, yeah. Because all of the characters. and I feel like this was an intentional choice to show off like the 16-bit power of the Genesis where all the characters had huge heads that looked exactly like the actors in very unflattering ways in the case of Bill Murray.

So it's kind of a Cato and Kin sort of thing? Yes, exactly. In fact, I wrote that down. These sprites remind me so much of J.J. and Jeff or Cato and Ken, that TG-16 game where they're really capturing the look of real people, not so much of J.J. and Jeff, but with Kato and Ken, those were Japanese comedians.

But that gives it a very distinctive look and the enemies are very creative. I feel like this game really is the most fun and evocative of that sort of real Ghostbusters spirit with crazy ghost designs and big-headed sprites just a really fun kind of romp. I don't know. How do you guys feel about this game?

It's a look that I really associate with that era and 16-pick game design. A lot of them were based on arcades of that era, and for some reason, big-headed sprites were a thing back then. It has a really arcade-y feel, though. I mean, just in like the terms of the game. gameplay and the visual effects and sounds like it reminded me a lot of like the Willow arcade game if you ever played oh yeah big heads on that one too it had it had sort

of a similar feel big detailed sprites for a thing because it's like oh look at all the detail on these like sprites this is amazing there everything's gigantic and i feel more than eight eight by eight sprites on a line and this era of sego was very much about we're going to give you arcade style experiences like short games that are very hard but somewhat complex and this is definitely one of those and there's there's a bit of a story a bit of a poorly localized story in that so destroying Gozer puts the Ghostbusters out of business and then

mysterious earthquakes and ghost phenomenon starts happening in NYC and the Ghostbusters have to find puzzle pieces to put together to find out who is behind all of this so yeah I believe there are maybe five or six levels but the downside of this game is that the

backgrounds are very repetitive the levels are very maze-like there's not a lot of a I mean like and again it's a very Japanese as hell game I mean you have very goofy looking Ghostbuster faces, even though they're based on the actors. You have very anime-style sprites. And also you have like,

here's the Ghostbusters Fire level. Here's the Ghostbusters Ice level. Here's the Ghostbusters sewer level. Like every type of Japanese game level is represented in Ghostbusters for the Genesis. It's funny in that way. But there is no Winston, which is an important thing to point out. An auto-mission, I don't know. How do you guys feel about this?

No Winston playable. You choose between one of three Ghostbusters. And Bill Murray is the most average of of all the Ghostbusters, the Mario. Yeah, I feel like the Winston omission happens to kind of a disturbing degree. Yes, to the point where he's like,

he's not even on some versions of the first poster, it's just like, was this just casual racism or did you not care about Winston? He was a really minor character in the original movie. He barely does.

He has no point in the original movie. He didn't have to be in it. Wasn't the movie part originally written much more elaborately? Yes, it was written for Eddie Murphy. That's why he signed on. And then they're like, oh, no,

you're only going to show up in like the second half because he thought he was going to be a star from it and that was not what happened. I feel like

Winston got screwed. Oh, totally. He gets a much better treatment in the 2009 Ghostbusters game but he is sort of overlooked for the most part

in every game and even in the cartoon he's not given much to do. So one thing that the reboot actually does fairly well is that they give Leslie Jones a really strong part

in the movie. Like she actually matters. She gets them the car. She gets them the coveralls. and all that stuff. She's a key member of the team. She's a key member of the team who's there, like, she doesn't, she's not there from the start,

but she comes in much earlier in the film. She's an integral part. Yeah. And Winston, I think, in the original movie, even though he comes in late and is sort of an afterthought. I feel like he is an important voice that he is the working class guy, just sort of the straight man to all this crazy shit happening. Especially in the second movie, I feel like he's given a lot more to do, a lot more, like, comedic things to do instead of just, you know, being the straight man a lot of the time. I felt like in the cartoon, he fell into the same role that a lot of African-American characters in 80s cartoons did, which is he says, ooh-wee a lot. Yeah, he did say ooh-wee a lot in that cartoon, you're right.

And it's funny because I was watching a lot. I was watching a lot of videos about the Real Ghost Switcher's cartoon, which I loved, and it's still worth revisiting. And some cases, some episodes aren't so great. But so what happened was they brought in this, the network brought in these consultants. They all had PhDs in education. They were like, we need to make this show better for children. And the creator was like, this is the number one show on the network, we are already good, go away. And then he left the show because they're influenced creeped into creative decisions.

