The NES game tie-in for Ghostbusters is infamously hard. How hard? Hard as balls. The way that old timey video games were, when they didn't need to worry about bad online reviews or people sending their games back or whatever. Back in the day if you couldn't complete a game, you just didn't complete it. There were no walkthroughs, no cheat codes, no downloadable save states to let you skip difficult levels. In most cases, though, actually muddling through these impossible missions will eventually reward you with a cool ending, like Metroid's Samus reveal or the meme-tastic Professional Wrestling's "A WINNER IS YOU!" Ghostbusters was a special kind of Old Video Game Difficult. It was a lot worse. Ported by Japanese developer Micronics from the original Commodore 64 title, the NES Ghostbusters was riddled with bugs, translation mistakes and dodgy controls that made the game even more impenetrable than it already was. Once you got past the most challenging boss battle ever - the mighty ZUUL, minus workable controls - you would hope you get a pretty good ending, right? Maybe the fun "I love this town!" musical montage over credits like the film, rendered in 8-bit form? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCO35b47wUQ Nope, that's it. A "conglaturation" followed by the rather arrogant (and totally incorrect) assertion that you've just completed a "great game" and that you have now earned yourself a rest, great hero. That's literally it. Then you get kicked back to the main menu. Even the usual feeling of accomplishment from beating a particularly tricky title is robbed by this totally awful disappointment of an ending. The only thing worse would be if all life as you know it stopped instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploded at the speed of light. But only marginally.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
