Ghost Master (PC)

The good: The game is chockfull of funny pop culture references. Sending ghosts to scare off mortals is great fun.
The bad: Random movement of characters can make solving each scenario unnecessarily long. The recommended roster of ghosts to use in a scenario may not be optimal. There is no indicator of how much time is left for a ghost to recharge its power. The 3D models aren’t as attractive as they could have been, and clipping problems are sometimes evident during cut scenes.
The tally: 7 / 10.

About the Game

Released in 2003, Ghost Master is a real time game in which you assemble a team of haunters to scare off mortals and release trapped spirits to join your cause. You start out with a handful of ghosts to send a group of college girls screaming from their sorority house. Over time, you get to recruit spirits to tackle more challenging scenarios.

After a briefing, you start each scenario by selecting which ghosts to bring with you to your mission. You can click the “Recommend” button to automatically select spirits to help you complete your objectives, but this roster isn’t necessarily the best for finishing your mission fast. In some cases, there may be hidden spirits that cannot be uncovered with the recommended roster. You may have to go through some trial and error to find a set of haunters that work best in a given scenario.

Spirits can only be positioned over objects or areas in the map that are associated with their manner of death or their strongest attachments in life. These objects or areas are called fetters. Spirits that can be bound over areas have more freedom of movement and a wider selection of fetters to choose from than those that can only be attached to objects.

Deploying ghosts on the map and activating their powers requires having sufficient plasm available for your use. Plasm is a kind of energy that serves as an expendable resource in this game. You start each scenario with a small amount of plasm that you can temporarily increase by frightening mortals. Over time, this gain in plasm will decrease as mortals calm down. Causing mortals to flee off the map will increase your plasm level permanently for the rest of the scenario. When you summon a ghost to the map or activate one of its powers, you tie up some amount of plasm in the process. Deactivating a power or removing a ghost from the map frees up the plasm that was used. If you attempt to use more plasm than you have, an alarm will sound, giving you a few seconds to deactivate powers or unfetter ghosts. If you don’t free up excess plasm usage in time, the scenario will end abruptly in failure.

Each ghost has several powers that require different amounts of plasm to use. Weaker powers cost less plasm to use than stronger ones, and some ghosts require more plasm for the same power that other ghosts may have. You use these powers to affect the behavior of mortals (usually by scaring them) or to change the environment somehow. Once used, most powers take some time to recharge before they can be used again. Unfortunately, there is no indication of how much time a haunter needs to recharge a particular power. Neither does the game indicate which powers need to be recharged and which can be used continuously. These are things you’ll need to figure out for yourself.

For most scenarios, you will need to cause mortals to exit the map in terror or to render them hopelessly insane. Mortals have three stats you will need to monitor from time to time; namely, Terror, Madness, and Belief. Terror indicates how frightened a mortal is. Each time a haunter scares mortals, their Terror goes up. If a mortal’s Terror is filled to capacity, that person will flee the map. Some haunter powers raise Madness instead of Terror. Mortals who go completely insane will not leave the map, but that’s as good as having fled for determining if you’ve achieved the scenario’s victory conditions. Belief determines how easily a mortal is terrorized. Those with low Belief are difficult to frighten. Fortunately, some haunter powers can raise Belief. You may need to use those powers to soften up skeptics before you barrage them with terror tactics.

In addition to these three stats, mortals also have a Conscious Fear and an Unconscious Fear. Mortals who are especially afraid of fire, for instance, will be more easily frightened when you activate fire-based powers. Unconscious fears are even more effective at terrifying mortals than conscious fears. Some haunter powers can uncover a mortal’s fear, but it isn’t necessary to know what they are to win a scenario.

A few mortals have the ability to banish ghosts that are fettered on the map. The game will immediately warn you if a mortal is banishing one of your spirits, at which point, you may have to unfetter the ghost to escape banishment. A haunter that is banished cannot be summoned to the map for the rest of the scenario, and if enough of your ghosts are banished, you will lose the game.

Many of the characters and scenarios in this game are inspired by TV shows, movies, and comics. Recognizing these pop culture references may get you chuckling. I’ve spotted references to The Evil Dead, Casper, Ghostbusters, The Three Stooges, and many more. The whole concept of gathering ghosts to scare off mortals makes this game immensely fun, especially when plenty of humor is thrown in. It certainly helps that many of the scenarios are cleverly designed.

When you complete a scenario, you are awarded gold plasm, which you use to purchase more powers for your ghosts. The amount of gold plasm you receive depends on your scenario score. While you can conceivably complete the game without purchasing new powers for your ghosts, having more powers at your disposal can help you complete scenarios faster. This grants you more victory points in turn. If you are not satisfied with how well you did in a scenario, you may replay it at any time.

