E-Mail This Article to a Friend Ghost busted Nintendo’s disappointing Geist BY MITCH KRPATA
	Geist For Nintendo GameCube | Rated M for Mature | Developed by n-Space | Published by Nintendo

When Geist debuted at E3 2003, critics flipped over a scene in which its ghostly protagonist assumed the form of dog food in order to terrify a guard dog. More than two years later, the game is finally in stores, and still the best thing you can say about it is that you can possess a bowl of kibble. Somehow that’s not the ringing compliment it once was.

Geist’s premise remains intriguing, and at times it almost justifies the muddled execution. After an evil corporation blasts your soul out of your body, you need to find your physical half and foil the company’s diabolical plot — though not necessarily in that order. Although Geist is played from a first-person perspective, it’s not a brainless run’ n’ gun game. Since you ain’t got no body, the only way to advance is to commandeer the fleshly vehicles you encounter. Scripted scenarios allow you to frighten people (and animals); this lowers their spiritual defenses and allows you to take over. It all sounds very cool.

Then again, in typical shooters, you switch among the pistol, the shotgun, and the machine gun. Sometimes you grab an enemy gun turret. In Geist, you switch among the guy with the pistol, the guy with the shotgun, and the guy with the machine gun, and sometimes you possess the gun turret. And the FPS gameplay just isn’t that good. Play control is sluggish, the weapons are boring, and the idea of giving each character infinite ammo is bizarre. Taking over an animal enlivens things, but these portions of the game are all too brief.

Geist does split its time evenly between shooting and puzzle solving. Unfortunately, for every decent puzzle there’s mindless busy work masquerading as a game — like when you have to install rivets in a particular sequence on three different metal plates in order to open a door. This game takes place at a corporate headquarters, mind you. And though I can accept the harnessing of souls and demons crawling out of dimensional rifts in underground laboratories, I think it’s asking a bit much to suggest the rivet-gun-as-door-key is company policy.

Given the length of its development cycle and the vitality of the original concept, one wonders why the game seems so strapped for content. The single-player campaign is short enough to beat in a weekend. Secret tokens, intended to create an impression of replayability, are tucked away throughout each level, but the item hunt is the last refuge of the developer who’s run out of ideas.

Certainly the development time wasn’t spent optimizing the graphics. A choppy framerate and muddy visuals simply have no place in the year 2005. If future video-game historians want to pinpoint the moment at which the GameCube hardware became obsolete, well, this is it.

Although taking supernatural control of a mop, say, or a grandfather clock does offer a fresh (if fleeting) thrill, it’s not enough — particularly when the rest of the game is equal parts uninspired puzzles and clunky combat. Maybe Geist was doomed from the start, or maybe it needed — well, not more time, obviously. If anything, this game has been processed and picked over until all that remains is the ghost of a good idea.

Score: 5.0 (out of 10)