Ghost Rush! for Pioneer LaserActive
This time I made a video on another Exclusive and somewhat rare Pioneer LaserActive title. This game is called Ghost Rush!.
This game is similar to Ghostbusters in where you are a Ghost Hunter and you go to a mansion that is haunted and traverse 20 floors up and 20 floors down to find and catch as many ghosts as possible without dying and bring them back to the shop keeper for gold to buy new items and weapons. The further you go down or up, the harder the ghosts become. Can you catch them all?
In the shop there are many items that help you along your way. Items like keys to unlock doors in the mansion, and ropes to help you escape pit traps, and bigger satchels to carry more items. Bigger and better guns to catch ghosts with, and bigger capsules to hold more ghosts! There is also a black hole item that takes you back to the start of the mansion so you can exit with ease. Other items like candy and life herbs heal your life bar at the bottom of the screen.
There is also a MAP of each floor as you walk through the mansion you will map out the area, and you can access the MAP by hitting the A button when not in a battle with a Ghost. Also each time you play the game the MAPs or Dungeons are randomly made providing a slightly different layout of the mansion every time you play.
This is where most of my gripe comes in. Due to this random map making I find the game to be a bit frustrating to play. Had it been executed the correct way I would have enjoyed the game a whole lot more!
For example, the correct way to do this would be to randomly make a new layout of the entire 40 floors of the mansion when a NEW GAME is chosen, and as you map it out and save your game it should save the map and layout as well with your saved game. Then when you leave the mansion to sell the shopkeeper his ghosts and return to the mansion all your progress would still be there.
But sadly that is not how they decided to do this game. No, in this game every time you enter a new floor it randomly makes a new layout on the fly and gives you a new map to work on.
So lets say you map out all of Floor 1 and unlock all the doors and everything (assuming you don't fall in a floor trap that is), and then you decide to walk downstairs to Floor -1 and when you get there you capture some ghosts and want to exit the mansion so you go back to Floor 1 expecting it to be cleaned out and the map to be made. Instead it randomizes Floor 1 again and gives you an all new map to work on. You might not be able to even find the front door to get out of the place due to floor traps and shit. :P It can be a real hassle, and black hole items are a must because of this.
The graphics are okay for this LaserActive title. For its time these dungeon maze games ran basically just like this or frame by frame, so that's just how it is. The graphics overall are decent though with neat animation using sprites for the enemies and the overlay is not bad. I like the artwork done in the game.
The music is good for the title screen and name input screen, but the music during the game and during the item select screen in the shop keepers place are far from good. The repetitive music during the actual game drives me nuts... although the music during the fights isn't too bad, and the game over screen also has a little tune that's decently done. Overall I expect a bit more for a Mega LD game. They could have done a bit better using the Sega PAC.
The sound effects are what I would expect from the Sega PAC. The ghost gun sometimes sounds like Striders sword. Crisp clear and loud. But most sound effects are just blips and bloops for items and such.
The control is pretty simple. You control the pointer on the screen during the ghost hunting scenes using button A or C to shoot the Ghost Hand, and use button B to shoot main fire, and you control where to go while walking around the mazes. Not hard to control at all.
Bottom line: If your looking for a new LaserActive game, and you enjoy older dungeon crawler type games, then you might like this game. It does have quite a bit of gameplay to offer. Once you get into it and buy a few items it becomes quite enjoyable. It's just sad that you need to buy a black hole item constantly because of the random map layout. It ruins some of the gameplay for me. But all in all I am glad I bought the game, and do hope to capture the toughest ghosts one day for some great rewards!
This disc is in 480i, and features Stereo sound.