Despite all the good things going for this game, some of the fun is sapped out of it when trying to figure out what powers should be activated to get mortals to do certain actions. For example, in one scenario, you need to send three mortals to a cabin to complete a ritual, but the mortals would first have to find a way to cross a raging river and a deep chasm. Since the solution to these and other problems isn’t always obvious, you may need to experiment with different powers before making headway.

This wouldn’t have been a problem if not for the fact that mortals move around the map randomly like characters in The Sims. Some will use the bathroom, take a drink of water, or converse with their friends at random moments. While it does seem natural to have mortals behaving in this manner, it doesn’t help if you have to wait a long time for a mortal to do a particular action, such as bringing a gift to a specific room. If you aren’t even sure that what you’re attempting will work as intended, then having to wait more than a minute becomes an exercise in frustration.

The graphics are another problem, albeit a minor one. Even considering that Ghost Master was released in 2003, its 3D models are not as attractive as they could have been. The graphics in older games such as Max Payne and Black & White are much better. In addition, Ghost Master has clipping problems that are especially evident during cut scenes. That said, none of these issues should seriously detract from the enjoyment of this game.

Room for Improvement

Considering the 3D technology that was already available prior to 2003, Ghost Master could have had better graphics, although this is really just a quibble compared to more serious issues with the game’s design. Having mortals move around the map and behave with clockwork predictability would have done much to decrease the waiting time in executing your plans. Knowing how much time a ghost needs to recharge its powers would also have made plan execution more predictable.

Conclusion

Ghost Master is highly entertaining, although a few unfortunate design decisions make it frustrating to solve some scenarios. Incredibly, Ghost Master doesn’t seem to have ever been cloned. Although games such as Dungeon Keeper and Evil Genius also put you in the role of an evil mastermind, there are no other games that I know of in which you command ghosts to frighten hapless mortals. If scaring the bejesus out of little computer people sounds like fun (and believe me, it is), do yourself a favor and get yourself a copy now.

Zanzarah: The Hidden Portal (PC)

The good: A number of fairies have clever graphical designs. It’s tempting to try to catch them all. The combat system poses some fun and interesting challenges. Reloading a saved game is instantaneous.
The bad: The story is not engaging. Leveling up your fairies will require long, tedious grinding. Evolving your fairies will not always make them stronger. The graphics are dated by today’s standards. Only one save slot per game, and it is automatically used whenever you change areas. The game lacks an automap feature.
The tally: 8 / 10

About the Game

Zanzarah: The Hidden Portal was first released on December 2002, and it shows. The graphics are dated by today’s standards. Despite that, the game play is engaging, and if you can look past the graphics, you’ll find yourself coming back to Zanzarah again and again.

You play Amy, an eighteen-year-old English girl who is magically whisked to Zanzarah, a world where elves, dwarves, goblins, and fairies had happily co-existed until recently. It seems that fairies have gone mad, attacking hapless folk for no reason. To top it all, shadow elves have appeared on the surface and are attempting to take over the land. It was prophesied long ago that only a human can set things right, and of the six billion or so people in our world, Amy was inexplicably chosen to be that savior.

The story is where Zanzarah is weakest. It merely serves as a pretext for Amy to go on her adventure. There is no deeper motivation for Amy to help the folk of Zanzarah, no opportunities for personal growth and development. All the characters are two-dimensional, except for Amy, who has no personality to speak of. You will never feel any strong emotions toward any of the characters. There is a lot of potential for a story about a girl who meets fairies, but all this has gone to waste in this game.

In Zanzarah, elves, dwarves, and goblins are civilized folk, and they never resolve conflicts by beating up or hacking at each other. No, they let fairies do their dirty work for them. If you, as Amy, are to earn a modicum of respect from the local populace, you would do well to collect your own set of fairies and train them to defeat others. This method of conflict resolution seems somewhat stilted, and one wonders how the game would have progressed if someone like Max Payne or Duke Nukem had been chosen to save Zanzarah instead.

Make no mistake about it. Zanzarah is a Pokemon clone. You’ll even use something like Pokeballs to collect the fairies that you capture. Nevertheless, there are enough differences in its game play to justify Zanzarah’s inclusion in my list of standout games. Combat is implemented as a first-person shooter, in which you control one of your fairies and blast the opposition with its spells. Offensive spells are powered up by holding down the left mouse button and fired when you release the button. If you hold down the button too long, however, the spell will backfire.

Your fairy flies up whenever you click the right mouse button. Flying expends your fairy’s stamina, however, and if your fairy is too tired to pull itself out of a bottomless portion of the arena, it will die.

