International Center for Ethereal Containment and Control

I remember playing the original Ghostbusters Activision game for the Atari 800 back in 1984. Repetitive, clunky, and featuring an out-of-place driving mini-game, my brother and I actually enjoyed playing it. After that game, it was all downhill for the Ghostbusters gaming franchise. Until now.

This new Ghostbusters game is an instructive way of immersing a player in the movie experience. The majority of the voice actors are back. The plot is directly tied to the first two movies. You get to play a rookie Ghostbuster and the proton packs are accurately replicated down to the slightest detail – the music is straight from the film, the sound effects are exactly the same, and the special effects of the twisty, winding proton streams are perfectly captured. Ghostbusters even features a nod to modern gaming tropes, like "venting" weapons so that they cool down before firing. That's the good news.

Setting aside the Ghostbusters content, the game comes up a short. Playing Ghostbusters is like playing on a movie soundstage: you can only go where the set is built. Although there's the illusion of freedom from the first- or third-person perspective, there's really not much to actually do. The characters have a shiny, plastic look and the lip-syncing is awful. There are half-hearted attempts to round out the content: collectible artifacts that echo creepy noises, equipment upgrades, and the bizarre ability to drink from water fountains. But none of this really affects game play – the artifacts are set dressing, you will be able to afford every equipment upgrade by the end of the game, and drinking from water fountains nets you an achievement.

Least forgivable is the lack of a co-op mode for the campaign. I was fooled by the advertising indicating that Ghostbusters has a "campaign mode." To be clear, campaign mode is NOT the same as co-op mode. One would think that a game that features all four Ghostbusters in play would be a natural fit for a co-op mode allowing four players. One would be wrong.

Looking back on the concept art, a lot seems to have been cut from Ghostbusters, and that's a shame. The game is short, with a very linear plot and not much in the way of side missions. Walking around with a PKE meter in first-person mode washes everything in a green lens, which is great for finding artifacts but not so great for enjoying the game's beautiful backdrops and foes. In fact, sometimes there's so much going on that the game's rendering can't really be appreciated. Ghostbusters feels cramped and busy.

The experience of running around the Ghostbusters' firehouse encapsulates much of what's wrong and right with the game: you can talk to the portrait of Vigo the Carpathian, stand in front of a game of Q-bert (but not actually, ya know, play it in-game), slide down the fire pole, listen to Janine Melnitz answer the phone, and be stalked by disembodied disco jeans you picked up earlier in the game…but once you've walked around a few times there's not much else to do.

But my two-year-old now chants "ghost-BUSTAHS!" whenever someone asks him who he's gonna call…so Terminal Reality must be doing something right.

Labels: Ghost Games

Okay, I was wrong.

When The Blair Witch Project came out, the movie was suitably freaky. The "what if" premise was as much a part of the film's terror as the movie itself. Unfortunately, the hype was as artificial as the movie itself: friends of the producers spread rumors on the Internet that The Blair Witch Project was the scariest movie ever. Sound familiar?

So you can understand my skepticism when Paranormal Activity released in a limited number of theaters, practically begging viewers on its web site to ask to see it. The exclusivity was clearly meant to make people only want to see the movie even more. Considering the numerous first-time posters on dozens of horror forums proclaiming it "the scariest movie ever" and…well, I didn't believe them.

I was wrong. Paranormal Activity, about a modern couple trying to survive a demonic haunting, does everything right.

* It takes the documentary medium a step further than Blair Witch, primarily used the style to make the film feel raw. That unfiltered feel is also present in Paranormal Activity, but the film goes beyond that by playing with time stamps. As the time stamp speeds up or slow down, the producers torque the tension.

* Never has a single open bedroom door been so disturbing. It conveys, by being open night after night, a sense of vulnerability, acts as a gateway between worlds, and symbolizes a violation of sanctuary. I couldn't take my eyes off the door the entire movie.

* Silence. Paranormal Activity uses silence to freak out the audience. Our own fears build and build in the vacuum of sound. In fact, the silence was so deafening that the sound from the movies playing next door and the clicking of the film projector proved a distraction. In that regard Paranormal Activity might be even scarier on a small screen.

* Whether it's propping up the false bravado of Micah or the dire predictions of The Psychic, there are no heroes here. And when someone a solution is finally identified as being capable of helping…it is tantalizingly out of reach.

This movie's plot isn't anything new. The same territory has been covered by The Haunting, Poltergeist, and The Exorcist. Paranormal Activity is simply a terrifying ghost story stripped down to its bare bones.

It may not be the scariest movie ever, but it comes damned close.

