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Posted on July 29th, 2005 - 2200 Reads

Rated Mature Geist GameCube Preview

-- Written by Justin Joseph



 Earlier this afternoon, I had the opportunity to play a demo of the upcoming FPS from n-Space and Nintendo in Geist! It happened to be one of the featured games on a demo collection disk for a GameCube at my local Game Crazy, and I was stoked to see it! I've been wanting this game ever since it was first announced and described, and the following will tell you of my hands-on experience with it!

There were two available missions on the demo that I had the chance to play. One I'm guessing was the very beginning of the game which had John Raimi and his military support team infiltrate the shady Volks Corporation. The other I will get to shortly.

Watching the opening cutscene was pretty cool. The graphics were fairly well-done even though some textures appeared a bit blurry, and the character models were quite nicely detailed. Now I don't know if what I saw is going to be in the final product, but if it is, I will tell you right now don't expect any kind of graphics that are as polished as the Halo games. No that doesn't mean the graphics suck, because they really don't. I would probably consider the presentation that I saw great. Not excellent but not poor enough to just be "good." Some parts of the missions I played looked incredible, while others suffered from lack of elaborate detail.

So anyway, to get to the first mission, it was fairly entertaining. It started out with you coming in via helicopter and being briefed about your mission by some unknown person. It was probably someone of higher authority, and he does a good job explaining your objectives. You are to first find an undercover operative of your team that infiltrated the corporation recently and find out what's going on with him. He apparently sent out a garbled transmission to your officers and in it they are able to make out the words "virus" and "demon."

You eventually descend into the area with your aiding military team via tether cable and begin your initial infiltration of the Volks Corporation. You will trek through various rooms and cool looking doors until you end up in the building's main lab. Here is where you basically hold up all the present scientists doing various experiments in there as you end up finding your missing comrade!

When you finally meet up with this guy, he tells you where the information you are seeking is. It's basically a download that you will put onto your handy PDA that shows a freaky looking virus the scientists have apparently been experimenting with. It's actually pretty cool to watch Raimi take a cable from his PDA and plug it into a port on the contraption that holds the information you need.

But of course, you are sneaking into a corporation that obviously does not want you there! Just about as soon as you download your information, the security alarms go off. This is basically the cue for your team to get the heck out of there! Once you leave the main lab, you go to a different area in which the man you found tells you to bust out the gun you have on you! It's a standard 9 mm pistol, but it looks REALLY sweet. Now I would be lying if I said the actual controls (with or w/o a weapon) aren't somewhat stiff when you first begin playing. But after a while you really get used to how the guy actually moves and it doesn't become too much of a hassle.

So the Volks security is obviously after you, and you will have to make use of the "duck" to make sure you aren't completely pwned right off the bat. A lot of window glass will shatter and a lot of gunfire will ensue. These security guys really aren't entirely difficult to take out, and even if you happen to take more hits than you wish, there are medical kits on the wall ready for your taking!

Eventually you come to a bridge that an officer and the guy that you found make their way across. But unfortunately for the officer, there is a nice freaky looking monster in the huge ceiling pipe that comes down, sends a nasty claw through his chest, and then bites his head off! So of course to proceed in the mission, you have to take this monster down. He really isn't that difficult, it just sucks that you're the only one that can attack him since the only vulnerable part of his body is his mouth. He's only facing towards you, so there's nothing the guy you found can do about it since he's on the other side! He does launch random energy projectiles from his mouth, but even a direct hit won't hurt you that badly. After about five minute or so, you will defeat it because his health does not go down quickly!

You will eventually get through a few areas that will take you back to the "extraction point" where the chopper is waiting to get you out of there. But that's when something goes terribly wrong. The game shifts to another cutscene in which you are now watching the view of what appears to be some kind of ghost, and it possesses one of the members of your very team! Unfortunately your team doesn't realize this has happened to the poor fellow until it's too late. He takes out every remaining member of the team, and then simply knocks you unconscious!

The game then shifted to another cutscene with John Raimi shirtless and bound to some kind of freaky loo contraption that is obviously going to be used to separate him from his bodily spirit. But in a sort of "teaser", the demo reset itself before you could watch that process initiate!

So after the game reset, I chose to take a shot at the next available mission, which basically happens after your spirit is ripped from your body. You will watch a cutscene with a rather deformed looking man in a futuristic looking wheelchair and a member of his team that wished to "pop" you rather than keep you for the 'separation experiments.'

