Game Preview: Ghostbusters' Rises from Its Grave

Mclatchy -Tribune News Service

"Ghostbusters"

Platform: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Wii

Style: 1-player action

Publisher: Atari

Developer: Terminal Reality

Release: 2009

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According to developer Terminal Reality, the reports of "Ghostbusters'" unfortunate demise were greatly exaggerated. When Activision Blizzard passed over the game after gobbling up previous publisher Vivendi Games, executive producer Brendan Goss became anxious about the project's future - albeit temporarily.

"While there was a certain amount of nervousness, that went away the morning it became public knowledge and it was announced," Goss says. "I probably had 25 calls that day from publishers saying, 'Who do we need to talk to?'"

With input from the original cast and a script co-written by Dan Akroyd and Harold Ramis, why did Activision decide against publishing such a seemingly sure thing in the first place? According to Goss, it was a matter of the game not gelling with the company's overall philosophy.

"'How are you guys doing a movie IP without a movie?'" Goss recalls Activision asking. "It doesn't make sense - it doesn't fit our model, so you're not going to make the move over to Activision.'"

Atari won the courtship between several other publishers, and the game is set for a 2009 release, just in time for the 25th anniversary of the first film. "We know that Sony has huge plans for that, and also Atari," Goss says.

We recently got our hands on the game again, and while there wasn't much new content since we last saw it, it's looking as good as ever. Players can expect to spend an hour or more in each of the game's eight levels; the library level we played took almost two hours to complete. Wrecking things with the Ghostbusters' Proton Packs is so much fun that we expect to squeeze even more time out of each destruction-prone environment.

With the game originally set to come out this fall, Terminal Reality has put the extra time to work.

"We're definitely not sitting idle," says producer Michael Fetterman with a laugh. Goss says having those extra months of development time has been a godsend for the team.

"It's given us the opportunity to go back through - as every developer wants - and have more time to put in more polish and to also take a look at some of the feedback that we've had and identify if there's low-hanging stuff that we can do that the fans will respond well to. I think we've got some tricks up our sleeve that people are going to be pleasantly surprised by when the game does come out."

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