You can keep as many as five fairies with you at any point in time. The set of fairies that you have with you is called a deck, a term that seems to hearken to Pokemon’s incarnation as a trading card game. You choose your deck from your entire fairy collection, which is kept in your house in London, and you take your deck with you wherever you go. If, during a battle, you want to switch your current fairy with some other fairy in your deck, you may do so. Only fairies that participate in and survive a battle earn experience points, so if you find that your fairy is being beaten to within an inch of its life, you will probably want to switch it with some other fairy.

You will also meet elves, dwarves, and goblins who are fairy masters, just like you. They will challenge you to a duel of fairies, pitting their decks against yours. Since fairies fair better against some types of fairies than others, both you and your opponent will do a lot of fairy switching during the course of the duel. You cannot capture fairies that are owned by other masters, so feel free to obliterate them as you please. Sometimes, you will also be attacked by a group of fairies that have no apparent master. As these fairies are not wild despite having no master, you will not be able to collect them.

As your fairies level up, most of them will eventually have a chance to evolve into some higher form, yet another concept that was borrowed from Pokemon. Evolving a fairy will not necessarily make it stronger, however, so unless you want to collect all fairy types, you may want to cancel a fairy’s evolution before it takes place. The only way for you to know if a fairy’s evolved form is weaker or stronger than its previous form (short of looking it up on the Internet) is to allow it to evolve. If you’ve saved your game before one of your fairies evolves, you can revert back to your saved game if you prefer to keep you fairy in its current form.

It is tempting to try to have each fairy type represented in your collection even though the game does not reward you for catching them all. The appearance of your fairies range from the genuinely creative to the downright silly, so having a chance to look at each of them at your leisure may be motivation enough to complete your collection.

Considering the large number of fairy types to choose from, you are bound to spend a considerable amount of time leveling up some fairies only to find another fairy that you will want to use instead. Leveling up your fairies will turn out to be a long and tedious grind, a necessary evil if you are to hurdle the tough encounters that await you.

Saving and reloading are instantaneous for all intents and purposes. If Amy dies or loses a fight, the game will automatically reload from your save slot. Unfortunately, you only have one save slot per game, and this gets automatically overwritten every time you move from one area to another. Also, your character’s position in the game world is never saved, so every time you reload, you will be repositioned at the starting point of your current area.

The world of Zanzarah is vast, and you will have to revisit some of the areas a number of times. Fortunately, you will have a chance to get rune stones that can teleport you to some of the areas that you have been to. A number of areas have twisting paths that double back to themselves, which would have made an automap feature welcome, if only the game had it. Because the game lacks such a feature, however, you are bound to get lost in these areas quite often.

Room for Improvement

Zanzarah does a number of things right. A creature collection metagame emerges out of its design, just as it does in the Pokemon games. Its combat system is an improvement over Pokemon and makes for an appropriately brief and exciting experience. Nevertheless, I’ve mentioned a number of shortcomings that could have been improved upon. The story could have been better, and an automap feature would have been welcome. Also, it would have been nice if there was more than one save slot in the game and if Amy’s location could have been saved as well.

If I were to choose just one aspect of the game to improve upon, it would be to tone down the difficulty of the non-random encounters while increasing their number. The way the game is currently designed, you would have to seek out way too many random encounters to level up your fairies sufficiently to survive the non-random encounters that Amy will have to hurdle so as to advance the story. I would have kept grinding to a minimum, ensuring that each set encounter will prepare the players' fairies sufficiently to survive the next set encounter. I would have to increase the number of set encounters in the process, but at least I would have minimized the players’ reliance on random encounters that do not advance the story in any way.

Conclusion

Zanzarah is a fun game that offers its own unique take on the Pokemon formula. PC gamers who need a Pokemon fix need look no further than here. The game does have a number of shortcomings, but those can be forgiven because of its engaging game play.

Majesty 2: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim (PC)

The good: This real-time strategy game provides a clever mechanic for indirectly controlling units through monetary rewards.
The bad: Advanced and Expert scenarios may be overwhelmingly difficult to the point of frustration.
The tally: 8 / 10

About the Game

“…many have tried to pry the legendary scepter from the dead king’s hands. None have succeeded. And now, it’s our turn!”
– The Advisor

Released in 2009, Majesty 2: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim is the sequel to (you guessed it) Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim, published in 2000. In both games, you play a king who can build structures for recruiting heroes, supplying their gear, researching spells, and defending the realm. Majesty and Majesty 2 are unique takes on real-time strategy gaming in that you cannot directly control the heroes that you produce. Instead, you set bounties for exploring areas, defending your structures, and attacking enemy units or buildings. You can also set a bounty for keeping heroes from entering an area, although you probably won't be using this type of bounty often, if at all. Having an indirect level of control makes sense in the context of the game. You are supposed to be a king after all, not a micro-manager.