You eventually see your actual spectral form trapped inside some huge mechanical contraption that is seemingly meant to keep you in there. You are eventually lowered down into some kind of chamber, when the military assistant of that freaky looking man complains of having to clean up "ethereal mess."

The game then shifts to an apparent fantasy world where you begin your "possession training." You are talked to by an unknown female voice on the basics of your skill, and in the tutorial, you end up draining various plants to replenish your energy and taking control of a rabbit. You have to drain energy from various "nutritional" sources because in pure spectral form you slowly lose energy. It's just a little bit about every five seconds, so you never really have to worry about dying in that form too quickly. In the possessing of the rabbit, you get a really freaky look of the world that is seemingly the "rabbit's perspective," and you get to use its special ability of jumping!

You then have one final shift into the actual game, where you meet your seemingly ghost friend in "Gigi." She's rather scary looking but she is indeed there to help you. In this, you will learn how to pass through walls, possess various objects to manipulate them in whatever way you wish and finally possessing actual human beings! Passing through walls is a no-brainer. You see an area of a wall where there is a small crack, and it has an eerie "glow" letting you know that it can be passed through! When it comes to actual objects. I possessed a paint can and made it explode. I possessed an electric generator and made it create some cool looking electricity effects. I possessed a crate full of explosives and took a wall down by blowing it up! Possessing is done through the simple pushing of the A button when you see the icon of your "spectral body in a circle."

After using the left shoulder button to "float and glide," I came across a sleepy looking janitor. Gigi took possession of a nearby trash can and you take a telephone station that is located across from him. When you possess the phone, you obviously cause it to ring. The guy gets up, wondering what's going on. Then he begins hearing a whole bunch of voices and becomes scared to death! Gigi then comes out of the trash can and tries to take him over. You can then dispossess the telephone and be the one that takes him over because Gigi is "too small" to be able to do so!

After that, there wasn't much for me to do. I just ran through some of the proceeding areas and talked to a couple of people. I eventually made it to another security guard that is sort of freaked out because of the alarm that went off, but I couldn't figure out how to scare him for possession. I don't know if I was supposed to be able to, but it was still cool going through the various environments the mission offered!

Unfortunately I didn't have the motivation to try out the multiplayer feature, but from what I heard from the store's manager, it's pretty entertaining when there's a good diversification to the battles. Smaller areas tend to suck, but open ones with lots of detail tend to be truly entertaining.

So all in all, I actually had some good fun with the first two single player missions the demo offered. The music is really cool and there is spoken and unspoken dialogue. The unspoken dialogue is a little weird though, because characters don't move their mouths to it at all. But nevertheless, the somewhat stiff but entertaining controls with great graphics and good music should make this to be a very fun game! Possessing anything you wish at virtually any time to find out what the Volks Corporation is really all about while searching for your original body, all this makes up the upcoming Geist! Look for it come August 15!

Updated: I actually decided to go back to the store where I played the demo and I just got back from pwning people in SSBM. But nevertheless, I have some more details to add to this!

I did say the controls are somewhat stiff at first, but when I first picked it up and began playing, I didn't have any problem whatsoever, and it helped me thorougly enjoy the first mission even more. What I said about the graphics may also not end up being true in the final product. I decided to play the Resident Evil 4 demo on there as well and it was really blurry compared to my television. So I'm guessing their screens there weren't the best quality so just about any game you would play on them wouldn't display as best they could. I'm thinking Geist is going to be one beautiful game!

Also, I actually took a hack at the multiplayer features available on the demo. I must tell you I had an absolute BLAST even though I was only up against one computer bot. One scenario allows you to "float" around an arena in search of a host with a unique weapon. This could be various assault rifles, standard rifles and shotguns. Then when you possess a host, you simply go after the other person(s) who took control of another! To make things a little more daring, if you leave a host, your spirit is vulnerable for three seconds so you can actually be shot in spectral form!

There was also a mode that had you basically possess a host and take it to a designated point in the arena. You were free to kill your opponent whenever you encountered him or her, but the only point of that mode was to dispossess it at the designated area and receive points.

You also have the option of killing unpossessed hosts, but that is sort of a waste of time since you actually want to keep them alive so I didn't really understand that.

One more thing about the mission in which you infiltrate the Volks Corporation and get captured. I thought the sudden "ending" of the beginning of the sequence in which Raimi lost his spirit was just a teaser. Well that was just the demo timing out. I actually witnessed the cutscene since I got through the mission a lot faster and I must tell you, that whole animation is really sweet to look at!

So that is my update, hope that clears up some things that may have caused confusion!

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