Date:
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
Author:
Mark Warner
Editor:
Brent Justice
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Ghostbusters Gameplay Performance and IQ

Who ya gonna call? Ghostbusters! That痴 right; a brand new video game marks the re-release of the feature film on Blu-ray. We値l take this game, which pays homage to the feature films perfectly, through our gauntlet of video cards to see what kind of value and gameplay experience you can get. We値l also see if the stories are true about this being a multi-core CPU aware game using CPU-based Physics.

Introduction

The original Ghostbusters film was released in 1984 by Black Rhino Productions and Columbia Pictures Corporation. On June 16th of 2009, it was re-released on Blu-ray by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. To coincide with the film’s release on Blu-ray, a video game was announced in November of 2008, to be distributed by Atari, and developed by Terminal Reality, with Threewave developing multiplayer content for the Wii, PSP, and PlayStation 2 versions of the game.

In an interview with Strategy Informer, Terminal Reality’s Executive Producer for the game, Brendan Gross, stated that the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 versions of the game would have cooperative multiplayer support. However, a few days before the game launched some observant website editors noticed that the back of the PC version’s box did not contain descriptions of multiplayer support, while the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions did. In addition, the PC version retailed for half the cost of the console versions. A few days later, the game launched in both retail and Steam channels, and the PC version of Ghostbusters did not in fact have multiplayer support in the box. Threewave, which was the studio tasked with multiplayer development, later commented on the lack of multiplayer support for the PC:

Multiplayer for the PC version of Ghostbusters is something that Threewave and Terminal Reality always wanted to do. However, our focus was on making the console version the best that they could be - an experience that allows multiple players to re-live and re-fight many of the themes from the movies. When we looked at the resources necessary to pull off multiplayer on the consoles and the PC, it became a question of what could we do and still be excellent in our execution. We couldn't do all versions with multiplayer simultaneously with the resources that we had available - there was simply too much to do. Something would have to suffer. Therefore, we kept our focus on making the console versions deliver on the promise of being an integral player on the Ghostbusters team.

Multiplayer support for the PC version was definitely planned, and was apparently something that the developer wanted to do. Unfortunately, deadlines exist, and they simply didn’t have the resources to devote to complete the multiplayer portion of the PC version in time. All we can say is that it would have been nice to have that statement from Threewave before the game launched.

Ghostbusters: The Video Game

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Ghostbusters: The Video Game is a third-person shooter. It is set in New York, two years after the events of the second Ghostbusters film. The beginning of the game features the Ghostbusters expanding their team by taking on a rookie after a burst of blue energy has apparently awoken quite a number of hitherto dormant ghosts. Beginning with the escape of Slimer, the famous green blob, the newly reinforced Ghostbusters team goes about battling the minions of their oldest foe: Gozer. He returns again as the destructor in the guise of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, which is the first boss fight in the game.

Throughout the process of tracking down the source of the blue energy emanation, the boys in grey travel all over New York City and do battle with a large number of increasingly violent ghosts and ghouls. The single-player campaign is all there in the PC version of this game, and it is split up over a series of seven levels, each consisting of a handful of checkpoint stages.

The Game Technology

Ghostbusters: The Video Game is powered by Terminal Reality’s own Infernal Engine. The Infernal Engine is a cross-platform development engine with an integrated rendering engine, physics engine, particle system, and audio engine. The rendering engine is multithreaded to take advantage of multicore CPUs on PCs, the PS3, and the Xbox 360, and it scales down to Wii and PSP platforms as well.

The game engine is a DX9.0c renderer with particle effects, per-pixel lighting, relief (bump) mapping, soft particles and advanced water effects. The "Velocity Physics Engine" is a CPU-calculated physics engine, leaving the video card free to handle graphics, as opposed to NVIDIA’s PhysX technology, which attempts both graphics and physics on the GPU. Velocity can calculate collisions with thousands of objects, environmental destruction, vehicle dynamics, ragdoll bodies, and hair and cloth simulation. For more information on the Infernal Engine, read up on it here. To see some technology demos of what this engine is capable of running on multicore CPUs, click [HERE] and [HERE].

The Video Cards

We have eight video cards in this evaluation for your enjoyment today. From AMD, we have the Radeon HD 4870 X2, the Radeon HD 4890 1GB, the Radeon HD 4870 1GB, and the Radeon HD 4770 512MB. From NVIDIA, we have the GeForce GTX 295, the GeForce GTX 285, the GeForce GTX 275, and the GeForce GTX 260 with 216 shaders.