Geist is a Gamecube exclusive game that was released in 2005, when everyone was already waiting for the Wii and Xbox 360. A game that in demos showed great capabilities, interesting mechanics and multifaceted gameplay. I suggest you remember how it was presented before release, get acquainted with the final product and look at the technical implementation of this game from N-Space.

The cons are all old and presented in full.

At E3 2003 This year Doom 3, Half-Life 2 and Halo 2 were shown for the second time, trailers for Metroid Prime Echoes, a remake of the first Resident Evil and Resident Evil Zero, Metal Gear Solid 3 were shown. Among these promising teasers and trailers was Geist. The project, which at that time had already been in development by N-Space for about a year. Then they showed Nintendo an early prototype of their game Fear, and at E3 2003 the game, with some modifications from the new publisher, appears as an exclusive for the Gamecube game console under a new name – Geist.

The trailer demonstrated a system for capturing objects (poisoning), which promised great opportunities in the game.

The spirit (blue-white glow) takes over the girl’s body

And in general, the game looked interesting – interaction with objects in the style of adventure, manipulation of NPC behavior to achieve their own goals, strange hostile creatures that clearly did not bode well for the main character.
True, it looked a little clumsy, but on the whole the audience liked it, and Nintendo promised to release the game the same year.

But the game was not released in 2003, but it was not forgotten either. IN 2004 The game was shown again at E3. One could notice changed locations, a change in the emphasis of the video and, most likely, the gameplay from the shooter component even more to the research one. Not much could be understood from the demonstration, but it seems that at that time for Nintendo it was some kind of hope for serious help for the Gamecube, the game was supposed to become a strong platform exclusive. But Geist still caused some concerns – there was a certain cheapness in everything and the already mentioned clumsiness of what was happening. In addition, the game was always shown little and in fits and starts, giving little insight. However, the core mechanic of taking control of objects and living beings was still fresh and unusual. Indeed, add here all the features of a good adventure game, some variability, and the result will be an interesting and unusual project.

Story shootouts from the game trailer

But this variability was not shown. In general, the trailer, like a year earlier, showed more of the concept of the main mechanics than the capabilities of the final product. Nevertheless, even if already with
great fear, but we were waiting for the game.

But even in 2004 the game did not appear on store shelves.

2005. Development at N-Space continues. To demonstrate the painstaking work, a video in the spirit of developer diaries is released and the game is shown for the third time at E3, and the release date is once again announced – the end of 2005.
From the materials shown, we can conclude that the game has again been significantly redesigned. But at the same time, the old problems remained, which was expressed concern, for example, by IGN in its preliminary review.

The player prepares to move into the door control panel

Even before the game was released, it became clear that it would not become a major Gamecube exclusive. By that time, almost 3 years had already passed since the start of development, the Xbox 360 from Microsoft was on its way, and the home console from Nintendo had long since lost its ground, and in the same 2005, at the same exhibition where the final trailer of the game was shown, the Wii console, then called Revolution, was demonstrated.
However, there were vague hopes that Geist would turn out to be just a good and exciting first-person adventure, because the ideas in the game were intriguing.

At the end of 2005 the game appears on store shelves. Gamecube owners could finally appreciate this long-term construction with great potential and the same ambitions. But… we were in no hurry to do this. Why? Let’s figure it out.

The main character of the game is still on his own body

The protagonist of the game is an employee of the special anti-terrorism squad named Raimi – at the very beginning of the game he loses his body. The game offers you to be a spirit, a ghost if you like, capable of possessing people and things to manipulate them in order to achieve the required goals with their help. Get a person with special clearance, a military man to break through with fire, become a mouse for covert penetration, an industrial robot to intimidate workers, or a can of dog food to finally feed her and distract her from guarding the passage. Sounds like a lot of room for ingenuity and imagination. Or at least just as a variety in solving the same problem. But don’t rush to conclusions.

So, Raimi’s ultimate goals are to save his friend, get his body back, and stop the bad guys from building their own army of the same ghosts who can control a variety of people with a variety of consequences. I won’t touch on the plot anymore, in case someone decides to take a look.

The gameplay is a mixture of first-person shooter and adventure genres. And the game is bland in both directions.

Managed to capture an armed man

With shooter mechanics everything is simple – weapon Just not felt. Regardless of whether the main character is holding a pistol or a grenade launcher, nothing changes for you as a player. There is no felt recoil, each firearm feels like feathers in Raimi’s hands. You also don’t feel like hitting enemies, which makes shooting at them not very exciting.

This is doubly offensive because there really is a selection of interesting weapons here. Standard pistols, machine guns, shotguns, rifles and grenade launchers sit side by side with nail guns, stationary machine guns, some biological weapons and even medical equipment.

