Star Craft: Ghost running on Xbox according to Gamespot
Starcraft: Ghost impressions
Blizzard shows off portions of its just-announced console game at a press event in Tokyo.
At its Tokyo Game Show press event, Blizzard briefly demonstrated the playable Xbox version of Starcraft: Ghost, its just-announced tactical action game. The demo begins with Nova being sent into a rogue Terran base for the purposes of collecting information for the confederation. After she drops from the ceiling and lands on the top of a Terran drop ship, players can fully maneuver the camera around to look for any enemies in the area. In this case, a couple of marines are patrolling the area, so you can decide if you want to engage in a full fire fight or use the ghost's cloaking ability. The person giving the demonstration opts for stealth and quietly walks by the rogue marines and through a door, and down a ladder located nearby.
Once inside this new area, Nova spots a camera over a door leading into yet another room. Unlike Metal Gear Solid that shows a camera's line of sight through a radar, Starcraft: Ghost actually displays it in the game, so you'll see a bright yellow streak indicating where the camera's currently looking. After avoiding the camera, Nova walks into the next area, but instead of just charging right in, she starts to use her special sight ability that enables her to see objects behind walls to see if there are any marines scouting the area. Unsurprisingly, her sight reveals the neon-outline of a Terran marine walking just around the corner, so Nova walks around the corner and begins to open fire with her standard assault rifle. However, it appears that the marines can take quite a bit of punishment as Nova unloads a constant stream of fire for about 20 seconds before taking the marine down. Interestingly, if you don't kill these marines in a timely manner, an alarm will sound and additional marines will come in to help, but the marine that came running in to help his comrade met with Nova's grenade launcher and was dead within seconds.
After going through another door, Nova reaches a generator room with an enormous spinning fan located at the bottom. Here, Starcraft: Ghost resembles more of a platformer rather than a tactical action game because you have to make several hair-raising jumps in order to make it to the bottom of the generator and avoid being chopped to pieces by the blades on the fan. Once she safely reaches the bottom, another character back at the confederation base tells Nova that this particular facility was being used to study the Zerg, and that the specimens somehow managed to escape from their containment areas.
At this point, a couple of zerglings start to break through the metal panels in the floor and come charging at Nova, but because she's a ghost, she has the ability to move at hyper sonic-speed, which causes everything else in the environment to slowdown—it's somewhat similar to the bullet-time effect seen in The Matrix or recent games such as Max Payne and Dead to Rights. The zerglings are summarily destroyed and Nova goes into the next area where a large zerg hydrolisk pushes over a table while running at Nova. Instead of using her speed ability again, Nova busts out the flame thrower that bathes the room and all of the objects inside in a bright light as the hydrolisk catches on fire and then falls to the ground.
One of the last areas we were shown seemed to be located on a balcony overlooking the central power area of the base. As a side note, we were told that each enemy in Starcraft: Ghost will have a different AI routine. For example, you'll know if a marine has gone into alert mode if the visor on his helmet is either raised or lowered. In addition, marines can be killed much faster with a head shot from the sniper rilfe if the visor is up. We got a chance to see Nova's sniper rifle in action as she took out a couple of zerglings from long-range. This triggered a cutscene similar to some cutscenes from Starcraft in which a group of marines are barricaded behind a door being broken into by the zerg. Once the zerg bust through, the marines start opening fire, and the demo ends.
For a game that was just announced, Starcraft: Ghost looks pretty far along. The character model for Nova as well as some of the zerg looked quite good and the environments are already sporting some nice special effects such as mist spraying from pipes and some impressive lighting. The game appears to play like most tactical action games in terms of the stealth element, but there appears to be much more to it as shown by the portion of the demo that took place in the ventilation area. We'll have more on Starcraft: Ghost tomorrow so stay tuned.
By Giancarlo Varanini, GameSpot VG [POSTED: 09/19/02]
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Nihilistics????
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