But they said essentially, we need to give each Ghostbusters a role in the show, more of a role, like more of a defined role. So it was said, okay, Egon is the brain. That makes sense. Ray is going to be the hands because he's more of the, you know, mechanic type. He's more a hands-on guy. Of course, Bill Murray's character, Peter Vankman, is the mouth. And they're like, and, oh, yeah, Winston. Justin's the driver, you know, that part of your body.

There's a lot of casual racism creeping into Ghostbusters decisions. Yeah. And that's why Strasinski left the series because he was like, don't touch my show. Like, we made these decisions for a reason. And they were like, no, we're going to make the show better. But they really just led to the cancellation of the real Ghostbusters, which would be named to slimer in the real Ghostbuzzers. And half of the show would be a slimer cartoon where a mad scientist is trying to capture him. and it's all done in a much more cartoony style

because they're like, this, the Ghostbusters are too scary for kids, but that's why I like that cartoon. It was like there was some stakes to it. That's what was interesting about it. And like, yeah, the Slimer cartoon felt oddly like a sanitized Heathcliff. A bit, yeah. And it is very ugly. It is not

the secretly anime real Ghostbusters that I love. What was the ghost version of the garbage ape? Oh, God. The garbage ape is an anomaly. We cannot talk about that on this podcast. But, yes, so back to the Ghostbusters Genesis game. It's a pretty basic platformer slash shooter.

You earn money through every level as a mid-boss, and if you wear it down enough, you can potentially trap it. It can't escape. That is the one ghost you can trap per level. You get a bonus if you trap that ghost. And between levels, you buy upgrades from Doc Brown with a mustache, basically. That is who you buy upgrades from. It's a very nice back-to-the-future homage.

Isn't Doc Brown with a mustache just Dr. Wiley? Um, kind of, yeah, actually. Less of a big chin to him, though, but this is definitely Doc Brown. I like the gravitas of the opening in the Genesis version, too, where he's like, there are ghosts appearing here and there. Yes, here and there, oh, no. No matter which ghostbuster you choose, the dialogue is the same. So you get some incongruous dialogue, like Egon saying, who cares, let's party, things like that. So this game is lots of fun.

It's not the best most solid platform or something. shooter, but they're fun boss fights. The ghost designs are really cool. There's like a snowman where the top, the top ball of the snowman is the head, obviously, but the bottom snowman is another head, and they're barfing out smaller snowmen.

Like, lots of fun designs like that that I like to watch. But, yeah, I feel like this game does hold up. I'm sure there's no way you could ever be re-released again in any format outside of 1990 on the Genesis. But it's worth downloading as a ROM just to check out. I mean, I love the sprites in this game, and I love just the crazy ghost designs. It does fall into a very rote platformer theme level style of game, but just that Ghostbusters hook to it really makes it worth it for me.

I don't know about you guys. I feel like it kind of got lost to history because, I mean, at least in my case, I wasn't really, I mean, I was sort of aware of the Genesis pre-super Nintendo, but, you know, that was really, like, the hardcore early adopter. Like, I want the top level graphics that I can possibly get. And I'm sure it was on the box and in the commercials, like, whenever the Ghostbusters just get hit, they get. these weird goofy faces and I'm sure that was like in magazines being advertised like these expressive characters Mario doesn't like look at you when he gets hit

If I looked at that stuff in a magazine in 1990 it would have been like must own right now oh my God this looks amazing I had serious urges to get a Genesis when I saw these screenshots but it's just like I don't want to ask for another console I also love that in addition to those freaky faces which kind of when I saw them yesterday they kind of reminded me of like remember the like the second wave

of Ghostbusters toys where like you'd squeeze their arms They make faces. Yeah. Like, when you die in that game, you fall over wrapped in bandages. Like a mummy. Yeah, you look like a mummy. I think it's supposed to be like, you're in the hospital now, but you're just like, the ghost turned me into a mummy.

Would have been my reaction as a kid. Yeah, absolutely. Friends of like a cowboy bebop and like Lupon III when he gets injured, he's just like wrapped up like a mummy and that will cure him in some way. I don't know how. But let's hear the Genesis theme of the Ghostbusters. I don't think this is very good. I forget, but it's interesting at least.

It's getting there's getting there. Wait, I want to hear the saxophone. Nope, it's a bit off. It's a bit off. Yeah, just a little bit. Let's call that an adaptation, not a... An arrangement, yes, exactly. Exactly.

So let's move on to our next game. New Ghostbusters 2. This game is developed by Hal, a reliable developer, but this is a fairly simple game for them. Only released in Japan and Europe, and Activision released the Game Boy version in the U.S., which is slightly different. We'll get into that first. So, Michael, you were saying you just found out about this game? I did, yeah. And I'm playing it, it's like after playing the original NES version and all these other kind of crappy.

