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First off, while you have an annoyingly small ammo load in your pistol (seven rounds) there's no ammunition limit, so reload at will. (Somebody get this guy a more modern pistol! Heck, give him a Beretta M92S with the fifteen round clip, and this part of the game would be much less annoying. It's not like you're limiting ammo.)

Second, it can be hard to hit things with the pistol. That may just be me.

Third, you move slower to the left than you do to the right. Maybe it's just me, but this was a consistent, pronounced phenomena that I noticed in the game. This is also the first first person shooter I've played on the GameCube, so as I said, it may have been me.

You move on, and soon one of your team members is eaten by a thingamabob, which you then have to dispatch solo. (It seems your friend on the other end of the trench can't help for some reason.) You have to learn the pattern of attacks and when and where you can hit the tentacle thing, and soon you defeat it.

Then something else happens - and I'll not detail it so you'll see it for yourself - and the game sets itself up for the basic premise. You're a ghost. (Shock, gasp, horror, I know.) You've got to save your friend from the same fate and regain your own body while finding out what's going on in Big Mysterious Evil Corporation.

As a ghost, you have slightly different game play. You're constantly (though very slowly) losing health, which you can renew by possessing a host or draining a plant. You can also float higher up in the air and, while you cannot pass through walls, you can occasionally squeeze through small openings. All of this is taught to you slowly by a little child ghost.

You can't just jump into somebody's body, though. You have to scare them, first. Fortunately for you, you can possess inanimate objects (well, not all of them, just the ones that glow red to show you that game allows you to possess them) in order to scare people or control them. Once you scare people, you can possess them.

For example, you may end up in a situation where you have to set off a sequence of events to scare someone by overloading an electrical system then setting off a steam pipe. Or by controlling robot arms then a laptop. My favorite was possessing a remote Gatling gun emplacement to blow away most of a group of guards, then taking over the lone one remaining. At one point you even possess a bowl of dog food to scare a dog so you can escape. While you can understand why Penny Arcade would make fun of that, it ends up working out.

While you're in possession of a guard, it turns into either a puzzle game (figure out where to go next, really, via various means) or a first person shooter (shoot the guys shooting at you). Boss battles are a hoot. Some will just be you versus a single bad guy; others feature you against multiple enemies - many of whom can probably be possessed.

As I said, though, the game isn't perfect.

The graphics aren't great. They're not bad, but not great, and eventually the little animations for possessing things just become annoying. The same goes for the sound effects, too.

The game play can become a bit repetitive. Scare the guy. Possess him. Shoot his friends. Move to the next area. Jump out of his body and continue. Then again, you can say that about a lot of first person shooter games, but I felt like a lot of times I was just doing the shuffle, especially since there's no lack of ammunition and the enemy AI is fairly stupid. You won't be picking up any other enemy's weapons, either.

I enjoyed the story line of the game, though. It was an interesting enough story to keep me going. There are several versions of multiplayer that can give you up to four players (and up to eight if you use bots). It's definitely an interesting change to the usual "deathmatch" type event, though the limitations of the GameCube really show in that (in other words, because of the lack of networking capability in the GameCube, it can be frustrating).

You'll also see the same "mushiness" to the controls in multiplayer that you see in the single player game. While that can be gotten away with in the single player game it gets extremely frustrating in multiplayer. Also, like in single player, you'll occasionally run into frame rate problems during hectic battles. For me, there's nothing worse than slow down during a big battle … it just drives me up the wall.

For all that being said, Geist is a fun game, and I'd have to recommend it to GameCube owners. It's a fun game to spend some time on. I tend to get frustrated at puzzles in games, and so playing it in short doses kept it enjoyable for me. Multiplayer gives a different feel than you may have found in other games, which provides a nice change of pace with your gaming. I have to admit, though, that it feels a bit "old." It just seems a bit behind the times - but if you're willing to overlook that, you'll find some good game play left in it.