With The Conduit out of the way and a couple more Wii projects being polished off, High Voltage Software is now ready to make the leap into the "next-generation." They've signed an agreement with developer Terminal Reality that grants them a lifetime license for the Infernal Engine, which was the driving force behind the extremely well-received Ghostbusters: The Videogame on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Joe Kreiner, VP Sales and Marketing at Terminal Reality, neatly dismisses the Wii as a current generation platform.

"With more than 75 titles shipped, High Voltage Software has a proven track record of developing quality products on all of the current platforms. Through the use of the Infernal Engine technologies, they are now able to extend that remarkable track record into the next-generation platforms."

Poor Wii. Still, considering how painful it was to read reviews for The Conduit, perhaps moving to a new platform is in order.

Because while the individual SKUs of the game may not have performed as well as many would have predicted, the game released on a lot of systems. Seven, to be exact. 360, PS3, PS2, Wii, DS, PSP and PC. And according to developers Terminal Reality, when those sales are combined the game has sold over a million units.

Add in the fact the game will probably have a long tail, that it's outsold any other movie tie-in for 2009 and that in PAL territories it's not out on 360 yet, and thing's are looking just fine for Ghostbusters, thanks.

When it came to producing a video game that was exciting and captured the spirit of 'Ghostbusters,' a Lewisville outfit got the call [Star Telegram]

The Fort Worth Star Telegram fingered the cost of development for the game at $15 million to $20 million.

The budget figure ran in a profile of lead Ghostbusters development studio Terminal Reality, which earned the opportunity to make a Ghostbusters game after one of its militiary-shooter prototypes impressed Vivendi Universal in 2006.

Ghostbusters film and game actor and co-writer Dan Aykroyd has also talked about the budget to the press, estimating in a June interview with the magazine If that the game's publishers spent "like $12 or $15 million" to make the game.

Last month, the CEO of Ubisoft said he expected the average video game budget to swell to $60 million in the next gaming hardware generation.

Vivendi, which merged with Activision, did not publish the game when it was released in June. In the U.S., Atari did. But a representative from the publisher did not respond to a request about these budget figures by press time. Kotaku has also inquired directly with Terminal Reality and will let readers know if they can shed any more light on the cost to make the game.

When it came to producing a video game that was exciting and captured the spirit of 'Ghostbusters, a Lewisville outfit got the call [Fort Worth Star-Telegram]

The presence of Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, the film's original writers and two of its leading actors, lent weight to the game as more than just a supernatural shooter involving familiar faux-technology. But we've seen impressive star power in movie adaptations before. So is Ghostbusters: The Video Game just a bunch of friends getting the band back together, or are we in for something more, a canonical sequel in its own right?

Loved
Multiplayer: This made me love the game all over again. It's deep and fun enough to keep you involved with Ghostbusters for well more than, say any rental period. You get instant action or cooperative campaigns - action being one "job" and campaigns being a series of them. Job types range from survival (destroy ghosts) to containment (trap them) to protection (protect a series of positions) and "thief" (a reverse-capture-the-flag, ghosts against you.) The ranking, achievements, and "most wanted" ghosts you encounter provide plenty of incentive to hang in there and pile up your score. The weapon enhancements you accumulate lend a semi-MMO quality to your online career. But mostly, it's just nonstop ghostbusting action, which is probably what made you reach for the game in the first place. I promised my review copy to a friend, and after finishing my first campaign, mailed it to him and raced back out to buy myself a copy so we could play together. That's how good the multiplayer is: It's $60 impulse-buy good, for someone who had the game for free.

Ghosts in a Ghost Land: Visually, Ghostbusters: The Video Game hits the original movie's art direction right on the screws. The phantasms carry on the themes of the original films, presenting the spirits as gross caricatures of their emotions and motivations. Not only is their look consistent, so is their behavior, and their ghostly swooping and darting, heedless of aerodynamics - as it should be. The more warped intersections of our world with the beyond are very impressively rendered; walls and ceilings disintegrate, the rubble drifting away into infinite, swirling backgrounds.

PKE Performance: Quite subtly, this game lets you decide what kind of Ghostbuster you want to be. If you want to blast your way through the game like a paranormal firefighter, go for it. But if you want to investigate a scene before cleaning it up, the PKE Meter is your tool. It exposes collectibles (worth money for upgrades) and scans ghosts, giving you some extra cash and filling up your notebook with some amusing histories. This should appeal to completionists, and very much extends the campaign mode's lifespan.