Ghostbusters games that this was a really pleasant surprise. It's pretty interesting. Again, it is, they very rarely institute trapping into Ghostbusters games, but this is all based around shooting and trapping, and you basically select between five Ghostbusters. Lewis is one of them. Winston is here, but because you're on the NES with a limited color palette, his skin is green, unfortunately. I think it was blue when I play.

It's sort of like a bluish green. Yeah, it's between the two. But, yeah, they look like the 8-bit JRP Sprite versions of the Ghostbusters. And, like, Bill Murray's receding hairline is just like the iconic look in some of these games. Just like the way they give him that, like, kind of horseshoe baldness pattern is pretty interesting. But, yeah, the gameplay is based around trapping. One Ghostbuster follows, one traps. A is your proton beam.

B is your trap. And it feels really satisfying, but there's nothing more to this game than that. There are no extra weapons. There are no other kinds of gameplay. It's basically just that through these link to the past, Legend of Zelda style dungeon kind of things. It's all topped down with a maze. Like you go into a room, ghosts attack, you trap the ghost,

and a little arrow appears telling you which direction to go in next. Yeah, and it does feel a little undercooked for when this game came out. So keeping in mind, this is December 1990. This was 18 months after the movie release, which was not crazy for a licensed game. Like thinking of something like Golden Eye 64 was all. almost two years after the movie. This was a similar case.

But I feel like with that much time and with a developer like Hal, I would expect more. And the director is actually a pretty notable Howell director. His name is Hiroaki Sukha. And he directed the first Lolo game and was the main programmer on Kirby's Adventure and is basically the main producer on the Kirby series. So like top level talent who would go on to basically prove themselves later in life would work on this game. I think you mean prove themselves. Oh, yeah, with two o's.

It's a more important version. version of that word. Yeah, exactly. So you played through this? I'm excited that this is a Game Boy game also. Yes, yes. That comes out, it came out in 1990, which means I will get to it at some point. Oh, cool.

Not soon, but within a reasonable amount of time. I think the Game Boy version I read has remix levels and only like five instead of six levels. That's true, but you do get various power-ups where the NES version, there is like no power-ups, nothing to pick up, just ghost trapping and shooting action, the Game Boy version would be a little different and a little more truncated, but you do get those extra power-ups. And I think it did come out a bit later, maybe 91. But that was released in America by Activision. Kat, have you played any of these games? Hell no. Do you have any interest in them? I do, actually. It's amazing to me that all these games existed, because I certainly was not aware

of them. I thought there was an extreme Ghostbusters game, but I could be wrong. There is, but we won't talk about it. Oh, is it that bad? I refuse. It was for the GBA. Yeah, right? Well, I don't... I'm talking... I really wanted to cover things that are based on the Ghostbusters, not just the extreme Ghostbusters. I'm not a true millennial.

I didn't grow up with it, so... I mean, it is funny to me that this game was apparently developed exclusively in Japan and never came out in the U.S. Yeah, that's because Activision released their version of Ghostbusters 2. Like, no, no, this needs to be the definitive version. But it's funny because I wouldn't have been... I wouldn't have realized that the Ghostbusters were actually that popular in Japan, so... I have to wonder, yeah, do you think that's true? Or they just have an opportunity to get the license?

I don't know what the Ghostbusters did in Japan. Hollywood movies were coming out over there. Yeah, I'm sure it did reasonably well over there. This kind of happened with licensing issues across territories. If you look at Kimco's Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle series, that was all over the place in terms of licenses. It originally came out in Japan as a Famicom Disc System game called Roger Rabbit. then it was released as a Famicom game or a Game Boy game called Mickey Mouse and then as an NES game called Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle.

So it's like three licenses on one game. You're really getting ahead of us. That's actually the next game on our list. But before we move on, I do want to play, again, we're going to play the Ghostbusters theme in all of these games. Here's the new Ghostbusters 2 NES theme. I think it's fairly accurate. Again, you've got to use that noise channel, guys.

Not using the noise channel. Go home. I like it. Yeah. This is very late NES. This is very late NES sounding. They're using all of the channels. Yeah, the noise channel is a nice deep, heavy percussion.

Yeah. Very good. Very good hell. Maybe the Kirby music guy did that too. Who knows? It looks like even though this didn't come out in the U.S. on NES, this is the game that was converted to Game Boy. Right, right. And released in the U.S. by Activision.