Labels: Ghost Reviews

I didn't expect much from the Grudge. Whenever a trailer has difficulty in explaining the plot, I lower my expectations. "When someone dies in the grip of a powerful rage, a curse is born" seems a bit awkward. The "grip" of a "powerful" rage? Not a really bad rage? What exactly is a rage's grip anyway?

This challenge, the failure to explain exactly the plot behind the horror, saps the terror from the movie. I should warn readers now that I'm going to make a lot of comparisons to The Ring, a movie that scared the living crap out of me, because the two have a lot of similarities. We are venturing into Spoilerland.

So let's talk about similarities. Although The Grudge is most certainly not a copy of The Ring, there are enough similarities to make comparisons inevitable. Besides the simplistic titles ("The NOUN, a new Japanese horror, coming to a theater near you!"), both films feature crawling girls with long hair covering their faces, a viral curse, and ghosts that defy the traditional boundary of staying in their respective haunted houses. The climax is even similar: both heroines struggle to save the male love interest before he too becomes infected.

The primary difference between the two films is style. Where The Ring creates a set of rules and then systematically breaks them (or, depending on your perspective, doesn't break them at all but stops reminding you about them), The Grudge isn't encumbered by such rules, to its detriment. This makes the movie hard to follow. In addition, the scenes unfold out of order, explaining what happened to each victim and thereby illustrating the original murder, Memento style.

Here's what I was able to piece together from the deleted scenes: Kayako (Takako Fuji) and Takeo (Takashi Matsuyama) Saeki move into a new home with their son, Toshio (Yuya Ozeki) and his pet cat. While attending school, Kayako becomes infatuated with Peter Kirk (Bill Pullman), her professor. When Takeo discovers her many love notes to the professor, he goes on a berserk rage, murdering Kayako, Toshio, and the cat. Then he kills himself.

The curse kicks in pretty quickly after that. Peter discovers something is wrong and visits the house, only to be infected by the curse, which eventually causes him to throw himself off a rooftop.

Three years later, Karen Davis (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and her pretty-boy boyfriend Doug (Jason Behr) move to Japan as part of an exchange program. Karen is a healthcare worker who specializes in taking care of the elderly. A house now inhabited by the Williams family, including Matthew (William Mapother), his wife Jennifer (Clea DuVall), and Matthew's elderly mother Emma (Grace Zabriskie). When the regular healthcare worker doesn't show up for work one day, Karen is called in to pick up the slack. She's got a new assignment that just happens to be in that Saeki house...

The beauty of The Ring was the development of its characters. It established people who, when faced with spreading evil or the death of their family, gladly chose the greater evil. It dove into the complicated relationship between two parents in a modern age who don't know how to be adults, much less parents. And it peeled away at the voyeuristic core in every one of us, who engages in peeping merely by sitting in a movie theater or watching television...and then punished us for it.

The Grudge is not nearly so high-minded. The curse spreads quickly; so quickly, in fact, that I had a vision of the Japanese National Guard being finally called in to stop the madness when two hundred people are found dead at the Sakei house. Ghosts change form, appear on camera, make weird cat noises, show up seemingly at random, and kill some people quickly but take longer to murder others.

I've never been a fan of Gellar, and her performance didn't change my mind. Karen has no spark with Doug on screen, and their relationship is barely fleshed out. Culture shock is briefly explored in Jennifer's struggle with understanding the Japanese world, but not enough to make us really feel her pain. Not even Jennifer's relationship with Matthew has any real depth. And Gellar seems way too old to be a giddy exchange student.

The only characters that are actually fleshed out are the members of the Sakei family. The deleted scenes make it clear that we're not witnessing one traditional American ghost haunting, but a ghost house of sorts, which utilizes all four bodies (yes, even the cat), to kill its victims. And we come to realize that they are all reenacting their deaths over and over, from the croak of Kayako's severed vocal chords to the shriek of Toshio's poor cat. Unfortunately, critical plot points connecting the first murders with the subsequent deaths were cut, seriously undermining the shuffled scenes. Half the fun is piecing together why the curse took place and connecting the murders to the original event; when you can't make those connections, the film just becomes incoherent.

And that's the problem. With a ghost that can invade your office building, your home, or your bed, we lose all hope that the heroine can even defeat it. The final solution, that the house must be burned to the ground, doesn't seem like a solution at all. When the ghost(s) can look like people you know and call you on your cell phone, the evil seems to have such power that we never believe the heroine has a realistic chance of surviving.

The movie is still creepy. After all, Sam Raimi executive produced. The film is beautifully shot with minimal special effects. The same creepy-crawly stumbling that made Samara so horrifying is in evidence here. The Grudge also makes use of a multitude of horrible sounds, including the aforementioned caterwauling and death-rattling.

