Stay Puft Marshmallows: Better late than never

One more wrong has been righted: Ghostbusters Stay Puft Marshmallows from ThinkGeek is now available! A box is $20 (and is made of a durable "rubbery" material that can be re-used.) Oh, and each marshmallow has 100mg of caffeine. Because geeks aren't already jittery enough.

I always wondered why nobody jumped on the bandwagon with this product back with the movie was still new. We eventually got Ecto Cooler (which was pretty damn tasty!) Why not actual Stay Puft Marshmallows?

Via.

Heroes and Villains

I really hate that I missed this event. It's not like I didn't have ample warning, but I was running on fumes last night and wasn't always entirely sure what planet I was on. I would have bet Golgafrincham. I would have lost that bet.

Anyhoo, Big Mammas House of Burlesque held the Heroes and Villains show last night at the Visualite Theater (a place better known as Unknown Hinson's home away from home.)

Lucky for us, the Carolina Ghostbusters were there and took a lot of photos of the Charlotte, N.C., event. They've got dozens of shots posted at their Facebook page, which you can find here.

Who you gonna call? Not Bill Murrary, apparently ...

Bill Murray seems happy in his role as full-time speedbump in the road to Ghostbusters III.While part of me would love to see another movie, I've seen enough cinematic trips down memory lane in recent years to know they rarely ever work out. When Rambo is the best of the bunch you know there's a problem.

Murray recently called the idea of a Ghostbusters III "a crock" and told GQ:

"Harold Ramis said, Oh, I’ve got these guys, they write on The Office, and they’re really funny. They’re going to write the next Ghostbusters. And they had just written this movie that he had directed. Year One. Well, I never went to see Year One, but people who did, including other Ghostbusters, said it was one of the worst things they had ever seen in their lives. So that dream just vaporized. That was gone."

It looks to me like this project is DOA, and not just because of Murray's lack of interest. It appears that the creative elements of this movie are moving in a lot of different directions and aren't really communicating. And that's never a good sign when you're working on a collaborative project.

Random Ghostbusters Image Round-Up

Would you prefer sex or soulless science?

For something that was supposed to be a "game," Dungeons and Dragons was pretty damned complicated.

In 1986, West End games tossed the rules out the window when they released a role playing game based on the original Ghostbusters movie. Technically the game still had “rules,” though it really depends on your definition of the word. By D&D standards, though, it was absolute chaos.

A Ghostbusters character had only four rated characteristics: brains, muscles, moves and cool. In order to accomplish a feat you can roll one six-sided die for each point you have for your trait. If the Ghost Master determines that lifting a 50 pound weight is a difficulty level of 15, all you have to do is roll the dice for your “muscle” trait and beat that number. The higher your trait level, the easier it is.
To make things even less complicated, every time you accomplish your character’s special goal (such as "serving humanity," "soulless science" or "sex") you receive brownie points. For each brownie point you spend, you can roll an extra die. Save up enough points and, theoretically, there’s nothing your character can’t do.
Unless you piss off the Ghost Master, who runs the game. There’s really nothing stopping the GM from dropping a piano on your head at any given point of the game.

The instruction manual  compared the tone of the game to the Batman TV show from the 1960s, and also encouraged the players to create their own characters, start a new Ghostbusters franchise and use maps of your hometown as the setting for your games.
Ultimately, Ghostbusters was just an excuse to sit around and bullshit with your friends. Which is what games are all about.

The Ghostbusters RPG stayed around long enough to generate a few modules and source books, such as Tobin’s Spirit Guide (which had stats for Gozer, if I remember correctly.) Because the thin gaming system existed entirely on paper (and not very much paper, at that) just about every aspect of the Ghostbusters RPG has found its way online in the form of JPEGs and PDF files.

The website Ghostbusters International has the rules, equipment and character cards available for download.

J'onn J'onzz ... the half-elf?

I spent way too much money as a kid on role playing games.
Ordinarily, I'd probably be a little embarrassed to talk about playing something as profoundly geeky as a pencil-and-paper RPG. By itself, it's bad enough.
But if Dungeons and Dragons was the gateway drug of RPGs, then I was a full-blown crackwhore by the time I was 14 years old.
Allow me to explain.
It started around 1980 or so when I had a lot of time to kill, specifically time on the school bus. My brother and I were the first ones on the bus in the morning and the last ones off in the afternoon. On a good day we spent an hour on the bus. One way.
We weren't alone on these daily trudges and, before long, someone introduced us to Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (I always thought the "Advanced" was a bit pretentious, even at the tender age of 9.) Most of these games were just excuses for the older kids to invent female characters with low standards in fashion and lower standards in men, if you catch my drift. Some of my greatest misinformation about sex came from listening in on the narratives of these games.

Anyway, I eventually created my own character, a half-elf named J'onn J'onzz ... a name I ripped off from an issue of Justice League of America because I was a raging dork. I'm much better now, thanks.
AD&D led to Star Frontiers, which lead to Star Trek, James Bond, Marvel and DC comic book roleplaying games, as well as my two favorites: Ghostbusters and Indiana Jones.

While I dearly love Ghostbusters and Indy, the real appeal of these games were their flexible rules. The Indiana Jones game from TSR let you build functional, detailed games that never got bogged down in tedious legalese like AD&D.
It was also easy to adapt those rules to other settings. Around 1988 I applied the Indiana Jones rules to a homemade Die Hard module and ran some friends through a skyscraper labyrinth full of terrorists ... all of whom proved less terrifying than my friends actually playing the game. One insisted on trying to rattle my imaginary bad guys by defiling the corpses of his enemies. And by "defiling" I mean pretty much what you think I mean.
Ghostbusters, on the other hand, had no rules. In the RPG world it was the equivalent of the old Batman TV show with Adam West. It was just an excuse to have fun. But I think I'll save commentary of that terrific game for another post.