Right. So, once again, Game Boy wins. Yes, and kind of better in some ways, with one last level, but still I'm looking forward to your Game Boy World version of that, Game Boy World take on that. Marking the dying gasp of Ghostbusters, as you already said, this is kind of the dying gasp of Ghostbusters, at least in the US and in Japan. And I think that Ghostbusters too kind of like, well, it kind of hinted at it when the Ghostbusters are there and all the kids only care about He-Man, because Ghostbusters are

already lame. That seemed lame because, well, sorry to use the same word, but in 1989, I don't think anyone cared about He-Man either. He-Man was also named by that. Yeah, I feel like that was written when He-Man was a big deal and everyone had moved on. Maybe it was, they would have, if that was accurate, Max Landis in that scene would have been asking for Ninja Turtles or something.

Yeah, exactly. I think so. Wow. So we're going to move on to the next game. Again, another game that is also the name of another game on our list, the real Ghostbusters for Game Boy. It should be said, this game came out in October of 1995. the Ghostbusters cartoon ended in 1991.

It ended in our hearts before then, to be honest. A little late to the party, must be said. It feels like one of those, oh, this license is cheap. Remember when there were like Gremlins and ET games on Game Boy Advance? That's what this feels like, really. And, Jeremy, this game is by Chemco. What does that mean? It means it's secretly a part of the Crazy Castle series.

In a way, it feels more like a load runner, though. So in Japan This is a Mickey Mouse game And in Europe It's a Garfield game With my favorite name of all time It's called Garfield Labyrinth

Because when I think of Garfield I think of him in a David Bowie Yes exactly I think this might have also been Released in Germany With like that Hugo character That troll

Oh I didn't see that But so the funny connection I have that Jeremy brought up earlier Is that this is a Peter of Megamon game in America And a Garfield game in Europe And Lorenzo music with the most, one of the best

voices of all time, I swear, I missed that man in his voice, but he voiced both Peter Macman and Garfield. And the story behind that is... Not in the games, though. Not in the games, no, but the reason Full House's Dave Cooleyer replaced him is that Bill Murray saw the cartoon one day and he was like, why do I sound like

Garfield? So they basically got a guy to do a Bill Murray impression to replace him, which was a real shame. But before we move on, let's hear the real Ghostwester's theme. This will be the last thing that we play because the next game will actually just use the Ray Parker song because it'll happen like 16 years later. So here's

the Game Boy Real Ghostbusters. It's kind of like the NES version, I think, not very good, of the first game.

So, yeah, this is basically a puzzle platformer where you play as Peter Vankman. It feels a bit like load runner in that your

ability is to destroy a block of the ground in front of you or behind you and to trap enemies and there's really no ghostbusting. In fact, I was looking at different versions of this game and they're not that different. In fact, the enemies are the same. The things you're collecting are the same. It's just like a very

low effort kind of character swap. They really just put a Peter Vankman Sprite in there and said like, yeah, his power proton pack is only good for digging straight down in front of him. And it's not a very good Peter Vankman Sprite either. It's actually kind of bad and not. It's really just a dude.

Yeah, and it doesn't look like him at all. I mean, Peter was my favorite character. I loved every sarcastic character, which probably explains who I am today. But him and Raphael like to find my cartoon character heroes, I think, as a kid. But, yeah, I mean, there's not a lot to say. I don't think anyone played this game. I'd be surprised if it's sold at all because the real Ghostbusters were nothing. There was, like, 93 October, it was all about Power Rangers.

No kid cared about Ghostbusters by then. I mean, yeah, totally. I mean, but yeah, no one cares about this game. It's a very late Game Boy release, at least before the, you know, I guess Link's Awakening would come out in a few months. But that was considered kind of the end of the lifespan of that system until Pokemon, I think. So, Jeremy, are you going to argue against this or do you agree? You just made a face. Do you think?

I just sneeze. Okay. That was his body making a face. Do you agree with that, Jeremy? Like 93 might have been like, oh, the Game Boy's over. People thought maybe... I don't think I really felt like Game Boy was over until 1994-95. Yeah, I guess Donkey Kong 94.

Donkey Kong land. 93 was the year of the Super Game Boy. I mean... Yeah. I kind of gave it a shot in the arm, actually. It still felt pretty relevant to me. Well, this game made it seem like the Game Boy was dying anyways. Ouch.

So, Let's move on to our, maybe our final game. We have time to talk about one last thing that is not a Ghostbusters game, but it's actually the best Ghostbusters game. But let's talk about Ghostbusters, colon, the video game, 2009 for everything. Which is, I have not seen the Ghostbusters reboot. Ghostbusters' answer the call, but this is essentially Ghostbusters 3 in a way. First of all, who has played this game?

