Ghostbusters Special Edition 3.0 Turns Sega's 1990 Mega Drive Game Into a Much Bigger Busting Business

BillyTime!Games releases Ghostbusters Special Edition 3.0 for Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, introducing six new playable characters, cheats, and a Columns mini-game.

BillyTime!Games has released Ghostbusters Special Edition 3.0, a substantial new ROM-hack revision of Sega and Compile's 1990 Mega Drive and Genesis action game. This is considerably more ambitious than changing Peter Venkman's sprite and calling it an anniversary edition. The update expands the playable roster with six additional characters and brings animated designs inspired by The Real Ghostbusters into the original framework.

Kylie Griffin from Extreme Ghostbusters and the wonderfully unexpected Crash Test Dummy also join the proceedings, while characters carry different abilities that change how stages and equipment are approached. New weapons, costume colours, cheat codes, difficulty-based rewards and hidden extras are included, alongside a Ghostbusters-themed take on Columns.

Cheats include God Mode, invisible proton shots, doubled money and unlimited traps, although anyone using all of them simultaneously should probably surrender their ghost-hunting licence. The patch requires the World v1.1 ROM of the original game and is not distributed as a complete commercial ROM. Some optional features depend on bank switching and therefore vary by emulator or flash-cartridge compatibility. Thirty-six years after Sega released Ghostbusters, the fan community has somehow given it the sort of expanded edition normally associated with games whose publishers still remember they exist.