Fix Ghostbusters The Game (2009) stuttering, slowdowns and difficulty issues

Ghostbusters the video game (2009) was released to the public on the 16th of this month. I’ve only had the chance to play the game for about half and hour and actually it’s been pretty fun so far. At least it does not totally blow like most of the movie based games out there. Although I have not hard any problems with the game so far, quite a few other folks on the interwebz have seemingly run into some. One of the common issues seem to be random, intermittent stuttering or slowdowns even on high end hardware. In addition, some users have reported about insane difficulty levels with almost un-killable enemies.

I’ve seen posts on various gaming forums by users with even high end video card such as Geforce GTX 260 reporting about slow gameplay performance, sudden framerate drops and stuttering. Well I have not been able to pinpoint an specific cause for this but here is possible solution. Most such slowdowns seem to be occurring in Windows XP – if you have a Windows 7 installation try running the game from there. Users have reported smooth gameplay performance in Windows 7 while they had FPS drops in Windows XP. 

Something else you can try is to disable the FPS lock. By default, the maximum refresh rate of the game is set to 60FPS. This can sometimes cause issues – if you are having trouble with low FPS even on relatively high end hardware (8800, GeForce GTX, etc), try disabling the FPS lock from in game options menu. Also, if you are using am NVIDIA display adapter, try disabling PhysX from the NVIDIA control panel.

Another one of the most common issues with the game seem to be un-killable or god like enemies. Some have reported about the game’s enemies being insanely hard to kill. If you are facing this issue then you are most likely using a pirated or cracked copy of Ghostbusters. Well this game is published by ATARI and you can trust them to include a crazy ass protection to fuc* up pirates for good (remember Alone In The Dark? ). Currently there are two cracked versions of the game floating around – one by scene group RELOADED and the other by ViTALiTY. RELOADED’s release is a Steam rip with a cracked exe with steam protection removed – the Steam version did not have SecuROM in the first place. ViTALiTY’s release on the other hand is a retail ISO which is protected by SecuROM DRM. Their NFO claims:

RELOADED took a SecuROM free executable from Steam and used it for crack. Their executable has a different build of gamecode and is not fully compatible with the retailiso release. We cracked the SecuROM protection from the retail disk version. We won fair and squire like RAZOR1911 did on The Sims 3. Try not to be a bad loser this time RELOADED.

Although ViTALiTY claims to have cracked SecuROM, they probably failed to remove at least one trigger. When this trigger is activated, the enemies become un-killable and gameplay experience becomes a nightmare for pirates.

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