I have. I've played it when I was unemployed, so my time was meaningless, and I enjoyed it. I think it's the closest thing to Ghostbusters 3 we're ever going to get. It was really pretty. It was a good-looking game. It had a lot of development problems and mostly due to the fact that when the Activision, like, Vivendi thing happened, it was one of the orphans. But Atari picked it up. It came on 2009.

And I remember I was actually in the industry by then, which is a little strange to say. And I remember that, say, Harold Ramos and Dan Aykroyd were working on it together, and they were talking about how different it was to work on a video game script versus a Hollywood script, mainly because they had to come up with lines for everything. Yeah, they were script doctors on this game. They didn't write the whole thing, but they were consultants, and they think they were pretty hands-on. And I think this made them be less grumpy and bitter about Ghostbusters. I feel like a lot of them resented that this is their most famous thing they've done kind of in a way, especially Bill Murray. But even grumpy sour Bill Murray was talking about how much he enjoyed working on this project, I think, on like David Laderman or something like that. It was kind of a reunion.

It was basically the last reunion that would ever happen because unfortunately Harold Ramos is now dead. I think he died in 2013. Yeah, he was a great comedic force in this world. So Gordie Weaver did not come on this one, though. And that's a funny story. Yep. Because later she told reporters or she told a site or something that I didn't know this was a Ghostbusters reunion. I thought they just wanted me to be Dana again.

If I had known it would be everybody, I would have done it. And, of course, Rick Moranis kind of retired from acting after the Flintstone's movie for the most part to take care of his kids because his wife died in 1991. And he is not really that available anymore. But it was a pretty good reunion of the cast. Alyssa Milano, I'm going to say right now, not a great actor, was the new love interest. Did not play well off of 60-some-year-old Bill Murray, but they did their best. think. Well, it was also, it was, like, supposed to take place in the early 90s, so it was a younger version of Bill Murray. Yeah, yeah. He's only middle age. I will say everyone performed pretty well. I will say that there are some lines where it's like, oh, you couldn't get a second take out of Bill Murray, obviously. He's notoriously hard to work with. He has, like, no agent. I've heard you call, if you want him to work on your thing, you call and leave a message on his answer machine and he might get back to you. He's very reclusive in that way. But this is. a very by the numbers of

its time scripty third person shooter. It is not a bad game. It's also nothing to write home about. In some parts are a little annoying but they do their best and it is an admiral attempt to make something out of the Ghostbusters license and there is trapping ghosts. It's like all about hunting and trapping

ghosts. Scanning stuff with your PKE meter like Metroid Prime like getting a lot of lore out of the Ghostbusters universe, things like that. It's a great exploration of that world. If you're a fan of the game And by then, you know, a lot of us were in our 20s and 30s, those two of us who grew up with Ghostbusters, like, it was really great because, I mean, you had lots of cool fan servicey things. Like, you were going around the Ghostbusters Firehouse, which was fully rendered. You can talk to Vigo.

Vigo was hanging out there and was being all like snide and snarky. Like, it wasn't evil anymore. It's Max Von Cito who does his line. That's right. That's right. Oh, my God. It's all like that. Like, come here, boy.

I'll wear you like pets. But, yeah, yeah, if you're a fan, like this is basically the game you always. always wanted. Yes, exactly. It was the game that I wanted in 1991, but of course, couldn't have. Yeah. And in fact, I mean, it's very much, it very much throws you into the, like, this game is like you are hanging out with the Ghostbusters because it is a, the protagonist is like

Krono and Krono Trigger, like Ness and Earthbound. You are a generic person. You are a generic white guy. The kid, the rookie. Although, I don't know if you guys played the Wii version ever, you could also be a generic white girl. That's right, yeah. Although none of the dialogue would change.

they'd still address you as him. Yeah, oh, man. Well, I guess you couldn't get that many extra lines out of those actors. But, yeah. Although there are some dialogue differences. And, like, the Wii version sort of plays down some of the more suggestive bits. I see. It's a little more family-friendly, yeah.

There are some different levels. Like, I think, in the 360 PS3 one, you shoot up an architect studio. And in the Wii one, it's like a game design studio. Oh, okay. And you get, like, a bunch of sprite-based enemies and start flying at you. Yeah. Yeah, I like the choice. I mean, I wish there was a female version of this in the more popular version, the better version of this game.

