Ghost Squad on the Wii

One of the Gemote brought Ghost Squad for the Wii along this weekend, and we all had a good four-player romp through the multi-player sections available. As an aside, one of the benefits of the previous generation of consoles that stored game data on memory cards instead of internal to the system, or on the game cartridges themselves, was that a game can be taken to a friend's home along with all the saved game information on the memory card thus allowing any and all unlocked data from the single player game to be accessed. Having the game data stored on the system may save a bit of money on a memory card but it makes for a less entertaining experience when playing a game away from your own system. Maybe a system will soon allow for saved game data to be stored remotely that can then be accessed on any system. This may involve problems where universal accounts propagate allowing games to be unlocked completely by anyone, but a system like the Wii can solve this by allowing the system's key to be uploaded to a Wii controller that can then be used on another system, thus requiring physical access to the console to gain remote access to the saved game data. But I digress.

Ghost Squad is an Operation Wolf-style game, a first-person shooter on rails. The game's tag line is 'leave no trace', alluding to the 'ghost' nature of squad you belong to. Get to the target, perform the mission, and get out again leaving everyone to wonder just what happened. However, with four of us all having fully automatic weapons and unlimited ammunition it soon became clear that not leaving a trace was futile to try to achieve, even if we wanted to. There were bullet holes everywhere, the cutlery in the lodge was shot to dust, the pots and pans were riddled with holes, the wood panelling was splintered to pieces, and anything that could be moved by shooting it was shot at and moved. And that's not counting all the dead bodies, terrorist or hostage, and the assumed shell casings. If we really were to 'leave no trace' there would have to be quite the cleaning squad coming in behind us, but that probably wouldn't make such a good game. I think the tag line was cut short. It should have been 'leave no trace of life in your wake'.

Posted in Gaming |
Tags: console, first-person shooter, ghost squad, memory card, operation wolf, saved game data, wii