Unfortunately, that's not enough to really make The Grudge a scary movie for Western audiences.

Labels: Ghost Reviews

The Ring is one of the scariest movies I've ever seen. It was a decidedly modern twist on an old horror trope: after viewing a weird black-and-white video tape, the viewer receives a phone call explaining he will die seven days later.

What made the Ring so enthralling is that what could have been a cheesy horror movie became an exploration of psychological terror. Instead of just treating the bizarre tape as a typical horror film foil, the protagonist (Rachel Keller, played by the lovely Naomi Watts) uses all her journalist skills to get to the bottom of the mystery. She investigates the background of tape, has it analyzed and basically does everything a logical adult would do when faced with what's basically a killer tape. Rachel discovers that the tape is actually the psychic death knell of a demonic little girl named Samara Morgan (Daveigh Chase) who longs to escape her physical and spiritual imprisonment at the bottom of a well.

In a rare twist, the more Rachel poked at the tape's mysterious origins, the weirder things got. More importantly, the film kept relentless pace with the tape's countdown of seven days. All of the scares were achieved without blood; water and wet hair have never been so horrifying. When we finally do see Samara crawl out of the television, it's to the film's credit that her appearance is as horrifying as we imagined. At the end of the film, Rachel discovered that her son Aiden (David Dorfman) had watched the tape and that the only way to save herself and the life of her son was by making a copy.

No happy ending. Rachel passed the horrible curse on to someone else. And that was the end of the film. Daring, innovative, and just plain creepy, The Ring made you want to move your TV out of your bedroom. Viewers haven't felt that way since Poltergeist.

Then we have Ring Two.

Studios are beginning to encounter a real conundrum in moviemaking. The Ring had a multitude of web sites supporting it that expanded upon the mythology in the movie, including one on the Moesko Island Lighthouse, whatscaresme, anopenletter, and sevendaystolive. Most of them have since been taken down, but they can all be found with the help of the Wayback Machine (look it up). With the advent of the Blair Witch Project, fans expect a supporting mythology and use it to flesh out the rest of the film's backstory.

All these web sites add up to a lot of detail about what happened to create this monstrous ghost known as Samara. With all this backstory, you would expect the filmmakers to further explore the questions around Samara's birth and death. We know only that Samara's mother, Anna, was incapable of having a child of her own and so she left for Europe, only to return with a child who "never sleeps." Samara's psychic abilities were evil...so evil that eventually Anna felt she had to kill her.

But that's not the story we're told in Ring Two. In fact, Ring Two seems to be hell bent on ignoring the rules that were set up in the first movie. We never see the tape again, although a brief introduction explains what happens if you don't make a copy of it. When that copy shows up in a new town that Rachel moved Aidan to, she burns the tape. And that releases Samara. Mind you, Rachel burned the tape in the first film and Samara was not released.

Samara then decides that she's going to live the life she always wanted, with a mommy and everything. Since Rachel and her son don't exactly have a close relationship (he always calls her "Rachel"), Aidan's possession by Samara takes on a kind of cheerful creepiness. Where Aidan is cold and distant, Samara is clingy and demanding. To Dorfman's credit, the child actor does a suitable job of switching between the two personality types.

Rachel searches for a solution to defeating Samara, only to suddenly stumble upon Samara's real mother (Evelyn, played for five minutes by Sissy Spacek). This fact somehow eluded Rachel in the first movie but is easily discovered in the sequel. Evelyn doesn't provide much insight anyway other than that, "Samara is listening...except when you're asleep."

It seems Aidan has psychic powers too and when he's not possessed by Samara, with a body temperature below 95 degrees, he can communicate with his mother. This bizarre plot device gives Rachel an advantage and she soon discovers that Samara's weakness is water. Which is odd, since that was never mentioned in the first film.

Along the way, there's a particularly creepy scene involving deer that is the high point of the film. Some reviewers have questioned the relevance of the scene, but in a rare nod to the original movie, animals can sense Samara and either run away from her or try to destroy her. In this film it's the latter. Unfortunately, the deer are entirely CGI (they couldn't digitally insert deer into the film?) and it's very obvious.

There's a glimpse of the original film in the finale, where Rachel gets sucked into the well and races to escape the weird, spider-like Samara. It's completely ruined by Rachel's catchphrase, "I'm not your F***ING MOTHER!"

And that's what's wrong with Ring Two. It's not a bad horror film, but it's not of the same quality of the first movie. Characters are introduced with the obvious purpose of killing them off, horrible deaths are telegraphed way in advance, and the heroine turns from a tortured, conflicted soul to a rock-climbing, foul-mouthed superhero straight out of Aliens and Terminator.