They just beg for situational use, but in fact, if the game didn’t directly force you to use a certain weapon in a certain place in the game, then you would get by with one or two types. This is because the weapons are not that different and enemies are susceptible to all weapons equally.

Inanimate objects are also subject to https://euromania-casino.co.uk

And this is also a shame, because there is a variety of enemies here. Simple guards, mercenaries of various levels of preparedness, snipers, workers with heavy pneumatic hammers, special squads to fight spirits, as well as a small number of different living creatures.

As for the adventure part, everything is ambiguous here. On the one hand, to solve current problems you need to look for the right things to manipulate, select an approach to people in order to capture them. Because until you scare them enough, subdue them
you won’t be able to free yourself.

Scaring the scientist

Sometimes you need to build a whole chain of actions, as if building a scenario for the behavior of everyone around you, in order to get the desired result. At locations you can often find a lot of things that you would like to play with. But the game only gives the illusion of choice. Most often, there are 3-4 items available for interaction, but they all lead to the same solution – the only one that the developers have provided. In addition, the further you progress in the game, the more often interaction is reduced to one item per room.

In a dog’s body you can quickly run into some small holes

In general, there is a problem with variability here and it’s simply not possible to approach the issue creatively. The game in this matter is completely linear. Yes, when there is a choice of at least 4 items per location, we begin to think about which captured item will cause the reaction we need in a particular type of NPC, when it is still possible to use the trial and error method, it becomes.. Interesting. Yes, ultimately this is still one single solution to the current problem, but it does not lie on the surface, giving the player the opportunity to play a little as a researcher and move his brains a little. Even in this form, it already enlivens the game and captivates.

For example, we need to eliminate all the guards who are now gathered in the dining room for lunch, but the cook is in no hurry to feed them.

Hungry men

We go to the warehouse, where 5 minutes ago we saw a jar of rodent poison. We take control of her and quietly roll into the kitchen. We manipulate the oven to spoil the cooked dinner and, using fan control, direct the air so that the cook smells the smell of burnt food and pays attention to it.

Finally noticed!

Using cutlery, we intimidate him, subjugate him, take the poison that we carefully placed in the kitchen, and add it to the food for the guards, and finally feed this mixture to hungry people.

This is what we’ll feed you.

Yes, I also couldn’t believe that this is what the game wanted from me, because it’s cruel, but this is what Geist has. Unfortunately, even such possibilities do not appear in all game situations, and often it all comes down to banal piercing of objects within the location to find the only thing(!) object for interaction. And when the first described moments give way to the second option, it’s just disappointing.

We use an engineer in a special suit to walk through the excavations

The fact that the game was supposed to be a good adventure with exploration can also be judged by the map or the elaboration of locations.

3D map with freedom of rotation. If you do not take into account the slightly illogical controls, then it is very informative. For such a linear game it is clearly redundant and more
useful for games with branched locations, where you really need to walk around corners and do backtracking.

Map of one of the locations

And you simply won’t use this card. There is no need for it, so its usefulness tends to zero. During my rather short playthrough of the game, I opened the map about 6 or 7 times. Half of them were when I wanted to see the current task and clicked in the wrong place, opening the map by accident.

The locations, given that the game is quite straightforward, have many branches that are either not used or the paths to them are closed. Moreover, there are places where, by intuition, the player will go exactly in the direction where the passage is closed or blocked. It’s as if it was there before
something important, but in the end it was cut out, the passage was blocked with debris from the ceiling, and the previously secondary path became the main and only one.

The locations themselves are often very detailed and have a good amount of details, rooms, various things and structures. They please the eye, arouse interest, and give the feeling that everything is here for a reason and has its purpose. And… it’s not like that. There are many items that cannot be captured, but in the current situation I would like and it would be logical to try. Much of the location’s surroundings are not used to interact with the world.

A riddle with light in a very interesting location

There were regularly places where, seeing all the decorations, I thought: “Wow, looks like some kind of puzzle that you need to solve in order to move on.”. And there are so many interesting things here, you need to figure it out.”. In the meantime, it turned out to be a fact that there is either a mystery here like “Turn the mirror twice so that the light is reflected” or there was nothing at all and the main character simply rushed forward past all these potential possibilities!

Towards the end of the game, there was a feeling that they were in a hurry to finish the game – there were a lot of missing animations, a lot of models began to fall through the walls, invisible walls here and there. Repetition of tasks that cannot even be called children’s puzzles. For example, turn on six generators in a certain sequence with a time limit.

One of the bosses

Artificial intelligence doesn’t shine either. I climbed onto a diagonal support and some enemies, squad after squad, ran up to this support point-blank to my coordinates in the plane of the x-y axes and calmed down on this.

