The kitchen work surface is dripping with slime, the lights are going crazy, there's screaming coming from down the hallway and your landlady dropped another of her passive-aggressive little rent demands through the letterbox this morning.
Who ya gonna call?
Well, ignoring the little rent issue for the time being, the answer is: you. Yes, you. It's the early 1990s: Nirvana has just hit the popular consciousness, the first set of detectives are on Law and Order as it has just wrapped its first season, and you've just signed up as the newest member of that elite group of ectoplasm-busting problem-solvers, the Ghostbusters.
The demo we were shown was split into two sections: first, we were shown an overview of the gameplay; then the presenters spent some time showing off the capabilities of the physics engine.
The game fits into the third-person action/shooter genre: two-thumbstick controls, indoor and outdoor environments modelled on New York City, and (of course) an appropriately eclectic collection of gadgetry taken straight from the movies. You play as the fifth Ghostbuster, a newcomer to the team (yes, you get a PKE meter), and will work alongside the other four to locate flush out and finally capture or destroy those pesky ghosts.
Following a storyline penned by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, the writers of the original film series, you'll encounter Mister Stay Puft, Slimer and all the rest whilst playing through what is essentially the third movie in the Ghostbusters series.
Your primary tools in the fight against the supernatural should be familiar: one portable nuclear accelerator strapped to your back, one stream gun, one PKE meter and a handful of ghost traps. There's no traditional game UI — instead, the various lights and indicators on the backpack and equipment serve as 'ammunition' (proton pack overload) and health meters. Additional auditory and rumble cues will let you know when you start to run out of juice — otherwise, the UI simply isn't there. This isn't a new approach, by any means, but Ghostbusters seems to be an effective implementation of the UI-free school of game design.
So, the call's gone out, and you and your teammates have reached today's haunted building. What now? Well, you're not about to start giving orders to Venkman and Spengler — you're the new guy, after all. This isn't a squad-based game in the traditional sense: Your teammates will come to your aid (and request yours) and the player's actions do drive the game experience, but the other characters aren't under your direct command. You do have a PKE meter to play with, though — so whip it out, and start looking for that ghost.
(As an aside, some ghosts are aggressive, and won't wait for you to find them, while others are more reclusive and might require some effort to discover. There's something of a 'gotta-trap-'em-all' mechanic in play here for the completionist players amongst you.)
Having found the supernatural beastie (or had it find you with a bucket of ectoplasm to the face...), your next task is to bring it down. Small ghosts can be easily incapacitated with one stream; stronger ones might need to be bashed against the ground or a handy wall a few times before they capitulate. Your teammates will automatically aid you with the bigger opponents: three streams are generally better than one, and some ghosts might require the combined power of the team to bring down. Either way, once you have the ghost under your control, the next step is to get it into a trap: the smarter newbie Ghostbuster will deploy one beforehand; the less-smart may find that his teammates have helpfully set one up for him. Either way, drag the screaming mass of spectral energy into the trap's field, and you're done. Assuming it doesn't get away, of course. And its mates aren't hanging around for vengeance. And you didn't get blind-sided by a possessed library book whilst all of the above is going on. And so on...
That's the gist of the gameplay we were shown — the game is still fairly early in development, so there wasn't a huge amount of gameplay to show off. That said, the other half of the demo focussed on Terminal Reality's technical achievements — and I liked what I saw.
In-house middleware is being used for both graphics and physics, and the combination allows for some rather neat gameplay elements. Take the proton gun, for example, and aim it at a vase. Shoot, and draw a line — and the vase will fall apart along the line you drew. Slice off a few more pieces of china, and they'll fall to the floor... take out enough, and eventually the object will break apart collapse. This level of detail in the damage effects will be available throughout the game, and the damage is reasonably persistent: go away, fight a few ghosts, and come back, and the vulgar poetry you scrawled on the wall at the start of the level will still be there. Fun stuff.
We saw some demonstrations of the engine handling many objects on-screen at a time, and physics interactions between them. Allow me to present a few vignettes from this part of the demonstration:
Fantastic stuff — with no visual slowdown, even with thousands of interacting objects on screen at a time. This segment of the demonstration was shown to us on a PlayStation 3, and we were told that the developers had made good use of the multiple cores of the Cell processor to pull it off — but the physics-based gameplay will also be available in the PC and Xbox 360 versions of the title.
The final demonstration we were shown was a crowd scene: hundreds of animated, interacting characters pouring out of a building and onto a New York City street. At the peak of the demonstration, 1,500 human characters were active and visible: then came the ghosts. Each of the AI characters had a response: some were struck dumb, others ran screaming, while a brave few hung around to curiously observe the action. This is the sort of technology needed (for example) to pull off a recreation of the Mister Stay Puft battle scene from the first movie — and Terminal Reality seems to have an excellent handle on the technical side of things. I'm looking forward to playing this title, and I hope the game content will do the technical achievements justice.
Now, about that overdue rent notice... I wonder if it's ethical to take unlicensed nuclear equipment home from work to slice and dice your landlady?
As I'm currently living off a student budget, my recent purchases tend to be from the various budget ranges of older titles: I'm more likely to be found playing Quake II or the original Unreal Tournament than Thief III or FarCry. I'll probably make an exception for Doom 3, though. (For the record, I did try Doom 3, and wasn't very impressed. Thief III has made it to the budget range here in the UK, and one day I'll play it. Perhaps after I've updated this profile properly...)
I enjoy online games, but I prefer the persistent world offered by the MMORPGs to the competitive environment of the CounterStrike servers. I've a feeling too many years of leisurely RPG playing have ruined my shooter reflexes; needless to say, I tend to end up on the tail end of the scoreboards in online FPS games. That said, I enjoy the competitiveness of multiplayer gaming, but prefer the face-to-face encounters of LAN gaming to the anonymity of the public servers.
