To help celebrate the 25th anniversary of one of the greatest ghost movies ever made - GHOSTBUSTERS - the long-running website, Spook Central: The Ghostbusters Companion, held a prize giveaway from June 8th (the 25th anniversary of Ghostbusters' U.S. theatrical release) to June 22nd 2009 to honor the momentous occasion. Spook Central teamed up with the leading producers of Ghostbusters merchandise to offer up a bevy of giveaways, which included copies of Ghostbusters: The Video Game from Atari, print and digital guides for the video game from Prima Games, Ghostbusters: The Other Side trade paperbacks from IDW Publishing, "There Is No Dana, Only Zuul" T-shirts from Fright Rags, The Real Ghostbusters Volume 1 DVD sets from Time-Life, wall graphics and game skins from Gamer Graffix, and lots of items that Spook Central webmaster Paul Rudoff pulled from his personal collection and For Sale site.

The contest was a greater success than I could have ever imagined. There were 648 eligible entries for the main U.S. & Canada contest (plus 30 ineligible entries), and 26 eligible entries for the side International contest (plus 7 ineligible entries). Below is the full list of winners, along with a brief description of what prize package they won. For more information on the individual prizes, check out the prize image gallery. For legal and reference purposes, a copy of the original official rules can be found on page 2.

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I have just put up the complete list of files found inside the .POD files on the PC and PS2 game discs of Ghostbusters: The Video Game. There are so many files, that a plain text list "as is" is too large to post to the blog. So I zipped up the plain text lists: PC POD File Contents (265 Kb, text zipped), PS2 POD File Contents (103 Kb, text zipped).

The PS2 has audio files in MP3 format, so they're easy to play. The PC version, on the other hand, uses SMP audio files. I did a little research and these are either Samplevision files, Ad Lib Gold samples, or Avalon samples (all three use the same extension). The Goldwave audio editor can open them, but I can't figure out the correct settings (sampling rate, etc.) for it to play them properly. Seere had said that the DJBCP Codec Pack let him play the files, but it was a "no go" for me. I looked over the list of codecs in that pack and didn't see anything for SMP files; just the standard codecs. A Google search didn't provide anything that worked, so if anyone has any ideas on how to play these SMP audio files, please post a comment.

I just made a bunch of small multimedia updates to the site.

• On the Sigourney Weaver page I added an audio file from a June 1989 TV interview she did to promote Ghostbusters II.
• The original 720x480 images of the Ghostbusters II 1999 DVD menus are now available. You can download them in a zip, or view smaller 400x300 images on the page.
• Created a new Ghostbusters 2005 DVD Still Image Comparison page to illustrate that all still images on the 2005 DVD have had a Photoshop "Oil Painting" filter applied to them, and look absolutely horrible as a result.
• Every single one of the still frames from the Ghostbusters Criterion laserdisc is now available. Currently I have uploaded a zip containing the original images and made place-holder pages for the web-friendly images, which I still have to edit/crop.
• Every single one of the still frames from the Ghostbusters 1999 DVD is now available. Currently I have uploaded a zip containing the original images and made place-holder pages for the web-friendly images, which I still have to edit/crop.

What prompted me to put up all of the still frames from the Criterion laserdisc and both 1999 DVDs, and make the original 720x480 images available in zip files, is that, from what I've read, the new Ghostbusters Blu-Ray doesn't include any of the still image galleries from the 1999 DVD. I can understand why they couldn't or wouldn't use them "as is". Those galleries are the only blemish on the 1999 DVD, and it's primarily because the images are displayed within a very large frame instead of being shown full screen, and the drawings are even shown at an angle instead of being flat-on with the screen; though I also take off major points for the images not being shown in any sort of context (the laserdisc gave LOTS more insight into just what you're looking at). Plus all but one of the drawings listed as "Early NYC Concepts" are actually from The Real Ghostbusters, not the movie. The Blu-Ray would have given Sony the chance to correct these problems. They could have gone back to the original photographic sources, rescanned them in at higher resolutions, and shown everything full screen and flat-on, taking full advantage of the widescreen aspect ratio and higher resolution that Blu-Ray provides. Instead, they just dropped them altogether. Very sad. Two steps forward, ten steps back, Sony. If you have the 1999 DVD (the one with the guys on the cover), I highly suggest that you keep it - whether you decide to buy the Blu-Ray or not.