Each guild that you construct allows you to recruit specific types of heroes; namely, clerics, elves, dwarves, rangers, rogues, warriors, and wizards. You can also build temples that allow you to recruit archers of Helia, beastmasters, blademasters, paladins, priestesses of Krypta, and priestesses of Agrela. These heroes have minds of their own and will go looking for adventure or picking fights with monsters as they please. As mentioned previously, you can direct their efforts by offering monetary rewards for various tasks, although you cannot choose who will respond to your bounties. Heroes will earn experience points each time they attack an enemy creature or structure, and they can gain gold that they may spend at your commercial establishments. They may also die if they are not careful, but you may resurrect them from the local graveyard for a fee that rises in proportion to their level.

Everything that you do – from constructing buildings to casting spells – is fueled by the taxes that you collect from the local populace. Some buildings, such as the marketplace, can generate more revenues than others. You can increase taxes from the marketplace by building trading posts at specially designated spots. Defending these trading posts and the gold-laden caravans that they spawn is going to cost you by way of spells, protection bounties, or defensive towers.

Despite being unable to control heroes directly, you'll be busy setting up your structures, issuing bounties, and casting spells throughout the game. You will also need to scan the realm for developments that may warrant your attention. It is tempting to occasionally watch a fight in one area, but if you spend too much time watching, you may lose track of another battle elsewhere, and before you know it, down goes one of your buildings, along with all the research and upgrades that you had invested in it.

Anyone who has ever played Dungeons & Dragons knows that having a balanced mix of heroes in any party is crucial for survival. In Majesty 2, however, heroes will tend to gallivant by default without regard for teamwork. To rectify this situation, you can construct a pub and initiate research on party formation. When done, you can use the pub to gather heroes and form four-person parties with them. The members of a party will then travel together until death does them part (or until you disband them, whichever comes first).

Come to think of it, having the king dictate when parties should be formed and who should comprise them seems odd. This design decision is not consistent with the rest of the game, where directing the populace is one step removed from immediate control. Party formation is a new feature that was not present in the first Majesty game. It is a welcome feature to be sure, but one that seems out of place with the rest of the game.

At the start of each scenario, the entire land is shrouded in a fog of war, except for a small area surrounding your initial buildings. The land is dotted with enemy structures that periodically spawn hostile units, so it is generally a good idea to encourage your heroes to explore the land so you can set attack bounties over these structures.

The campaign scenarios range in difficulty from Novice to Expert. The more difficult scenarios are sufficiently varied to require different strategies and build orders to succeed. Herein lies the rub. The later scenarios are so punishing that you are bound to fail in your first few attempts while you try to discern the pattern in the enemies’ attacks. Exploring the land early makes for good policy, but in some scenarios, early exploration will trigger an immediate assault from powerful enemies. Building defensive towers around your town is usually a good idea but not in one scenario, where the boss can huff and puff and blow your towers down. If you make a mistake somewhere along the line, your enemies will accumulate and overwhelm you with sheer numbers. The only way to gather sufficient intelligence for victory (short of reading a walkthrough) is to try different strategies and fail often until you find one that works.

On the shallower side, the 3D graphics are attractive if not spectacular, and the music and sound effects are pretty good. The actor who plays your royal advisor sounds a lot like Sean Connery and does an excellent job of narrating events. The voice acting for the bosses, however, leaves something to be desired.

The setting of the game is generic fantasy, albeit with a dash of humor that adds to the game’s entertainment value. Two of the bosses are clearly inspired by Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, particularly the movies by Peter Jackson. Seeing them made me smile with recognition.

Room for Improvement

While the core mechanic is solid, most gamers may find the later scenarios of the game difficult to the point of frustration. Perhaps the developers should have included a difficulty slider to let players choose just how much punishment they can handle. The easiest difficulty level should be challenging enough to allow most players to win on their first or second try with little sweat. Even in the hardest scenarios, the opposition should be strong without overwhelming the player. It is all right to have enemies attack in large numbers, as long as there is some brief respite between attacks to allow  players to recover a bit and adjust their strategy. When the enemy reaches the point where your units are being pounded relentlessly, you will have no recourse but to end the scenario.

Conclusion

All told, Majesty 2 offers players a chance to be a king in a generic fantasy world. As a king, you will be building structures and issuing bounties, but you will not have direct control of the local populace, which makes perfect sense. You will be able to order specific heroes to band together, which does not quite make sense, but doing so will improve your heroes’ chances of survival. Most players will probably be frustrated with the difficulty level of the later scenarios, but those who persevere may enjoy the interesting challenges of directing the citizenry through fiscal incentives.