Our first stop on the Comic Con show floor today was Atari’s booth, where they were showing off three upcoming games. The one I was most excited to get my hands on was definitely Ghostbusters. After being in publisher-less limbo for some time last year, Atari has picked it up and given the developers more time to work on making a great Ghostbusters game. No offense to the NES game of the same name, but it’s about freaking time.

I decided to try out the Wii version, because I really wanted to see if it would be worth playing, or just a watered-down port of the 360 and PS3 versions. Third-party publishers don’t have the best track record on the Wii, but Atari has clearly worked hard to make sure that this game stands out. Surprisingly, Ghostbusters is a really good-looking Wii game. Instead of taking a realistic approach, the characters have a stylized, exaggerated look, which works really well. I was continually impressed by the graphics as I played, since so many developers don’t really tap into the Wii’s full graphical power.

Motion-sensitive controls do come into play, as you would probably expect, but luckily, it felt better and more responsive than a random waggle-fest. The camera is controlled by pointing the Wii remote at the screen, which takes some getting used to. I instinctively tried to use the thumbstick on my nunchuk to move, and I have to wonder why they didn’t go with that more natural control scheme. However, I think that once you have done it enough, looking around with the remote will become second nature, or at least more natural.

The bad news is that the version I played was an older build of the game. The good news is that, according to the developers, they have already fixed the part of this game that I found most annoying. Capturing ghosts required a lot of steady remote movements and directional thrusts, but it was too easy to mess up and have to start all over again. I was told that the process would be greatly improved in the final product.

Wii owners who are looking forward to this game can breathe a sigh of relief; it doesn’t look like you’ll be getting a gimped version of Ghostbusters. I don’t know if I’m convinced to get the Wii version over the 360 version, but there’s no denying that this is a solid game that’s sure to get even better in the months between now and its June release.

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