Hunt Ghosts in Real Life With Ghostwire and the DSi
It's one thing for a game to bring you face-to-face with ghosts in a spooky alternate reality. It's another thing entirely for a game to bring you face-to-face with ghosts in real life.
It's a shame that potentially innovative technology often gets wasted on "gimmicky" addons - for every game that takes genuine advantage of the DS' touch screen or the Wii Remote, there are ten that replace mindless button-mashing with mindless screen-tapping or remote-waggling.
And then there are games like Ghostwire. Ghostwire is unique because its DS-specific gameplay doesn't revolve around the touch screen - it revolves around the built-in camera and microphone on the DSi. Effectively, the DSi becomes some sort of supernatural tool that enables the player to commune directly with the world of ghosts.
I doubt that it'll play anywhere as seamlessly as it looks in the trailer, but it's certainly one hell of a cool idea. This sort of "augmented reality" gameplay seems to be making very tiny inroads, a bit at a time, and the more I think about it, the more I become convinced that this could be the closest we get to the whole "virtual reality" concept that was all the rage a few decades ago.
If nothing else, you have to give the developers [http://www.ghostwiregame.com/] credit for trying something new, no?
(Penny-Arcade [http://penny-arcade.com/2009/8/24/])
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It's one thing for a game to bring you face-to-face with ghosts in a spooky alternate reality. It's another thing entirely for a game to bring you face-to-face with ghosts in real life.
It's a shame that potentially innovative technology often gets wasted on "gimmicky" addons - for every game that takes genuine advantage of the DS' touch screen or the Wii Remote, there are ten that replace mindless button-mashing with mindless screen-tapping or remote-waggling.
And then there are games like Ghostwire. Ghostwire is unique because its DS-specific gameplay doesn't revolve around the touch screen - it revolves around the built-in camera and microphone on the DSi. Effectively, the DSi becomes some sort of supernatural tool that enables the player to commune directly with the world of ghosts.
I doubt that it'll play anywhere as seamlessly as it looks in the trailer, but it's certainly one hell of a cool idea. This sort of "augmented reality" gameplay seems to be making very tiny inroads, a bit at a time, and the more I think about it, the more I become convinced that this could be the closest we get to the whole "virtual reality" concept that was all the rage a few decades ago.
If nothing else, you have to give the developers [http://www.ghostwiregame.com/] credit for trying something new, no?
(Penny-Arcade [http://penny-arcade.com/2009/8/24/])
Permalink