Doing damage: Destruction is an art in Ghostbusters, and the proton stream is your medium. Nearly everything in this game is destructible - most of it quite pointlessly, but that was Ghostbusters, wasn't it? A running dollar-figure arbitrarily totals up, the damage you do in your career. It's just a score, this has no effect on your in-game funds. Large insurance policies taken out by the city cover all the cleanup, and since this is set 14 years before Hurricane Katrina, you know they'll pay up. So go ahead and rake those priceless works of art with your slime blower. And after you finish a prolonged bout with all four Ghostbusters wrangling a platoon of spookies in a library basement, be sure to take a look around and admire your tableau of flickering scorch trails and slime puddles. It would make Jackson Pollack proud.

Ghost wrangling: On harder difficulties, the ghosts soar higher, and slamming them into the ground or walls takes greater effort. The venting option, too, is brilliant, forcing a reload-type mechanic on you without violating the infinite-ammo supply of a canonical proton pack. You'll have to develop your own methodology, when to deploy a capture stream, how to use it, and when to let go and vent the pack. Sometimes it can feel like you're not connected to anything on the other end. But sitting here writing this I'm still lured in by the whirring sound of the trap and the satisfaction of dragging some struggling ghoul down a flight of stairs, through stacks of books, and into confinement. Every one is a battle in its own right, rarely repetitive. I relished having ghosts to trap, even though they took much more work than those I blasted into infinity.

Dialogue: People speculated this game couldn't possibly be as funny as the film because Bill Murray's celebrated ad-libbing, said to be the source of so many quotable lines, isn't feasible in a mo-capped production. In a way, they're wrong. At times, the in-game banter substitutes for this ad-libbing, and some of the lines are bona fide howlers. Winston Zeddemore's obvious, yet subtly stated agitation at having to fight Confederate ghosts cracked me up so bad I had to hit pause. "I wish these traps had windows," he said, "it'd be like a little Vicksburg snow globe." Even the little things show you this was not some thrown-together script. In the game's first sequence, New York is rocked by a pulse of energy, passing through the Ghostbusters headquarters. Everyone staggers. A lesser writer would script out "What the hell was that?" or some other useless exclamation. Here, Harold Ramis calls for Egon to say, deadpan, "Was that us?" Just three words, but they instantly brought me back into the world of the Ghostbusters.

Hated:
Errata: For all of the above, Ghostbusters is not a perfect game. Here's an omnibus paragraph buttoning up the flaws, none of which on their own are enough to spoil the game but need to be mentioned. Single-player load times are a bitch, especially after repeatedly failing a mission. The single-player campaign upgrades are nice, but you'll have bought them all by the middle of the game, diminishing the incentive to do extras to earn them. For another reason, I felt a twang of disappointment midway through; the mystery seemed to be building up for an incredibly long experience, and then the story abruptly and conspicuously lurched into its resolution phase. Finally, in parts the game really could have used a map, or at least some way to highlight your next objective. In dimly lit environments it is not always obvious how to overcome the obstacle in front of you.

Ghostbusters: The Video Game is what a film adaptation should be - true to everything that made a movie a hit and a thrill ride in the first place, without shamefully exploiting itself. It's not the first good game of the season; but in a way you'll feel like summer has truly begun once you play Ghostbusters, a game that very much honors its blockbuster heritage.

Some might think that a game that brings in the entire core cast (minus one), two of whom are the original writers, should be a success born on third base. If so, why hasn't it been done until now? Because for everything in the gameplay and set design expected of a AAA title, that's what puts the shine on this experience. You want to be a Ghostbuster? Strap on the pack, because you are going to run with the real Ghostbusters. "This team plays to win!" Winston said, right before the finale, and I swear I swelled up with pride.

Ghostbusters: The Video Game was developed by Terminal Reality and published by Atari for the PlayStation 3, PC, and Xbox 360. Multiplayer developed by Threewave Software. A substantially different version is available for Wii and PS2, developed by Red Fly; Released on June 16. Retails for $59.99 PS3 and 360, $49.99 PC. Played the Xbox 360 version. Completed singleplayer campaign on "casual" difficulty; retested several levels of singleplayer on all difficulties; Played all online multiplayer modes.

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And while karaoke games are normally seen as a bit naff, something for young girls and drunks, I'd been secretly looking forward to it all week. Not just because I'm partial to a bit of rap on the side, but also because I got the impression from the people involved - former Rockstar execs and Def Jam records - that the project was serious.