In the process of doing all of the still images, I decided that it was a great opportunity to find out if something that I had heard about was true. When the 2005 DVD first came out, I had heard that there were new still images on it. So in addition to capturing every still on the 1999 DVD, I did them all on the 2005 DVD as well - then compared them to each other. There were indeed some new still images on the 2005 DVD: three new Terror Dog photos. There was also one less logo drawing. Gain three, lose one. But what I never heard anyone talk about four years ago, and maybe no one ever knew because they never compared the two sets of DVD images to each other, is that a Photoshop "oil painting" filter was applied to the images on the 2005 DVD, thus making them look horrible and ruining all of the details in them. You can see this for yourself on the new Ghostbusters 2005 DVD Still Image Comparison page. I'd love to know why Sony would do such a stupid and unnecessary thing like that.

I can now say, without a doubt in my mind, that the Ghostbusters DVD released by Sony in 2005 for Region 1 is the worst piece of shit I have ever seen put onto the DVD medium by a major studio! They remove perfectly good bonus features present in the previous DVD release from 1999; they screw up the menu design just so they can have widescreen menus (though all still images are left in 4:3 ratio); they alter the colors and brightness in the movie; and they apply a Photoshop "oil painting" filter over the still image galleries thus ruining them. Avoid the 2005 DVD like the plague. Get the 1999 DVD (alt link) and the Blu-Ray, which eliminates half of the bonus content from the 1999 DVD but has some new extras plus the higher quality copy of the movie (hopefully not using the 2005 transfer). I have officially removed the Ghostbusters 2005 DVD from my store page because I will not support substandard products.

Steven Reed just sent in his review of the UK/Region 2 release of The Real Ghostbusters: The Complete First Season. Unlike Time-Life's Volume 1 release, which is a five-disc set containing all 13 Network episodes and the first 17 Syndicated episodes, this two-disc set just contains the 13 Network episodes. Steven also provided some menu screen shots and the Sony Pictures Television logo that appears at the end of each episode.


I bought the UK release of The Real Ghostbusters: Season 1 on Play.com last week for £4.99, I wasn't really expecting much in terms of re-mastered picture or sound quality, but I was really appalled at Sony's laziness and lack of imagination for designing the interactive main menus, Disc 1's menu is a exact duplicate of Creatures of the Night menu and the menu layout on Disc 2 is exactly the same as Spooky Spirits main menu.

Also, all of the episodes on both discs are unedited especially Mrs Roger's Neighborhood (the scenes at the beginning of the episode weren't edited) & Take Two (the ending wasn't cut short on the DVD, like it was originally aired on Fox Kids), but the only downside is that the title-cards are missing, just like The Real Ghostbusters broadcasts on Fox Kids.

At least they've included multiple languages such as English, French, German & Spanish as well as subtitles in languages, English, Arabic, Danish, Dutch, English (For the Hard of Hearing), Finnish, French, German, Hindi, Icelandic, Norwegian, Spanish, Swedish & Turkish. At the end of each episode, the Sony Pictures Television logo materialises after the DiC logo, just like it does on all the episodes included on the Time Life release

To be honest, I'm so much happier that I bought The Real Ghostbusters: The Complete Collection from Time Life, it's ten times better than the crappy set that Sony have just released. I would be interested to see when Season 5 is released in the UK and if Sony use the same masters with the defective/slowed down episodes that Time Life used.

Thanks to an anonymous commenter, I have just been informed that a program was just created that allows us to extract the contents from the .pod files on the Ghostbusters game disc. Rick's Ghostbusters POD Unpacker is very simple to use. When you run the program, press Extract, select the .pod file to extract from, then select where on your hard drive you want to extract it to.

The program will work on the PC and PS2 versions. On the PC disc, the .pod files are inside setup\data1.cab, setup\data2.cab, and setup\data3.cab (use an archive utility such as the freeware IZArc to open the .cab files and extra the pods to your hard drive). On the PS2 disc, the pod files are in the root directory on the disc. Both discs are in DVD-ROM format, so you can view them using a regular DVD-ROM drive (the PC disc is dual-layer, so make sure your computer's DVD-ROM drive can read dual-layer discs). The Ghostbusters game uses Terminal Reality's POD5 format. Their earlier games use earlier versions of the POD format, which may or may not be compatible with this program. And that's not to be confused with the countless other files with a .pod extension that are totally unrelated to these.

When I have the time, I'll go through ALL of the .pod files and maybe put up a full list of the files contained in each one. That way you'll know where the text, audio, textures, etc. are located. Now if we can get a tool to pack up the POD5 format files as well, we can take steps towards modding the PC game.

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One of the pains of PC gaming these days is DRM (Digital Rights Management). The Ghostbusters game uses a well-known form of DRM called SecuROM online activation. Considering that the game has no online features (there's no multiplayer), I find it deplorable that Atari would force us to have an internet connection just so we can play the game that we legally bought.