But it's funny, they kind of excuse it where it's like, your character tries to talk sometimes and is interrupted. And they don't want to learn your name because they don't want to get to attached to you because apparently they've been through rookies before who have died on the job, it seems. Yeah, and the rookie was actually played by the associate producer of the game, Ryan French. And I'll link to a YouTube interview with him, but it's interesting as to how he got the role. it's it's kind of I would feel weird about playing the most generic white guy ever in a video game because he kind of is he's sort of like the default white guy you would see just like walking on the streets like the character creator white guy that has no none of the options altered on his design so really I think the banter and the presence of the cast makes this game it's just great to be with the Ghostbusters and hear them like joke and And here Egon be Egon, hear Ray be Ray, here Peter be Peter, and here Winston be Winston. Winston is given a lot more to do, I think. I think they finally do more with this character, and I think there was a conscious choice

to make more of Winston. The actor's actually really good. I like him in a lot of different things. Ernie Hudson? Yeah. Yeah, he's great. He's really great. I think he's missing from like the first half of the game, but then he shows up and

it's like, hey, guys, I was just finishing up my Ph.D. Yeah, he's given a bit more respect, I think. So, as Michael pointed out, and I think Jeremy, too, there is a, so there's a different version of this game with much of the same dialogue. I think it's like 95% the same in the same story, but it's the Wii, the PS2, and PSP versions are more stylized, and they are kind of real Ghostbusters-ish, but not really, but Egon does have big hair at least. So I think there was some inspiration there, but they didn't or couldn't use those real Ghostbusters characters for whatever reason. And I don't know why they made that choice probably because they're working on systems with the lower power and they wanted to be more convincing and give you a better experience with what that hardware is capable of. But I haven't played these at all. Has anyone played these versions of this game at all?

I've played the Wii one a bit. How does that work with the Wii mode? Is it fun? It's a little tough because it felt a lot more responsive and sensitive, I guess. So, you know, and pointing it at the screen is just kind of, me. By 2009, the motion control thing wasn't quite the novelty had been. I'm remembering, like, I didn't actually play the Wii one. I played the PS2 one, which is identical, but tries to adapt the Wii controls to PS2 and does not do such a good job.

There were a few games like that, like Silent Hill Shattered memories, things like that. They were Wii skews, but they also have a PS2 version, yeah. Yeah, play it on the Wii if you can. What an odd time to be alive. There are seven versions of this game that, yeah. It was all different developers, too. The one who made the 360 PS3 version, this is easily their best game. They're mostly known for porting like Metal Slug Anthology, that kind of stuff.

Yeah, yeah, terminal reality. They did a really horrible Walking Dead game, and they also did connect Star Wars, which was really terrible. Which gave us like Darth Vader dancing for like YMCA or something. It no longer exists the studio, so RIP, but this is definitely their best work. There is a unique DS game that I only watch videos of. but it is a top-down game with driving sequences. It looks okay. I never played it.

I probably never will. But so there, it's, what, again, what a weird time to be alive when there are three versions of a license game. It just reminds me of the 90s. I mean, it was, you know, at this point, Ghostbusters nostalgia was definitely in full swing. Yeah. Because the 80s were back, baby. Yes. And they will never leave.

To some extent, like, the Ghostbusters nostalgia has not left us. I'd say that a lot of us are still fans. of it, so. Yeah. move on. We have time, thank God, for the last game in our list. And so what I forgot to mention is it doesn't really matter because you can't read any of this content, but like I did on one-up with all of these

Simpsons games, I wrote about every Ghostbusters game. This was my last entry. The secret best Ghostbusters game to borrow Shane Bettenhausen terminology. That is Luigi's Mansion. It is actually the best Ghostbusters game ever made. And I'm happy that I think it was, there

was a lot riding on it for the GameCubes launch. It was unfairly criticized for not being a Mario platformer, but I think people have come around to realize it is a fun adventure game, sort of a parody of Resident Evil in a way. I think now that we've had a few system launches, Nintendo system launches, without a Mario platformer that changes the universe. I think people are kinder to it. But you do have to keep in mind that the NES launched with Super Mario Brothers, the Super

NES launched with Super Mario World, and the N64 launched with Super Mario 64. So there was this precedent here and very high expectations for a new Nintendo system launch. And this game was designed to be very modest and to provide a totally different experience. And people just weren't ready for that. And people don't like it when Nintendo gets weird. They're like, I don't understand. This isn't Zelda.

Nintendo's at their best, actually. Game Game Game Game was weird, peak weird Nintendo, I think. I agree. No, that's, and. But, you know, those people are dumb. Yes, exactly. With the journalists, we're going, well, what the heck is this? I mean, this is cute and weird and kind of short, and it's not a graphical extravaganza.