And that's exactly the impression I got walking away at the conclusion of the demonstration, at which we spoke with 4mm founder Jamie King and Warner Music Group Executive Vice President Kevin Liles (who is also head of Def Jam Interactive).

Rapstar is the combination of two things: 4mm's desire to carry the same torch its founders did at Rockstar by taking modern culture seriously (not to mention having a genuine appreciation of it), and to, as 4mm founder Jamie King puts it, "be a response to a market that is not being catered for".

The mechanics of the game will be familiar to, well, almost everyone, as it follows the same structure as SingStar, Lips, Rock Band and Guitar Hero: World Tour. Lyrics and coloured bars appear on stage, you sing/rap to match the pitch and tone of the original, and you're scored on your performance. No surprises there.

But where Rapstar looks to change the game is in everything else about the title. Where SingStar presents itself to a specific market, Rapstar is the anti-SingStar, which looks to deliver that same experience (it's even got the same community features and 30-second trailers as SingStar's PS3 version) only with a front-end aimed at hip-hop fans.

It's community features will support battles. Users can select which 30 seconds of their performance they'd like uploaded to the website (SingStar's doesn't yet allow that choice, though that feature is coming soon), and when uploaded, can trigger text messages to be sent to competitors/friends if a high score is broken. And, in a strong sign of how seriously the cultural and musical side of this is being taken, Def Jam will be keeping an eye on those performances.

"I wanna find the next DMX...in Japan", says Liles. "But I can't spend a year there lookin' for the motherfucker". He'll be urging all Rapstar players to keep an ear to the ground, and if they know of any half-decent MCs, to make sure their performances are uploaded on the website (which will also support freestyle clips).

For all the game's mechanical strengths, though (and it appears up to the job of tracking your rapping), these music games live and die on the strength of their tracklist. We only saw seven songs today, from artists ranging from TI to B.I.G. to Kanye West, but Liles stresses that those may not make the final release, as around 400 tracks have been licensed, and over the next few months it'll be a matter of sorting through them and finding the right mix for the retail release.

After that, of course, King says there'll be a bevy of downloadable content, and that both the retail package and subsequent downloadables will cover all kinds of hip-hop content, from old to new, mainstream to underground, Def Jam artists to rappers outside of the label's roster. And after that? The 4mm boss says Rapstar is just the beginning of a long-running collaboration with Def Jam, which will see the release of "a number of different games".

Rapstar is due later this year on the 360, PS3 and Wii. As an interesting footnote, the developers of the title were unveiled for the first time today in the game's opening sequence, and they are Terminal Reality. Yes, the guys who just made The Ghostbusters game.

The studio says that the Infernal Engine offers excellent cross platform support and is compatible with all of the "leading gaming systems" including the PC.

The developer plans to show off the engine at the DICE conference over the next few days. They also plan to release a tech demo featuring a revamped look at The Stranger from their 1999 game Nocturne. I wonder if that means we can expect a true sequel to their survival horror game.

Harold Ramis' hair in the 1984 movie Ghostbusters was years ahead of its time, and quite frankly I wasn't sure that any amount of modern technoology could possibly render it faithfully. Thankfully, Terminal Reality has proven me wrong, possibly using advanced alien technology to make sure Spengler's oddly-upswept doo is all present and accounted for. The world may rest easy now.

Only the fact that Crecente might actually be reading this post keeps me from just writing "Why?" 200 times and calling it a day. For 1200 Microsoft points on January 19th you can download Majesco's 2003 run and gun shooter, which scored around a 50 average on GameRankings. If that's a bit too pricey, you could always buy the original game for the Xbox on Amazon for $1.50 used. Or you could just not buy it at all, which is probably your safest bet.

At this point I am convinced the Xbox Originals selection process features a hat and a blindfolded child.

BlowOut Coming to Xbox Originals [Gamerscore Blog]

If you happen to be in the Dallas/Lewisville, Texas area, you might want to inquire if they're still ongoing. The Craigslist posting notes that there will "several sessions over the next month both during the day and in the evening" so we'd say bug 'em. We've played it, so we'd definitely encourage you to try to do the same. It's not a paying gig, but you do get the bragging rights of having played Ghostbusters.

Focus testers wanted for upcoming Ghostbusters video game [Craigslist]

No, that's hearing the voice work. This is the first time we've heard Messrs Murray, Aykroyd, Ramis and Hudson appear in-game, and if any other game trailer has made me want to high-five myself to death, I certainly can't remember it.