Here's the problem with online activation as I see it: What happens when the activation servers go down permanently? They will be taken offline at some point in the future as no company can support a product indefinitely. Add to that Atari's financial woes, and this could happen a lot sooner than later...though I really hope it doesn't. Anyone who buys the PC version will be left with a $30 coaster.

Thankfully if you hate DRM and online activation like I do, or if you don't have an internet connection at all and would still like to play the game (since you don't need an internet connection to use any of the game's features), you're in luck. There are currently two cracks for the game that supposedly remove the online activation: one made by RELOADED and one made by ViTALiTY. Both of them involve replacing the original ghost_w32.exe file with the cracked one (the Vitality crack also includes an additional .dll file). Of course, I'd suggest backing up your original ghost_w32.exe file before you replace it (the simple way is to rename it to ghost_w32.exe.bak or just save it into a zip file).

I have not yet had a chance to test out either of these cracks because I haven't gotten the game to properly install yet (a problem many other people have been having as well), but from what I've read... The Reloaded crack (which was done first) used the SecuROM-free exe file from the Steam download, which is a different game build than the retail disc, but causes some problems with languages. The Vitality crack is based on the exe file from the game disc, but a bad side effect is that it give invincibility to some enemies (like the candelabra ghosts in the hotel). Some people have also reported getting a "can't mount w32art.pod" error message with both cracks. (A trainer may overcome the side effects of the Vitality crack, but who wants to cheat on their first time through the game?)

Once I'm able to personally test the cracks, I can put up a full progress report and make a new post about it. In the meantime, you can get the cracks from GameFix - but you use them at your own risk!

IMPORTANT NOTE: You need a full copy of the game in order to use this crack. I am not, and will NEVER, supply anyone with a full copy of the game. Although you can find it online (no surprise there), I would highly suggest that you legally purchase the retail disc of the PC version. Also, your use of this crack is AT YOUR OWN RISK! I am not responsible if anything happens to your game or your computer should you decide to use this crack.

I now have two versions of my Tobin's Spirit Guide document up on GameFaqs, one for the PC/PS3/X360 and one for the PS2/WII. As always, you can find links to everything (including all of my recent game-related blog posts) on Spook Central's Ghostbusters: The Video Game page. Now, on to the review...

I just got the PlayStation 2 version of Ghostbusters: The Video Game yesterday, played a little of it, and LOVED it! This is my quasi-review of the game taken from all of my hand-written notes. Apologies if it's a little rough or a bit disjointed as I pretty much took it from my notes. In this review, I will be using "PS2" as shorthand for the PS2/Wii version (stylized), and "PC" as shorthand for the PC/PS3/X360 version (realistic).

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The PlayStation 2 and Wii versions of Ghostbusters: The Video Game share a lot of the same files and are pretty much the same game, so it should come as no surprise that there are a lot of references to the Wii in the language.pod file on the PS2 game disc (this file contains all of the text used in the game, along with text transcriptions of the audio). What's really sad is to find many references to content that isn't available in the PS2 version.

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Unlike my PC Video List, this one for the PlayStation 2 version of Ghostbusters: The Video Game (and presumably the Wii version too) will be short and sweet. Not because I've lost interest, but because there aren't many video files to talk about.

There are 11 video files located on the disc in the \VIDEO\EN\ directory. They are encoded using Bink Video at 640x480 at 29.97 frames per second. Four are cutscenes, the other seven are company logos. Here's the list:

INTRO.BIK - Cutscene: Game Intro (1:44) (NO VOICES, MUSIC & SOUND EFFECTS ONLY: 32000 hz, 16-bit, stereo)
TSINTRO.BIK - Cutscene: Times Square Intro/Stay Puft's Entrance (2:20) (NO AUDIO)
HT2END.BIK - Cutscene: Second Hotel Visit Ending (0:34) (NO AUDIO)
LIINTRO.BIK - Cutscene: Lost Island Intro (3:55) (NO AUDIO)
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ATARI.BIK - Atari logo
COLUM.BIK - Columbia Pictures logo
GL33K.BIK - Gl33k logo
INFERNA.BIK - Infernal Engine logo
RFS.BIK - Red Fly Studio logo
SONYCP.BIK - Sony Pictures Consumer Products logo
WARDRUM.BIK - War Drum Studios logo

As you can see from my notes, only one of the cutscene videos has audio, and it's only the music and sound effects. I guess the voices are layered over the video as it plays in the game. As these are the only four cutscenes to have video files, I can only take that to mean that all of the other cutscenes are done using the in-game engine. Since the player can choose the model of the Rookie character, this was probably the only way to do it. You'll notice that the Rookie doesn't appear in any of these four cutscenes.

