Submission #7831: ShesChardcore's NES Ghostbusters II in 08:30.19

This submission is for the NES game Ghostbusters 2 (not to be confused with "New Ghostbusters 2" which is a different game entirely.) This game is notorious for being bland and difficult. We remove one of those qualifiers. You can probably guess which.

Ghostbusters 2 is based on the movie of the same name. Shocking, I know. There are 3 main game types: Side scroller/shoot stuff and don't get hit levels, driving levels, and two Statue of Liberty levels. Since the levels in each given category are pretty similar, I'll lump them all together with some explanations.

All the sidescroll missions in this game go to the left instead of the right, so this breaks the mold of "just hold right and jump once in a while" I guess. There are various hazards throughout the levels. There are slimers, bigger slimers, things that bounce toward you at varying heights, things that move up and down on a fixed pattern, things you have to jump over, things you have to NOT jump over... It's a mess in the later levels. Everything kills you in one hit if it touches you aside from the red slime thast the slimers drop. All it does is slow you down, which is still bad of course.

You have your gun and traps to help you out. However, the gun is only able to pick up ghostbusters symbols (collecting 20 is a one-up which is very important for later death abuses) and shoot small slimers. None of the other obstacles can even be hurt by it. Only the traps will kill them. Pressing start drops a trap but it takes a second to set up and fire so it's good to clean up some messes behind you (namely those giant slimers) but it's still faster to play aggressively and not slow down to try and trap the bouncy enemies safely. Laying a trap costs no frames which is good at least. You get unlimited traps but only one can be on screen at a given time.

Bouncy enemies can be finessed a bit. By delaying/burning frames before the next thing spawns, you can change its pattern. This is done constantly throughout the run. Most of the time, 1 or 2 frames of delay will save you dozens of frames later by getting better bounce patterns but certain sections take longer and in some cases it's better to just wait for the obstacle to move without wasting more frames earlier to change it up.

There is also a little tech here. Sometimes when you land, you end up two pixels lower on the screen. To jump from here, you need to hold jump for 3-4 frames as you have to "move" back up each pixel. In some instances in this run, this is used in lieu of delaying a frame or wiggling; if we know we have a jump coming up we can deposit those frames more optimally to dodge other things.

There are 2 driving levels. Your car shoots in two directions. Straight ahead, and upwards like a mortar to shoot things above you. These levels are fairly straightforward. You drive right, shoot ghosts, pick up symbols, avoid some obstacles, drive through others for swag, make some jumps and eventually finish the stage. You technically don't even have to kill anything to proceed to the next level but shooting stuff is fun and the less stuff flying at us, the less we have to dodge and the lazier we can be about moving around.

The two most annoying stages in the game come back to back, those being the Statue of Liberty levels. They function as a shooting gallery style of stage. Even though you're scrolling automatically it's just got a different feel from a typical autoscroller and you have to actively kill things to advance.

Each stage has 10 waves of things you need to wipe out. You can fire your torch straight up (and angle it if you pick up a torch powerup) you can move back and forth and most importantly, you can bomb the screen (the book is the bomb.) Certain waves give you bonus stages if you clear them without getting hit or killed. Remember that death abuse we talked about? Here it is. Taking intentional damage/deaths will negate the bonus round. We do actually complete the first one because it's faster than the alternative due to having to wait way too long for something to hit you on that wave. Bombs are especially important as they can end waves VERY fast if they hit more than one thing in the explosion. So instead of having to shoot a dozen pain in the ass things, you can bomb 2-3 of them and get credit for the wave.

There's also a bomb duplication strategy. I don't know if this is a glitch or a bug or lazy coding, but byte (0x00CF) controls the X position of powerups (and special ghosts) when they spawn. Some other value that I didn't bother look for controls the pattern the item uses to move. When you shoot said item, you get the pickup and the item disappears... Or does it? Shooting the item doesn't despawn the item, nor does it 0 out the X position value. It freezes the X position and moves the item offscreen until the next item spawns. With 2 precise shots you can shoot a bomb, collect it, use it, and have the second shot hit the off screen bomb to give you a head start in the next wave. This only works once per spawned bomb so you can't chain it infinitely but being able to do this at all is a massive time save.

Beyond that, all damage and deaths are intentional for bonus game skips and manipping bombs to spawn. Even just shooting randomly can mix up the RNG patterns a bit.

The final 4 stages are side scrollers that get increasingly ridiculous with the amount of things trying to kill you, and I thought it was pretty cool to be able to just stroll through all of this nonsense without actually being in any danger.

Oh, and this game doesn't have a final boss. You get treated to a cutscene of 4 climate change activists protesting by shooting pea soup on a painting and defacing it forever. The planet is saved! This game was just way ahead of its time.

feos: Claiming for judging.

feos: I wish I, too, could solve my problems by shooting pea soup at them! Oh well. Accepting, because everything I questioned in this movie was explained in the submission text.

despoa: Processing...