Sure enough, where a search for 'Ghostbusters' on Gamestop once returned this impressive array[via Google cache] of results, currently the only Ghostbuster-related item to be found on the site is this rather forlorn copy of the original movie on UMD.

Hard to say exactly what this means - both Terminal Reality and Vivendi have been adamant that the game will be published. The main confusion seems to be who by?

Ghostbusters will be published. That’s all I can say at the moment.

Well, that's nice of you to say that.

“Ghostbusters will be published,” says Randel [VG247]

He made so much money off of Honey I Shrunk The Kids that he retired. He just doesn’t want to work anymore.

Oh. Well. Good for you, Rick Moranis.

An Inside Look At The Making Of Ghostbusters [Das Gamer]

"What Zootfly did for us, inadvertently, is help sell the concept. When their footage came out, we were close to our green-light meeting, and when the executives saw the reaction from the fans, they immediately knew, 'Hey, Ghostbusters is going to be a big hit - we need to put this game into production.'"

Small consolation for the folks at ZootFly, but Ghostbusters fans around the world sure appreciate the help. Next time just make sure you're allowed to make the game before you make it!

Zootfly Ghostbusters footage helped sell concept [CVG]

Apparently it was Aykroyd who got all of the other cast members on board to do the voice-overs, and he was so enthusiastic about the game that he helped name and create specs for many of the game's weapons, to make sure they sounded and played like something that would have really been part of the franchise. In fact, Aykroyd is co-writing the entire script with fellow Ghostbusters writer Harold Ramis, so it's a game adaptation with what look to be strong ties to the original material.

The city of New York plays a major role here, too, and from what I saw and was told, the developers are aiming for a true-to-life NYC that echoes the environment in the films, from indoors to out - the city as a "character," as the reps said.

They told me they're aiming for a "seamless" transition between the game's indoor and outdoor environments. I also learned why you won't get to play as any of the four Ghostbusters.

In the game, you play a new recruit to the team whose primary role is to act as "guinea pig" for all of Egon's new weapons. You play as part of a team with the other Ghostbusters, and the reps told me they really want to capture the "comedic timing" of the interaction among the characters - with the player controlling one, it might interfere, as you can probably imagine.

Ghostbusters: The Video Game is set in 1991, three years after the second film. The mayor has just been re-elected on a pro-Ghostbusters platform, and he's now funding the team's latest activities. However, it looks like the team will end up racking up more in city damages during the poltergeist fights than it earns in fees for eliminating the beasties.

In the scene I saw, the player and two teammates fought a ghost inside New York Public Library. That scene alone, the reps told me, had about 4,000 destructible objects inside it, and as items were destroyed, they got sucked into the ghost's body. Characters can be created out of physics objects in realtime, the reps explained.

And for every shelf, chair, book and lamp the team bashed up, a little running cash tally in the corner of the screen showed how much dollar damage the player had racked up. There's no penalty for this, the reps explained - it's intended as a fun sort of points system.

New weapons become available from Egon and they can be upgraded and customized using your earnings from successful ghost hunts. The way the weapons system works, you can see what's going on on the back of your equipment pack - for example, instead of an ammo system, you watch your heat cylinders and have to take a pause when you overheat. Keep an eye on it, though, and you can vent it manually.

In another scene, I watched the team battle the iconic Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from inside a city building, escaping out onto the roof to trap little bits of him that had separated off and begun attacking. When you use your beam to lasso a ghost, the reps said, the teammate AI knows what you're up to and will provide a trap for you.

I also learned a little bit about how the multiplayer will work on Xbox Live and PlayStation Network - it's cooperative for up to four players who compete against each other for the leaderboards.

The team also said the PlayStation 3 was the game's "anchor platform," and built in Sixaxis controls for the beam weapons on that version. For the less-powered system, developer Red Fly is preparing a more stylized, cartoon version that's more mission-based for Wii and PS2, while the DS version is more focused on being a "throwback to the 90s." (We also hear the DS can connect up to the Wii and act as a PKE meter). Each version, I was told, is totally different, but they're all "by fans, for fans," as the reps said.

Interview: Terminal Reality? Ain't Afraid Of No Ghosts [Gamasutra]

"When we were doing the focus group testing, we asked people how they'd feel about a remix done by a current band. We got booed out of the place," Goss said. "People were really against it, going, 'You can't do that, there's only one song for Ghostbusters!' It was incredible. So we were like, okay, we won't mess with the Ray Parker Jr. song then."

No theme tune remix for Ghostbusters [Eurogamer]