It's just weird. Yeah, and actually Michael brought up on a video game apocalypse, which I forgot, is that this was intended to be a 3D game back when that was going to be the stereoscopic 3D. Yeah, the gimmick of the system, which is why all of the levels are like, you're looking into like sort of a diorama almost. But this game was really showing off the power of the GameCube in that, like, lots of things moving around. You can, you can use, it was just fun to use Luigi's vacuum on objects in the background. We should say Luigi was equipped with the polter gust, which was his way of busting, Ghost. It is so explicitly. That's right, the Game Boy Horror.

But it's so explicitly a Ghostbusters ripoff. In fact, you don't have a trap, but you do suck in ghosts. And the way you do it, it just feels so satisfying. And I feel bad that I never played the Dark Moon sequel. Oh, it's really good. And I heard it's really good. But, man, I love Luigi's Mansion. And I feel like we can credit this for really personifying Luigi, like it or not, as who he is today.

Give him the coward. A coward weirdo. Yeah. Who, you know, you want to root for it, but he's all. also like a giant baby. Kind of a loser. Yeah. I want to say another Ghostbusters knockoff that I don't know if you have on the list, Ghost Hunter.

You know what? I got, so when OneUp was moving and we just had a library, no one was doing anything with, I grabbed it because who knows what would happen to those games. I never got a chance to play it, but I know it's a UK developed PS2 game. Can you talk more about it? Yeah, I reviewed this for GMR magazine way back in the day. Oh, nice. And it's by Studio Cambridge, Sony,

Studio Cambridge, which is the same studio that did, I think, Primal. Oh, primal, okay. Yeah, and it was published by Namco in the U.S. for some reason, but it's very like real Ghostbusters style sticky with like lots of like really big, disturbing, monstrous ghosts that you have to bust and they like take you into like their different worlds. Like I think I just have this weird memory of there's like this ghost family that like lives out on a bayou and you have to like go into this bayou area to bust them and like the the sun is this like gigantic bulbous muscle man who's like died wrestling an alligator and he's

like always wrestling an alligator the the mother is like this villain you like go into this room with like she's just like her corpse sitting in a rocking chair but it's gigantic and like you don't do anything in this room you're just sort of walking through and it's just filled with like those really disturbing sort of set pieces but there's like this lightheartedness that runs through the whole thing. And do you trap ghosts like you do in Ghostbusters? I don't really remember. I do remember there was something like the proton pack where like you're sucking in ghosts

and capturing them. But I don't remember. I don't think there was like a separate trap. But it has been years since I played this. Yeah, it looks interesting. Unfortunately, I feel like we won't play a lot of these games again, especially any licensed Ghostbusters game. But Luigi's Mansion, I'm hoping, gets a re-release on Switch with their virtual console

GameCube, which they're kind of hinting at. Is that true? They're saying, we might do this. They hinted at it. Who knows what the? they actually will do. I replayed it back in 2009 for that one-up blog, and I was like, I love Luigi's Mansion. I liked

it at the time. I was like, this is sort of a 10-hour experience that I paid $50 for in 2001, but it's a fun little diversion. It's like, what if Nintendo made Resident Evil slash Ghostbusters, and I find it just very enchanting, and a weird project they would probably not do

today on that scale as a launch game. It's definitely found its audience, and it's, you know, beloved. I feel like Captain Toad Treasure Tracker has the same Spirit as Luigi's Mansion. A bit, yeah. I feel like it did have roots in another game, but it is a smaller release that just should have been digital and not in a box.

And it was great. It was really good. Yeah, I did play through all of that. But yeah, that is our Ghostbusters episode, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us. I think we covered everything. We did not touch the extreme Ghostbusters because they're too extreme for me, frankly. The game's not very good at it.

Yeah, and I think it's just like a Game Boy Advance game or something. Game Boy Color. Game Boy Color. Okay. In that case, a licensed Game Boy Color game. I suffered through that in preparation for this show. Oh, God. Michael, say something about it then.

I mean, you sacrificed your time. I only played, like, the first level. You're playing as Eduardo. You're very big and very slow. And it kind of takes a minute to get used to the controls because you're shooting this capture beam. And, like, by hitting left and right, you sort of just move it around in a circle. I see. And to aim it.

