| E3 2004 Coverage > Geist |
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| Geist |
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Once inside the guard's body you will see that you have access to a gun amongst other things (just as the guard did.) However, if you aim to find this engineer, you're going to have to act like a real guard otherwise you're going to be found out. Pressing on, you see that the next room has two guards blocking a door. They kindly tell you that only an engineer can get through. In this area I purposely acted like a complete jack-ass in front of the other guards by ignoring them and sprinting all around the room. To my surprise they actually opened fire on me. Before I could get my bearings and realized what was going on, my host was shot down. Quickly looking around I see a water sprinkler on the ceiling. Taking control of the water sprinkler lets me spray all over the place and subsequently take control of one of the trigger-happy guards. Instead of acting like a complete jerk again, I instead head down the joining hall to find this engineer. The next area makes it really apparent that you're near a laboratory, and thus, the engineer could potentially be nearby. Pipes and red lights line the hallway, and following them (and smoothly walking past a couple more guards) finally brings you to a hole that leads into the lab. Bingo!
In the lab you can see lots of equipment and plants, the likes of which you hardly care about at that point. Rather your attention is transfixed on the lone man using the computer terminal at the end of the room. There is another computer you can use in the back end of the lab, but that would hardly be useful at this point since there really is nobody nearby. Doing so leaves the entertaining message "trust nobody" on the computer monitor. You can even possess a nearby security camera to look around with. But these are simply peripheral to the main event. Instead, you possess the very computer that the engineer is using. As the computer you press the action button to hack it. Doing so will lock your controls to show an amusing action play out in front of your eyes. As you hack the computer, you not only start manipulating files and the what comes on the computer screen (you're looking directly through the other side of the screen at the engineer's face) but you begin to take control of the lab equipment therein. You lift the engineer using the giant industrial arms nearby. When he falls he looks scared to the bones, yelps, and quickly darts towards the exit.
In ghost form, this guard's sprint is like a baby's crawl so plainly it takes no effort to finally snatch the engineer after he has been so shaken up. So you have the engineer you need. Though you have made a significant milestone in your progress, you still have a ways to go before you can stop the system that will purge Rourke of his body. Opening the door to the lab, you come to a hallway you did not have access to prior. At the end of it is an elevator. You step on the elevator and activate the switch to go up. Before you have a chance to say "ah, nuts" the elevator quickly stops and comes back down to the bottom, where you are informed that it has lost power. Conveniently, next to the elevator there is a fenced off area which seems to house many plants and lab supplies. Passing through the fence in ghost form, you notice a generator which you promptly possess and then activate, ultimately giving power to the elevator. Upon return to the elevator, you will see that the engineer is collapsed on the ground. It appears that he is so shaken up that when you leave his body he simply faints. Riding the elevator to the top brings you to the hallway with the red lights and steam pipes. Racing through the hallways brings you back to the door that was guarded by the two trigger-happy guards. Thankfully this time you're in your Sunday best.
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| Possessing a Nintendo-branded laptop. |
As you might have guessed, the big door and two soldiers were guarding something significant on the other side: the control room. You are now made aware that things are getting dangerously close to zero-hour around the office. You can possess the sensor that looks upon the giant device on the opposite side of the giant control-room window. With it you can change your viewing filter to different sensor filters (the uses of which were not disclosed.) Without wasting any more time we run for the western door of the control room which leads into a hallway with a mop and bucket, some guards at the end, and a sentry gun. At this point there is no more time for goofing around, so taking control of the sentry gun is no-guff approach that you're just itching to take. As the sentry gun, you can either fire or zoom in. The really interesting thing about the possession with the sentry gun is that the zoom resembles a real-world digital zoom where the image gets larger but pixels become the size of your thumb. This gave a lot of hearty laughs from passers by at the show, as it is a design choice that is really smart in it's execution and at the same time makes a great deal of sense (Hollywood would have you believe that you could zoom in on a security camera image and see the price tag on a carton of milk.) Guards come flooding in from the door at the end of the hallway, and you can gun them down at your leisure. Once the flood stops, you quickly go back to ghost form and head to the end of the hall to get a body count. You see here that not all guards were shot dead. One yellow-armored guard in particular is huddled in a corner in fear of his life. This seems to be just what the doctor ordered. And although you're going to need the engineer further, it is far too dangerous in the coming hallways to allow him to walk unarmed.
Taking over the yellow guard gives you a sleek new rifle, though you'll have little time to idle with the angry guards awaiting you in the spiral staircase coming up. At the end of the staircase is a door that only an engineer can get through. To get there though, you'll have to clean the staircase of any guards to give the engineer safe passage to the door. To do so you can go on a bullet-spraying rampage or you can quickly possess exploding crates and watch hiding guards go flying. Personally, I'm one to go for the slow-motion guard explosions. With the way cleared and a complete fire-fight under you belt you can now safely move the engineer through the door located at the bottom of the stairs.
Here you come across an air lock and a gas suit. Once you get in the gas suit, you will notice that you are looking right through the shiny mask of the suit and are now holding a rivet gun (something the other workers down here are using.) A fellow worker tells you to get to work on a couple of panels that need work so you do as he says like a good little worker bee. To complete a panel you have to remember the order it shows you to nail in and then repeat. After you do three panels of increasingly difficult orders you are finally let through to the bio lab by the other worker. You have finally made your way to the heart of the beast. Here you will find the captain of the guards which could be seen as the level "boss". In either corner of the room you will find a trusty sentry gun to help in your plight. Unlike earlier however, these guys put up a serious fight even against a sentry gun. The moment you fire, every baddy in the room whips around and unleashes hell until your vision begins to go on the gun and you have to bail out. What's more, the captain has a large anti-ghost weapon that you don't want to get pegged with in a host. Using both sentry guns, exploding crates, and defending guards as weapons should eventually pump enough lead into the captain to finally take him down.
Once defeated, the bio laboratory fills with deadly gas. With only two minutes to live, the engineer must shut down the machine. From here you ditch the engineer and run out of the room as ghost and the demo goes to cut-scene. You order the man to stop the machine that you worked so hard to get to. When he refuses to do so, Raimi gruesomely nails him in the head. Thus concludes the single player E3 demo. It was quite easily one of the longer demos on hand in the Nintendo booth and served as a great showcase for the different possession features.
In multiplayer, Geist was simple in its execution. All players act as geists to begin, but can possess guards that are standing around conveniently wielding different sorts of weapons. One guard might be fiddling with a bomb that, when possessed, will allow you to use the very mines he was holding.
A feature that should be noted about multiplayer is that, while normally you're simply blasting each other like every other first person shooter on the planet, you can also obtain a hijacking item that allows you to steal somebody's host, leaving them vulnerable in ghost form. Also important to note is that the multiplayer had 4 slots to use in the E3 version with 4 extra empty slots below. The attendant was unsure about LAN mode, but said that bots are being planned at the moment. It remains to be seen if LAN mode or the alleged bots will make it into the retail version.
After all is said and done, the demo shown at E3 was promising and at the same time somewhat rough around the edges. In particular the framerate could stand to use a bit of a boost. Look over at the Timesplitters 3 kiosk after is like night and day in terms of fluidity. However, on the other side, the game uses bump mapping on many surfaces as well as some amazing vision filters. As an example: when in ghost form your vision is blurred and a bit grey to give the image a "misty" sort of look. As was mentioned earlier, there are also visual effects like the pixilation in sentry gun zooms and the blurry vision with rats. These kinds of details are very much appreciated. However, if the frame-rate was higher, this game would be look like a true graphical showpiece. Here's hoping they can at least clean a bit of that up before the project is wrapped up for its fourth quarter release this year.