Atari Preview Tour: Ghostbusters (DS)

You’ll start off at the Fire House where you need to equip your Ghostbusters with different weapons, upgrade the Ghostbusters, fix up your Ecto-1, and various other tasks. There are a lot of management options here and lots of ways to upgrade the Ghostbusters giving the DS version an RPG element to it.

From there, you can play through the main story mission or play through side missions. You’ll earn money and reputation depending on how successful you are on your missions. If you plain suck, you’ll actually lose as no one wants to hire you.

To get to a mission, you will actually drive the Ecto-1. Yes, you drive the car in this game! You can even turn on the sirens! The camera switches will be pointed at the rear of the Ecto-1 as you drive through the city trying to reach your destination. You’ll be on a time limit, but there’s a map you can follow on the top screen so you can see the best routes to your objective. The Ecto-1 also has a proton beam on it that you can actual fire while driving. Just tap on the screen and your proton beam will shoot out at where you’re touching. Oh and the Ghostbusters theme song plays every time you drive.

[Editor's note: This music video is epic lulz. I've never watched it until the other night. Just wow.]

After reaching the library, the camera shifts to bird;s eye view on the four Ghostbusters. The Ghostbusters will follow directly behind whomever the player has selected and they will all fire whenever you shoot at anything by touching on the touch screen. There’s a ghost that’s running loose on this first section that keeps hiding in objects. You’ll have to use your PKE meter to track it down throughout the first section until you can actually capture it. This ghost can actual posses one of the Ghostbusters too, so hopefully you’ve equipped the right blaster to rip the ghost out of a human host.

Eventually, the ghost is caught and we are presented with a challenge that’s blocking the next section. A lion statue is blocking a door and will move if its riddle is solved. You’ll have to be the right Ghostbuster in order to answer the question so you’ll have to switch between each Ghostbuster until you get the question right.

Once through, I encountered more ghosts that would hide in random objects. It was a larger room this time and I found leaving one Ghostbuster in a stationary position in the room would help me capture the ghosts faster.

I eventually gave up on this preview, as I found it way too annoying having to chase after these ghosts. It's just not as fun when the viewpoint is set like this. The ghosts will fly off screen and it became a chore finding the ghosts again.

Hopefully, the entire game isn’t based around players having to chase, shoot, turn on PKE meter, locate, shoot, and chase every single time.

Ghostbusters is developed by Red Fly for the Wii, PS2 and DS, developed by Terminal Reality for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC, and published by Atari. It will be out sometime early 2009.