And, yeah, it's like these maze-like levels where it's, like, you get to the end. And it's like, oh, that's not the end. I had to do something else in here. I don't know extreme Ghostbusters that well. I associate it with like Sonic Underground as these garish awful late 90s cartoons I was kind of too old for and then not for me. But I do remember Maurice Lamar, she played Egon in the real Ghostbusters, came back to play Egon in extreme Ghostbusters. And I was like, maybe I'll watch it for that Egon, but I couldn't even go that far. Egon and Janine, I think, were the only returning characters.

I see. The idea was Ghostbusters the next generation, right? We had like these snarky, you know, 20-somethings. We had some ladies. We had a guy in a wheelchair. Kylie, the goth girl who dressed in football pads. Interesting. And did the new movie acknowledge the old movie at all?

Was it an alternate reality? How did they even address that? Okay, yeah. I was wondering about that. Are you talking about the Melissa McCarthy one? Yes. I call it Answer the Call Cat. That's his actual name that everyone refers to it as.

It's a parody. And that's how it is. And I guess we're not going to talk about sanctum of slime or the the one that was tied in with the new movie. I left that out. The one tied in with the new movie is too new. Sankton of Slym looked too crappy to talk about. But we want to be thorough.

If you have something to say about Sankton of Sly, Michael, this would be the only time anyone talks about on a podcast ever for the rest of time. I haven't done anything to say about Sanktum of Slam. Was it a dual stick shooter? Yeah, I think so. The one thing I associated with box art where they refuse to acknowledge that there are women in the movie on which it is based. It's a logo. There are no women.

Oh, that's like silhouettes or something? Yeah, it's silhouettes. Yeah, yeah. We'll talk about that in 10 years. Or will we? We probably won't. No, no one will. Yeah, it's just weird to see a licensed game on that level.

But, yeah. So to wrap up for my third time, this has been the Ghostbusters episode. Thank you for joining us. This is a fun exploration. I was glad to revisit this eight years later, not on the phone, not nervous in grad school, nervous in San Francisco. Much different experience. But let's move on to our plugs.

I will go last. I want to take a break from talking. Let's move on to. Cat, where can we find you? Hi, I'm Cat Bailey. I run a little website called U.S. Gamer where, you know, we do the usual video game thing, but we're pretty retro-friendly.

So come on down if you really enjoy us. And I also host a podcast called Axlubla with my co-host, Nadia Oxford. We talk about RPGs of all shapes and sizes every Friday. So check us out. We're coming up on our 100th episode. Very exciting.

I'm Mike Oriparas. I host a podcast called Vigigam Apocalypse on which I am usually much less congested than I've been on this episode. Apologies for that. We just passed episode 200 a few weeks ago. Congrats. That's a great landmark. I'm pretty happy about that.

And you can also read my work for Ubisoft at ublog.com. Jeremy, how about you? I'm Jeremy Parrish, and if you go to my Twitter account at twitter.com slash games spite, I will haunt you. It will be exciting.

In the meantime, you can find me here at Retronauts because that's what I do. I will also haunt you at Wikiparas. Yes, and you should follow me at the underscore cap bot because pretty soon my followers will be over 9,000. Oh my God. Yeah. Jeez.

My power meter just broke. It's retronauts, so I need to dust off 10-year-old memes here. Also, I should say follow Wikiparas with an AZ because the EZ is an e-book spot that someone made out. Oh, I see. Those bastards. Well, you can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo. I also write every day for fandom.com about video games and every other Thursday for something awful.com as I have for the past 12 years.

And my other podcast is Talking Simpsons and Chronological Exploration of The Simpsons every Wednesday at Talking Simpsons.com or just search for Talking Simpsons in your podcast machine. It's a great podcast. I love doing it. And we go into such excruciating detail about every joke, every reference, every interesting character move. I think it's a great exploration if you love The Simpsons. And as always, this podcast is brought to you by Patreon. all of our great Patreon listeners, go to patreon.com slash Retronauts to find out how you can help us as little as a dollar a month can

help us stay afloat and we're now an official business and trying to make this a full-time thing. Jeremy has already done it, and we want to do so much more with this podcast and with all the related content. So please go to patreon.com slash Retronauts for more info. You can get ad-free episodes if you donate enough. You can get a t-shirt,

other rewards, and you can just, you know, get as much Retronaut stuff as you want. You can always follow us on Retronauts on Twitter and Retronauts on Facebook. That is a lot of plugs, and I am out of things to say. So thank you so much for joining us this week. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode of Retronauts. We'll see you then. totally up to the Attorney General. Maine, Susan Collins, says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving

of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officer started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear knowing that your charge. will directly affect the lives of others.

The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police say acted as his lookout have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.