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Well, that makes two ghost busting games in less than a year's time. Perhaps it's time for a revival of The Ghost Busters?

Nintendo debuted its GameCube system with Luigi's Mansion, a game which featured Mario's perpetual sidekick busting ghosts and taking names in a mansion. Now, developer Artoon (the makers of Xbox's Blinx) are doing some ghost busting of their own on the PS2 with Ghost Vibration, a game which is being developed for the Japanese market and published, oddly enough, by Eidos Interactive.

As with Luigi, you enter a mansion intent on busting ghosts. But that's really where similarities end. Luigi offered up free roaming exploration, allowing you to move the plumber in all directions. In Ghost Vibration, you move your character in just two directions: forward and back. Push up on the controller, and the character advances forward on a pre-determined path; back makes the character back track, also on a pre-determined track. You have analogue control only that you can make your character move fast or slow at varying levels of sensitivity.

Things heat up when you see a ghost in the distance. In order to attack the ghost, you switch to a first person view and aim your trusty spear. While your spear is attached to the ghost, you slowly suck up the ghost's energy. But be careful of overheating! If your spear overheats, it will detach and you'll have to wait a bit before attacking again, during which time you'll usually be attacked by the ghost who will then flee. To defeat the ghost, you must attack with the spear, release, attack again, release again, and so on, making sure to not overheat.

In the first level at least, the gameplay proved rather limiting, but we get the feeling that the developers have been concentrating more on spooking players stiff through cinematics. As your character walks, he goes through a variety of animation patterns, from creeping along to straight walking, with his facial animation showing his fear. The camera constantly changes movie-style, showing the action from a variety of different angles. Ghosts also appear through cinematic sequences, with the game quickly returning control to you so that you a switch into first person mode and blast away. Sadly, despite some unique character design work, the game doesn't look at the level of the PS2's best, but with the camera work and the eerie chanting music, we have a feeling that Ghost Vibration will be spooky late at night in the dark.

It took some getting used to, but we were able to get into Ghost Vibration through our one level of play. Things come together for the final boss encounter of the first level, which requires that players defeat three ghosts who are attacking simultaneously. You can only lock your spear onto the ghost which is coloured yellow, forcing you to toggle your spear continuously.

We'll of course have to play more to determine if this is a game worth a single play through or if Artoon has been able to add true replay value to what seems to be a purely cinematic experience. Currently, with the game only scheduled for Japanese release at this point (on 4th July 2002), it seems that we may not get the chance on American shores.