There's a new launch trailer just released over at Shacknew which also nails down the June 2009 release date:
http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/43333/Ghostbusters-The-Video-Game-Screenshots-Trailer
And for anyone not up on teh game, there's a new progress report over at IGN (posted below) or you can read from someone who doesn't even like Ghostbusters that much...
December 2, 2008 - You can't keep a good team of paranormal investigators down. Just five months after Activision announced that it wouldn't be publishing Ghostbusters: The Video Game -- along with a handful of other newly acquired Sierra titles -- Terminal Reality and the game's new publisher Atari were all too happy to show off the videogame that will reunite Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, Ernie Hudson, and Annie Potts for their legendary roles.
The last time I saw the Ghostbusters firing their proton packs and battling the things that go bump in the night, Ray, Egon, Winston, and the new recruit gamers will play as were traveling deeper and deeper into the New York Public Library while chasing the infamous purple librarian from the first film, whose name is revealed to be Eleanor Twitty in this game. If the news of the Ghostbusters' return has caught you off guard, this game might need a bit of explanation. Set two years after the events of Ghostbusters 2 and written by Ramis and Aykroyd, the game puts you in the boots of the newest 'buster just as a Gozer exhibit gets ready to open in New York. Soon, there's a spike in the amount of paranormal energy in the city, and all of the non-containment unit bound enemies from the boys' past begin popping up -- think Stay Puft, Slimer, etc. You'll dive into a third-person adventure where the proton pack acts as your HUD; where you wear ghosts down with your proton blast before grabbing them with a capture stream and wrangling them into waiting traps; and where you'll use slime blowers, PKE meters, and tons of other Egon-approved goodies.
When I got the controller back in my hands, my play session picked up exactly where it left off oh-so-many months ago; all hell is breaking loose and it's up to the guys to stop it. With the flying books and monstrous ghost that ended the last demo out of the way, Winston radios the team to let them know he's run into some more info on the evildoer Edmund "The Collector" Hoover and none of it is good. Seems this Gozer-worshiper was making all sorts of Gozer sacrifices in the library back in the day, and some of that occult stuff might be leading to the paranormal disturbances our team is seeing now.
Although the majority of the ghouls I ran into during my time in uniform were the same fare I had seen before -- the monster made of books whose lamp brain I had to rip off with a proton capture stream, the ghost warriors with book shields I had to rip down, and so on -- this demo definitely pushed the title into new environments. After the book depository, the team moved into a children's reading room that was decorated in the traditional bright colors and kiddie decor, but once I activated my PKE Metter (a move the drops the POV to a first-person perspective and puts on your ecto-goggles), I found ghostly handprints of children along the perimeter of the room. There was more PKEing and ghostbusting as I made my way deeper and deeper into the library -- even coming across a lone book on a pedestal that was guarded by a pair of ghouls in robes and a furnace room filled with fiery monsters -- before coming to the Collector's private office/creepy Gozer room.
This locale was something off the beaten path and not what you'd probably expect to find in the real New York Public Library; cramped and cave-like, the dank room was littered with disregarded books, paperwork, and brick. When we arrived, the ghostly librarian was behind the desk, Ray nominated me to make contact, and things went about as well as you'd expect. Soon, she was zipping around the room and we were firing proton blasts as fast as we could. However, as the fight wore on, it became noticeable that Eleanor wasn't trying to beat us -- she was trying to lead us. When we stopped trying to capture her, a portal opened and we stepped through. To Hell.
You read that right: the Ghostbusters go to Hell in this game.
It probably isn't the Satan-led Hell, but there's definitely inter-dimensional travel to an ungodly place filled with ghostly beasts and endless voids. I won't spoil too much for you, but when I got to this point, I did get to see some of the game's reported puzzle solving mechanics in action. During the tutorial for the slime tether -- the alternate fire for the slime blower -- I had to tag one end of a broken bridge with goop and then tag a suspended portion of the same bridge with the other end of the slime before watching the tether pull the two pieces together so that I could cross a bottomless chasm.
So, yeah. On one hand, I got to play a demo in the same location as most of my previous busting experience, but on the other hand, I went to Hell. That caught me off guard. The scope -- and subsequent length -- of this library level is pretty gigantic. If you toss in the section I played from the first demo, you're probably looking at 40 minutes to maybe an hour of gameplay that takes you from the street outside of the library, through the marble entryway, through a few reading rooms, around the book depository, into a children's wing, into a furnace room filled with smoldering ash creatures, down into the dank depths of the buildings, and then through another dimension. That's a long level and a lot for the Ghostbusters to tackle. Thankfully (although lip syncing definitely hasn't happened yet) the journey is peppered with in-jokes from the characters and the types of Ghostbuster lines fans would expect.
The Terminal Reality folks I spoke to during the demo said that they're trying to have something funny, fun, or scary every 15 feet in the game and recognize that the title can't be ten hours of just trapping ghosts. They've been saying this since the first time I met them, but this extended look at the library level was the first chance I had to see that philosophy in action. I still worry that the experience could get stale over an extended period of time if that 15-foot idea isn't executed well -- and the aliasing on the characters needs to be addressed before launch -- but this demo showed that long levels in this title don't have to be the same blast-trap-repeat process.
Ghostbusters: The Video Game is set for June 2009 release to coincide with the original film's 25th anniversary.