With none of the pacing, none of the innovation, and very little of the original plot, Ring Two is torn between staying true to the original and appealing to a general audience. In attempting to generalize the fear and horror, the film loses the spirit (forgive the pun) of what made the first movie so appealing.

Oh yeah. If a ghost popped out of your television, wouldn't YOU get rid of every TV in your house?

Labels: Ghost Reviews

Download Price:$6.45
Print Price: $13.95 $11.86 In Stock
Pages: 56
Size: 3.02 MB
Format: Landscape (screen viewing), Portrait (for printing)
Writer: Mike "Talien" Tresca
Cover:
SKU: RPO3013
ISBN: 978-1-935432-24-1
Game Lines: Modern System
Systems: Modern d20
Product Type: Supplement
Media Type: print, PDF

Do you want to make more money hunting ghosts?

Sure, we all do! With our easy to read Ghost Hunter's Guide, you too can become a Ghost Hunter in just under one hour. That's right, one hour!

Armed with the Ghost Hunter's Guide, you can learn such professions as antiques dealer, circus performer, escape artist, fortuneteller, ghost hunter driver, ghost hunter president, ghost hunter secretary, ghost hunter tactical leader, ghost hunter technician, ghost hunter treasurer, ghost hunter vice-president, journalist, mystic, psychic, psychic investigator, or stage magician. You can also earn your degree by taking one of our advanced classes, including arcanist, clairvoyant, exorcist, geomancer, ghost hunter, medium, parapsychologist, and skeptic.

Everywhere, people are dying and rising up as ghosts. These ghosts are in desperate need of capturing and only you can help. Thanks to the International Center for Ethereal Containment and Control (ICECC), we now have the technology to trap ghosts and can lend it to you for a very low fee. With your purchase of the Ghost Hunter's Guide, you can rent our amazing electron packs for just five dollars an hour and start hunting ghosts in no time!

Blood and Spooks: The Ghost Hunter's Guide is a d20 Modern supplement that includes:

• five new allegiances
• a new organization, the International Center for Ethereal Containment and Control (ICECC)
• 16 new occupations
• 10 different ghost hunter backgrounds
• the joy of playing a victim
• 8 new advanced classes
• over 50 psionic powers
• five ghost types and the spirit advanced class, just for ghosts!
• and of course, lots and lots of equipment to capture ghosts

BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE!

Buy a copy of the Ghost Hunter's Guide and we'll also include a ghost container. With ghost containers, ghosts check in, but they can't check out.

Ghosts are the enemy that we all must fight. So please, call and buy your copy of the Ghost Hunter's Guide today!

Labels: Ghost Games

Download: ICECC
Authors: Michael Tresca, Matthew D. Riddle, Fritz Baugh
Type: Role-Playing Game (D20 Modern Supplement)
Suggested Retail Price: FREE
Format: .pdf
Pages: 51
Description:

What if ghosts aren't really supernatural concepts, but creatures with their own biology? And if ghosts have their own biology, then using scientific principals, they can be thwarted - if not destroyed, at least captured. And if ghosts can be captured...well, then somebody can get rich doing it. Enter the Ghostbusters. Hobbled together by a group of misfit scientists, they attempted to use parapsychology for profit and, at least some of the time, succeeded.

In the 80s, Ghostbusting was a novelty. The end of the world brought on a lot of supernatural phenomena and, thanks to a lot of strange science and the Ghostbusters, was narrowly averted. By the end of the 80s, Ghostbusters were dealing less with the supernatural and more with problems like New York "not giving off a good vibe." The Ghostbusters were called upon again to do something about it and they moved pieces of NY's monuments to do it.

Life as a Ghostbuster is never predictable. The wax and wane of supernatural activity seems to vary without rhyme or reason - the 80s was rife with supernatural phenomena but there were entire years that were actually quite boring. At least, for a Ghostbuster.

As the world changed, so too did the nature of Ghostbusting. With a heightened awareness for global terrorism, the psychic energy matrix of the Earth is boiling with anger, fear, and hate - ghosts are more common than ever before. And what do you need when the world is gripped in fear and suspicious of everything that moves? You need a Ghostbuster: a man or woman who, backed by nuclear weapons, blasts a stream of barely harnessed energy at whatever you're afraid of, and do it with a smile and a small service fee.

Ghostbusters: Who Ya Gonna Call? is a d20 Modern RPG supplement that contains: 5 new allegiances, 7 new occupations, one advanced class (the elite Ghostbuster), new uses for old skills, 2 new feats, a bevy of new weapons and equipment (including proton packs and ghost traps), action point rules, planar travel, and monster classification.

Labels: Ghost Games