The Nintendo GameCube has seen its share of first person shooters over the years, but all in all, the majority has been rather formulaic in execution. (Now, I know what you’re thinking, “What about Metroid Prime? That game rocked!” To which I say: Metroid Prime is not a first person shooter, it is a first person adventure.) However, Nintendo has teamed up with developer n-Space to create a truly innovative first person shooter that looks to break the mold.

In Geist, you play as John Raimi, a soldier that is investigating the enigmatic Volks Corporation. It seems that the Volks Corporation specializes in paranormal research, and at some point in the game while you are exploring the facility, your spirit is separated from your body. You spend the majority of the game playing as Raimi’s spirit in an attempt to regain his physical body. This is where Geist sheds new light (perhaps from the end of the tunnel?) on the typical first person shooter formula.

Four-player fun makes stuff blow up real good.

As Raimi’s spirit, you are still in the first person perspective, but to give the illusion that you truly are a ghost, a special graphical filter is placed over the background that gives everything an almost blurred appearance. And since you are a spirit, you are able to possess both animate and inanimate objects. By inhabiting a guard with a gun, for example, the game becomes a more traditional first person shooter. However, there’s a catch: if you are trying to inhabit a living being, you have to scare them first. Only when they are scared enough can you enter their body and take control of them.

One example is when you have to make your way through a giant steel door in order to progress to the next area. (Why you can’t just pass right through it is beyond me. You are a ghost after all.) There is a guard nearby, as well as a guard dog. You can try to scare the guard by inhabiting a nearby lamp, and causing it to flicker it on and off. However, more often than not, the guard won’t fall for it and will simply unplug the lamp. So what’s your next best bet? Why, the dog, of course.

"Now, if I take over the computer, I can make her leave with 300 pop-up ads."

By inhabiting the dog’s bowl of food, when the dog comes to take a bite, you can jump out of the bowl and spook the dog enough so that you can possess it. (What exactly were they smoking, or, since it’s Nintendo, what mushrooms were they eating when they decided to let you possess dog food?) Once you have control of the dog, you can continue on to the next area of the facility. This mechanic will also be implemented into the multiplayer.

The game will support up to 4-player split-screen multiplayer. However, the possession technique will put an interesting new spin on the usual death match. Players can choose to be either ghosts or soldiers, with the ghosts’ goal being to inhabit the bodies of the soldiers, and the soldiers’ goal being to repel the ghosts. With this new take on multiplayer competition, along with the interesting single player mode, the GameCube might just have a contender for “First Person Shooter of the Year” when it is released.

Will Szwagiel