He’s normal

You can peek around the corner, seeing the enemy’s leg, and calmly kill him by shooting his foot. And if you do this with his comrade-in-arms standing next to him, he won’t even blink. But as soon as a certain point of your carcass, which the AI ​​uses for tracking, appears on the horizon, the enemy will immediately begin to fire back with automatic weapons from another corner of the hall with a hit chance of almost 100%.

The engine seems to work poorly with planes in general. Shadows regularly break – enemies under a diagonal support cast a shadow on it. The spider around the corner above you at sea level will beat heart-rendingly in your direction, but it won’t go around the corner and won’t go down – finding paths in the game
(at least for this type of enemy) simply does not give him the opportunity, as if
height is not taken into account at all for AI.

Look for the shadow on the stairs

Spiders, by the way, are a separate disappointment. When I saw these invisible enemies for the first time, I perked up. It was something new and interesting. But they turned out to be stupid, predictable and simply not interesting to shoot. You find one pattern and follow it through all your encounters with them in the game.

The same thing happens with bosses. They appear regularly as you progress through the game. Sometimes these are representatives of the human race, but most often they are monsters from the depths. And more often than not, battles with them suffer from repetition.

Seriously, this boss appears three times during the game and all three times his behavior changes no way. Moreover, the scheme for fighting him is the most boring – shot, hid behind cover, waited for 3-4 return shots, came out at a moment of silence, shot, hid behind cover. And so on for 2-3 minutes until the adversary is killed.

Interesting boss

This boss is encountered twice during the game, but he was approached with greater responsibility. At the first meeting, he behaves similarly to the previous boss, but after several hits he abruptly changes tactics, forcing you to panic for cover and a convenient position for attack for the first time. Towards the end of the battle, he changes tactics again and here firearms are useless to finish off and he has to use grenades.

Re-meeting

During the second skirmish with him, which occurs towards the end of the game, you will have to rush around a large hall with some columns, either chasing the boss to attack, or running away from him and hiding in cover. The enemy speeds up and slows down, changes trajectory. When he realizes that you are following him, he releases poisonous gas behind him. If you hide, he will begin to scour the area, looking for you to attack. True, I did find a bottleneck in his AI and used him for the entire second half of the battle. But until this happens, this boss made me tense in a good way. Yes, and using an error in his behavior required performing a certain sequence of actions at certain (quite strict) timings, so sometimes he still managed to cause damage to me, move on to another branch of the pattern of his behavior, and then again I had to rush around the area, trying to introduce him to the behavior I needed.

If we talk about the technical component, then it, like the gameplay, led me to slight confusion. The game can run in progressive mode, outputting the image at 480p resolution and rendering the image at the same actual resolution. The effects of particles, reflections, and surface shine are quite good for such a console. Good shadows and high-resolution textures (for the platform). But at the same time, the animations are sometimes unnatural to the point of horror, the textures of the active zones of objects against the background of the rest are depressing. Detailed locations juxtapose with sparse rooms, straight out of GoldenEye for Nintendo 64.

But what really confused me was the performance. The frame rate is simply unstable. This already appears in the prologue, the game sometimes drops to 15 frames per second. To be fair, I note that this does not happen all the time, but enough for you to remember it.

The majority of gameplay takes place at framerates between 20 and 30 frames per second. Especially when the game goes completely into corridor action mode, trying to display an enemy around every corner of numerous rooms.

But that’s not all the problems. In fact, the game targets 60 frames per second and apparently has adaptive synchronization (we are talking about software implementation, not hardware technology). Analysis of the video showed that the game most often does not go above 30, displaying a line graph, but there were also results showing from 45 to 60 frames per second.

I thought that the algorithm of my program was very mistaken in something and began to check it manually. But it turned out that the game in small, unloaded rooms really starts aiming for 60 frames per second and really gives them away.

But after the load appears, it jumps for some time between 45 and most often 50 and then sharply fixes at 30 frames per second. But, as I already said, she is not always able to hold them either. With fire effects or a lot of geometry in the frame, performance drops below 30 so much that you will feel it without special analysis. Also, the theory of synchronization is confirmed by the absence of tearing with such a floating framerate.

Contradictions are the name of the game. A lot of good ideas, but their implementations range from good to boring, predictable, monotonous and poorly technically implemented. The trouble is that I really felt that moment in the game at which the developers began to rush, leave a bunch of imperfections, cram in mechanics that are not used or also not brought to mind and are not developed, although this was not enough for me as a player. Great ideas that were not properly implemented. Strange technical solutions are also incomprehensible. If in some gameplay moments the game does not reach 60 frames per second, then it would be more logical to always aim for 30 frames per second.

Game Geist – a set of contradictions, where good ideas, together with good implementation, coexist with monotony and lack of interest.