New Ghostbusters Video Game in the Works

Next month's issue of Game Informer has a big, familiar symbol on its cover. On their website, they tease the announcement of a brand-new Ghostbusters video game. This isn't some knock-off, either: "Harold Ramis, Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd are getting back together and revisiting their roles to make a sequel to Ghostbusters 1 and 2 - in video-game form, and we've got the first details. Both Aykroyd and Ramis are teaming up for scriptwriting duties and are going far beyond just the typical licensed add-your-voice-to-the-game-you-had-nothing-to-do-with formula" Commentary on the announcement provided by Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

Comments

First Screen here

[EGSonikku]

http://kotaku.com/gaming/ghostbusters/ghostbusters-screen-co+op--mp-info-322990.php

They've said the game is set in the early 90's after Ghostbusters II so either the Stay Puft Marshmellow Man makes a comeback or there is a flashback. Im voting he gets ressurected, or they are taking some license with the flashback since last I checked they never did and scaling of walls ;-)

Hilarious screenshot:

[bruins01]

http://cache.kotaku.com/assets/resources/2007/11/gbstaypuft.jpg

Re:Scraping the bottom of the barrel.

[ddrichardson]

The movie came out in 1984. It's the end of 2007 now. Are they hurting that badly for material?

The Warriors came out in 1979 and the game in 2005 yet is one of the best film tie-ins I've ever seen, expanding the story and letting you play through the movie.

I guess a good game is a good game, maybe when they aren't being rushed out to coincide with the movie's release, not to mention having a cult following.

Very true, not the first time...

[Panaqqa]

Actually, there was a Ghostbusters game written for the Commodore 64 that I can recall playing back in about 1984. Surprisingly good graphics for the standards of the time, and considering the machine could only user 8K of RAM for video (and that 8K it had to steal from the 64K RAM total in the machine).

As I recall, the program was a little over 30K in size. Hmph. These days a "hello world" executable can run 1.7 MB.

Re:Very true, not the first time...

[Applekid]

It's very possible to get a Windows "Hello World" made in Visual Studio in under 5 or 6K.

If setting it to "release" mode is all you rely on you'll be unhappy. You can enter project settings and set options such as align on 1-Byte boundaries instead of the default 16, REALLY remove debugging information (strangely, some still sticks around), set the linker to exclude the default libs, things like that. Look at the options, think about what they would do, and set it to the one you think is appropriate. When done, save your profile for future projects.

You might have to dig around the Win32 API to get the "native" equivalent to printf (it'd probably be easier to just call one of the messagebox functions), but you can do it.

Ya gotta trick Microsoft's compiler into doing what you want (as opposed to just passing parameters to gcc) but it can get done. I've personally built an application for our sysadmins that monitors a specific system environment variable and lets you set it to one of three possible values from the notification area with just a click. All in exactly 4608 bytes, packaged in an EXE, including the tray icon with only Visual Studio and no packing utilities.

To be fair, though, you shouldn't HAVE to dig through all that stuff, and, heh, I probably should have stopped when the application was done. But I had a coworker tell me from the start I should just do it in .NET and I had a heart attack and aspired to make the tiniest thing possible. B)

Variety has a better article

[Champion3]

There's a way more informative article with additional screen shots here. Looks like Ernie Hudson (Winston), Annie Potts (Janine), and William Atherton (Peck) are signed on!