Silverball guide · Ghostbusters
Six times everything
Ghostbusters will take your ball faster than almost anything else on the floor. The answer is not shooting more accurately, it is multiplying before you collect.
The two little targets that decide your game
There are two mini-targets for playfield multipliers, one for 2X and one for 3X. On their own they are worth almost nothing, and the game's own guide says so.
Lit, and hit together, they multiply. Not two plus three — two times three. Everything you score is worth six times as much for as long as they last, and hitting a target again while it is timing out buys you more time.
That is the whole game in one paragraph. Ghostbusters is not generous and it is not long; the difference between a forgettable game and a good one is almost always whether the big collect happened while both multipliers were running.
Build the super jackpot, then multiply, then collect
The super jackpot is collected at the left ramp, and unusually there are many separate ways to light it — cleaning up Slimer's slime, putting both Scoleri Brothers down, the captive ball toy, the pop bumpers, Tobin's Spirit Guide, certain scenes.
Light it while one is already lit and it becomes a 2X super jackpot, then a 3X. Light it again and you get two stacked on the ramp, where collecting one immediately starts the next.
Its value builds separately, from the library hole, the subway hole, the pops and Tobin's, and that value carries over until you actually collect it. The trap is at the end: an uncollected super jackpot times out, and a drain loses it outright. So the sequence to aim for is build the value, light the multipliers, then take the ramp — in that order, because doing it backwards throws away the multiplication.
Scenes are three ladders, not nine choices
The nine scenes are grouped into three ladders: two at the Public Library, three at the Sedgewick Hotel, four at Dana Barrett's apartment. You climb each ladder in order — you cannot reach a scene until you have finished the one below it.
Only one scene runs at a time, and a scene you started but did not finish will pick up roughly where you left it when you come back, which makes returning to a half-played scene much better value than it looks.
A few completed scenes light an extra ball. All nine start the wizard mode. On a machine this unforgiving, the four-deep Dana ladder is a long-term project rather than a plan for one game.
Slimer, and the pops that talk to you
With the G-H-O-S-T letters flashing, the next shot to their target brings Slimer out where the ball can reach him. Hit him and he slimes one of your shots; clean all the slimed shots and the super jackpot lights. Chase him off and he lights some of your scenes as he goes.
The pop bumpers deserve more attention than pops usually get, because they are running a slot machine. Each hit picks an award; when two bumpers match, the award locks in and waits for the third to match as well. Over twenty features can come out of them, including lighting the extra ball.
Which gives you the most useful reflex on the machine: if you can see the pops are one match away from something you want, put the ball back up through the top lanes and let them finish the job.
Reading the lights
The guide's own convention is worth memorising because it applies everywhere and it tells you what to panic about.
If a light is blinking, it is temporary — at best it survives until the end of the ball. If it is not blinking, it will still be there next ball. The extra ball does not blink, so it will wait for you; a blinking hurry-up will not.
Timers announce themselves too. Under about four seconds you will hear a beep and the lights blink faster, and each timer has its own sound, so with a bit of play you can tell what is about to expire without looking up.
Two long games running underneath
Ghosts caught accumulate all game, and the thresholds are real rewards rather than milestones: twenty lights Tobin's Spirit Guide, forty lights the video mode, sixty starts Loopin' Supers, eighty starts P.K.E. Frenzy, a hundred starts Mass Hysteria Multiball.
Gear is the other one. Loop the left ramp as many times as you dare to build the award, then cash it at the bank of three targets on the left. Five pieces of equipment to collect, and the decision each time is simply how many more loops you trust yourself to make before taking what you have.
Where this came from
Silverball wrote this, but not from scratch: it was compiled against the published rules below and checked against them, rather than written up from one person’s games. None of the wording is theirs. Machines get code updates that move the right shot, so a guide has a date on it for a reason.
- Stern Pinball, Ghostbusters (Pro) Basic Strategy Guide, by Dwight Sullivan
