Ghostbusters Paranormal Blast: There’s something strange in your neighborhood

The latest game in the long-running Ghostbusters franchise promises to actually put “something strange in your neighborhood” thanks to augmented reality and its integration with the foursquare API.

In Ghostbusters Paranormal Blast, you play the part of a rookie Ghostbuster, hunting down and capturing a variety of ghosts. They could be as close as the gas station on the corner, because all the locations in the game are pulled straight from foursquare.

With GPB’s augmented reality views, you’ll think the ghosts are right in front of you. They’re overlayed over an image of your living room, office or favorite restaurant. Pull out your neutrona wand and blast them into submission, but watch out because they’ll fight back. Once you’ve weakened the ghosts enough, you can wrangle them into your ghost trap and deliver them to the containment unit to collect your reward.

The payments you collect for catching ghosts can be used to upgrade equipment like your neutrona wand, flight suit and ghost trap.

GPB is not the kind of game you’ll want to play in public. You’ll find yourself spinning and twisting to line the ghosts up in your sights as they flit about the room, which will likely draw the disapproving eyes of anyone nearby.

If you like augmented reality games, you’ll like GPB. The gameplay is fun and appears to be pretty varied, with a wide range of missions (“calls”) you’ll be asked to complete.

GPB is 99 cents in the iOS app store. It requires an iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPod Touch 4th Gen, iPad 2 and iPad 3 since both a camera and gyroscope are required. Give it a try and let us know what you think in the comments.