Taste-Test: Geist

How, Lord? Or any other deity that might be listening to my pleas? How can a game with such a good concept and possessing of such promise fall so far? This isn't limited to human-known deities mind you, anyone with an answer is acceptable.

At E3 2003, I found Geist tucked away in a corner of Nintendo's booth. It was a test-balloon kind of game - a nice concept, with two stations to show it off, and see what people thought. I personally thought rather highly of it: A first person shooter, where you move around as a ghost, possessing people to wield weapons, manipulate objects, and otherwise advance through the game. Fast forward a year, and Geist is one of the keystones of Nintendo's booth - an area of eight to ten stations, under a sign showing where they are, no different than that of Resident Evil 4, Starfox, Donkey Konga, so on and so forth. Now, I can feel you thinking the question: Why Mike, in so short a timeframe, whatever could have gone wrong?

Four words: Bowl. Of. Dog. Food.

Yeah, that's right. You thought that strip was just good old Penny-Arcade, embellishing, joking around. Wrong. In the name of any and everything held sacred in the history of the human species, I tell you truly that the very beginning of the E3 2004 Geist demo had me possess a bowl of dog food in order to progress through the rest of the level. In hindsight, after the Nintendo rep told me what I had to do to move on in the level, I should have done a number of actions. Roll my eyes, snort in disbelief, perhaps even laugh in his face at the absolute ludicrousness of what he proposed. However, all I could do was meekly go forth and do as he instructed, like a cow heading towards that point of no return.

Moving away from my crushing disappointment to solid facts, the storyline was only marginally fleshed out from last year's demo with a mission briefing before the level. Inferring from that, the character you control was forcibly turned into a specter by some paramilitary/covert/rogue/black op kind of organization - you know the type. The objective of the level was to prevent the same from happening to a friend of yours from when you still had a pulse. Controls remained more or less the same as last year. Movement is still controlled with the sticks, A interacts with objects, et cetera, et cetera. X, Y, and the shoulder buttons vary in function depending on what host you inhabit at the time.

As for what's changed…quite a bit. For starters, you cannot exist only as an apparition anymore - you can operate for a time on your own, but you need a host for long-term survival. You can now inhabit animals (rats and dogs in the level) and non-organic devices (like…bowls of dog food. Grumble…) This is now crucial, as you can no longer affect the physical plane by yourself while in ghost form as you could in the last demo, shutting laptops and withering plants and the like. Also, in the last game, there were ghosts that were possessing guards that were opposing you - ghosts that could spot you in a host and would open fire. From what I've seen, that feature was taken out of the game. I say, "from what I've seen," because it highlights my next point - the demo absolutely redefined the term "buggy". In order to proceed at certain points, you need to be in spectral form and allow yourself to be sucked through a gap in a door or wall. More times than not, that's when the game would just freeze and Los Angeles got a taste of good old-fashioned New York City profanity.

All in all, between the changes and the frequent hard resets I had to pull, my opinion of Geist has dropped severely. Hopefully it can redeem itself before it drops later this year.

Mike Twomey