If you'd like to play these files on your computer, you can play them right from the game disc (it's in DVD-ROM format) using The RAD Video Tools/Bink Video Player, which is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux for free from the company that develops and licenses the Bink format. You can even use this tool to play/convert/encode .bik video files.

Finally, if you'd like to see the difference between the opening cinematics for the realistic version (PC/PS3/X360) and the stylized version (PS2/Wii), go to these YouTube pages: Realistic Version and Stylized Version.

At the end of every level on the PlayStation 2 version of Ghostbusters: The Video Game, and presumably the Wii version too, is a stat screen telling you how well you did in the level. You are given an award for how much property damage you did. Here's the full list of awards, from lowest to highest. No, I can't explain the Ghost World levels or the "Creepy Lame" and "Creepy Cool" notations. This is just how they were labeled in the game's data files. By the way, so far the highest award I was given from the first three levels of the game is "Zealous Zapper" - though I wasn't trying very hard to do lots of damage.

REGULAR LEVELS Hall Monitor Careful Catcher Responsible Buster Nice Shootin', Tex! Sharpshooter Conservationist Vandal Becoming A Liability Redecorator Loose Cannon Zealous Zapper Walking Lawsuit Master Blaster Gozer's Pet Lunatic

GHOST WORLD LEVELS - CREEPY LAME Innocent Pure Tainted Stained Corrupt Foul Vile Wretched Irredeemable Unholy GHOST WORLD LEVELS - CREEPY COOL Boring Slimer Like Almost Gozerian Rival Of Stay Puft Vigo Incarnate

I rooted through the files on the PC and PS2 game discs and found the credits text files. On the PC it's in common.pod (the one in language.pod is missing the names), on the PS2 it's in language.pod. The PS2 disc also had the Wii's credits as well (it's virtually the same as the PS2). Below are the main credits that I think would be of interest to everyone, but if you'd like to read the entire credits list in its original order, that's available too.

VOICE TALENT Bill Murray Dan Aykroyd Harold Ramis Ernie Hudson Annie Potts William Atherton Alyssa Milano Brian Doyle-Murray Joel Murray Max von Sydow Erin Gray Andre Sogliuzzo (realistic version only) Fred Tatasciore Keith Fergusen Vanessa Marshall Troy Baker Travis Willingham Colleen Clinkenbeard R. Bruce Elliot Christopher Sabat Yuri Lowenthal (realistic version only) Jason Liebrecht

MOTION CAPTURE PERFORMERS Donovan Stinson Peter Benson Julian Paul Santo Lombardo Debbie Timuss Cailin Stadnyk WRITERS Dan Aykroyd Harold Ramis John Zuur Platten Flint Dille Patrick Hegarty John Melchior (stylized version only)

Ok, first of all, who do you NOT see on that list? Gene Wilder. Now that long-forgotten rumor can finally be put to rest.

It has been said that Max von Sydow (best known as Father Merrin in The Exorcist) is the voice of Vigo in the game. The extra Vigo quote on the PS2 version ("This isn't Ghostbusters. This is The Exorcist!") lends credence to this. Chris from Proton Charging theorized that he might actually be the voice of Vigo in Ghostbusters II, as well. We've all assumed that Wilhelm von Homburg, who played Vigo on-screen, was also his voice. However, if you remember your Ghostbusters history, you'd know that in the first film we saw Slavitza Jovan on-screen as Gozer, but the voice we heard belonged to an uncredited Paddi Edwards (reminiscent of Mercedes McCambridge's vocal performance in The Exorcist, coincidentally). So it's entirely possible that Wilhelm was Vigo on-screen, and Max was uncredited as Vigo's voice. The only ones who'd know for sure would be Ivan Reitman, Max, and Wilhelm. Ivan and Max are still alive, but sadly Wilhelm passed away a few years ago. So if anyone ever meets Ivan or Max, be sure to ask them who provided Vigo's voice in Ghostbusters II.

Besides Bill and Brian, we also have a third Murray brother in the cast, Joel Murray. The same one who was in the audience and asked Sigourney Weaver a question on the Ghostbusters II episode of Oprah back in 1989. According to IMDB, this is the third time the three have worked together. They previously paired up in Scrooged (1988) and the short-lived Murray Brothers golf series The Sweet Spot (2002).

The other big names in the voice cast include Erin Gray (Silver Spoons, Buck Rogers) and Keith Fergusen (Bloo from Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends). Oh, yeah, Flint Dille, who was a writer and story editor for the original G.I. Joe and Transformers series back in the 1980s, had a hand in writing the game. Cool!