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Geist
is another GameCube release of few from Nintendo this year, and
there has been a lot of people highly anticipating its’ coming.
It’s another one of the games this year
that’s really pushing boundaries right from the conception of it.
Other Nintendo releases like Nintendogs, Mario KartDS
and Battalion Wars have had a huge reaction on release; but Geist
has had a large following since the first mention of it in late
2003.
It’s not surprising though - I don’t know any
First-Person Shooter that has taken this idea and used it well, or
at all in fact. The concept is unique; you are a on a mission to
infiltrate a rouge scientific research lab called Volks
Laboratory’s which is suspected of illegal activities. During this
mission however everything goes horribly wrong, and you and your
team leader get captured and have horrible experiments performed on
you. These experiments leave you without your body floating around
in a ghost like state; you now have to use your detrimental
condition to your advantage.
The game that has come of the concept plays as a First-Person
Shooter with an added element of gameplay, you can now possess
people and objects. It’s done through a system where you can
possess objects at anytime - but only specified ones - and in order
to possess people you must give them a good scare before-hand. This
structure really governs the gameplay as you will find yourself
completing many small puzzles which eventually scare someone, posses
them and carry on with the
story. Being a First-Person Shooter, there is of course many
gun-battle segments - these can be lots of fun as when a body
you’re in is killed you don’t die; instead you de-posses the
body, time slows down and you get time to look around for your next
victim. This game really does turn the genre on it’s head, simply
because you can’t be killed when you’re running around in a body
killing people, you only die when you’re dead and have
nothing left to possess - even then you get a Spirit Meter to show
how long you’ve got to find another host.
The puzzle element does add a lot of intrigue to the game,
instead just running through destroying what ever you see you spend
a lot of time thinking through how to get your immaterial-self out
of the area you are trapped in through you lack of being able to
work door handles. The gene ral
procedure is to take over an available object, activate it, see if
that scared the person in the room enough, if not find another
object and possess that. Sometimes there’s a set routine to follow
to scare the person enough to possess them - bigger and more complex
puzzles in the game that require a lot more thinking to get through.
The shooting isn’t the main part of the Single-Player game,
but it’s everything that makes the Multi-Player game. There are
three Modes to choose from, Possession Deathmatch, Standard
Deathmatch with lots of Hosts to amuse yourself with, Hunt - a mode
where Ghosts and Hosts fight for survival; Hosts fight with
Anti-Spirit guns and Ghosts try to take over the Hosts and send them
into the death pits around the arena - and then there’s Capture
the Host, this is  like
a normal Capture the Flag Mode apart from it’s a Host and you get
extra points on it for every person you kill whilst on the way to
the flag drop-off point. All of the Multi-Player options have a huge
number of bots, loads of teams to set people on and varied
difficulty settings.
Graphics on this game are appropriate for the title: there
aren’t many things that will absolutely amaze but there’s
nothing that will leave you felling horrified you paid full-price
for it. As with most Nintendo releases, this title is internally
stable with no glitches or patchy areas of the game at all. The
sound has a nice quality to it, especially the screams you hear when
taking over someone’s body!
This is a really good, fun, enjoyable game, but I really
don’t think it’s lived-up to the anticipation it created when
people first heard of it’s ideas. The story is really the thing
that keeps the Single-Player game moving with the gameplay just
adding mild bits of entertainment throughout, even the Multi-Player
that’s normally the be-all-and-end-all of First-Person Shooters is
missing that little magic that just keeps you wanting to go back and
play again and again. The title can easily be deemed as an
opportunity just missed out upon - seeming as though there was
rather less input by Nintendo's own developers than had been
suggested - and a test-bed for some amazingly original ideas for Geist
2. 
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