Gast the Greatest Little Ghost! Review

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Gast the Greatest Little Ghost!

Review by JenJanuary 2003

I thought Gast was going to be a walk in the park, a run-of-the-mill kids’ adventure game. It is, after all, rated for ages 3 and up.  But it turned out to be kind of scary and totally surreal and probably too hard for most children. However, the rating was bestowed by the ELSPA, the more liberal European counterpart to our ESRB.  That probably ‘splains it.

The game opens with a cutscene in which a narrator intones, “Far far away, an old amusement park awaits you …” Gast is the caretaker of the magical clock tower that keeps the place happy, and the evil clown Beleseblob ruins the clock and unleashes his evil henchmen on the park, turning it into a dark mockery of its former self.

After the introduction, you are deposited just inside the gate of the creepy park and must make your way around the mazelike grounds. Signposts are sparsely scattered around the various crossroads to aid you, and there is a sorry excuse for a map of the park grounds in the game’s manual. Also, your clock tower is atop a rise in the center of the park and once you get inside its accompanying mansion you are faced with another labyrinth—for this one you’re on your own.

As you journey around, you will encounter various creatures.  Most will ask you to satisfy some need of theirs to make them go away; occasionally one will be enticed to follow you around and you can lead it to its doom. Other times, you must find a particular inventory item and use it correctly to get rid of a henchthing.

You move Gast around the screen by holding down the mouse button and guiding Gast in the direction of the onscreen arrow. My hand kept going to sleep as a result of this; I wish movement had been of the click-on-the-spot-you-want-the-character-to-go-and-wait-for-him-to-get-there variety instead.

Inventory is limited to six items, and you can only have one henchcreature following you around at any one time. You can deposit items or creatures at will to make room for others; the trick lies in remembering where you left them so you can find them again when you need them.

Every time you eliminate a henchbeast, you collect a “soul star.” You can get soul star bonuses in a couple of other ways, too, just by some savvy use of inventory items or practical puzzle-solving. It is extremely important to your endgame success to collect as many of these stars as you can.

Once you think you have disposed of enough henchmonsters and have enough soul stars, you can go take the “final ride.”  The final ride costs three soul stars to board, then you must ride a roller coaster and dodge obstacles for a minute or so.  If you hit an obstacle, you lose a star. The “regular” obstacles are just unmoving little white balls and are easy to avoid, but any henchcritters you left behind will be added to the obstacle mix, and they are difficult to escape since they bounce around all over the place.

Back to the regular adventure gameplay part for a moment: Every time Gast gets scared or hit by something, he gets a “scarepoint.”  According to the game’s manual, the fewer scarepoints Gast has, the longer the final ride. However, there is no telling how many scarepoints you are stuck with; you can tell only whether there are some or none by the state of the Gast face icon at the top right of the gameplay screen. If the Gast icon is frowning he has scarepoints; you can get rid of them by catching dewdrops (these are few and far between; I found it best to wait until I was ready for the final ride and then go looking for them) or eating slime. At the time I took the final ride, I had a happy Gast icon, which I assume means zero scarepoints and the longest possible final ride. I can’t say this for certain, but my strong suspicion is that one faces the same number of obstacles on any length of final ride but in the longer ride the distances between the obstacles are greater and thus the obstacles are easier to dodge.

I’m not sure if these next parts constitute a spoiler or not; all of the above final ride info is listed in the game docs but what happened after that was a surprise. But forewarned is forearmed, I always say, especially when it comes to arcade sequences.

After you get to the end of the final ride, you get two bonus soul stars. You then enter a room where all of the henchbaddies you didn’t eradicate in the adventure part of the game will come at you and you fling your remaining stars at them. If you hit them they go away for good; if you miss they hit you and take away another star and then reappear as targets for another round.  Thus, it pays to get rid of as many of these henchdudes as you can before you take the final ride.

And then, after that little lovely, you get to face Beleseblob himself and chuck some more stars at him in a shooting gallery–type sequence. You have to get three hits to finish him off, so you’d better either be a good shot or have plenty of stars left by the time you get to this point.

In the adventure part of the game where you are wandering around the park and doing in henchentities, it is possible to hit dead ends with one or more, and then you’re stuck with them in the arcade part.

I played through Gast twice; the first time I had 27 stars and had left behind seven henchcreepies. I could not beat the second part of the final sequence, throwing stars at the remaining ones, even after several attempts. I had dead-ended with all seven of the remaining henchites so there was nothing I could do to go back and remove them; in two cases, the henchfiends just up and disappeared on me due to some kind of weird clipping error in the game, and then two others needed these “gone” ones in order to finish them off, which of course I could not do. The other three were genuine dead-ends—I had used their required items elsewhere and was unable to find alternate solutions.

The second time through, I knew where most of the inventory items would best be used and how to get rid of most of the henchnaughties, and I was able to arrive at the final ride with 30 stars and only two unfinished-off henchminions. At that level I was able to complete the entire endgame arcade sequence in one go, with maybe two stars to spare.

One final gameplay note: In the finest adding-insult-to-injury fashion, you cannot save once you begin the arcade portion of the game.

Okay, on to the regular review blabbing about presentation and suchlike.

Graphics are pleasingly creepy in the gameplay portion, dark and gray. Camera angles are artistically cinematic, but as usual when different views are employed on each screen navigation can be confusing—not a good thing when the game is already one gigantic maze. Cutscenes are interlaced, in a throwback to the mid-90s, but the various henchizens were creatively drawn and animated in a Little Shop of Horrors kind of way.

Music is nothing special, but it’s unobtrusive. There is very little voice acting but what’s there is halfway decent, although sometimes it’s drowned out by other characters or by the music.  There is no option for subtitles, and this game could’ve really used them.

Gast certainly is one of a kind—its uniqueness is what saves it from the ol’ dung heap—but it sure wasn’t very fun to play. And having to start the game all over again just to bulk up for the final arcade sequence was really not to my liking. I would recommend Gast only to someone whose sole criterion for a gaming good time is replayability; I’m thinking there must be some way to play through the entire game and have no henchghouls left over at the end. But it won’t be me that goes looking for it. You can stick a fork in me ’cause I’m done. The End

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: Idol Publisher: Mindscape Release Date: 2002

Available for: Windows

Four Fat Chicks Links

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Screenshots

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System Requirements

Windows 95/98/2000/XP DirectX 8 PII 256 MHz 64 MB RAM 8X CD-ROM drive 315 MB free hard drive space 800×600 resolution, 16-bit color 4 MB video card DirectX compatible sound card

Where to Find It

Links provided for informational purposes only.  FFC makes no warranty with regard to any transaction entered into by any party(ies). 

      Copyright © Electric Eye Productions.  All rights reserved.  No reproduction in whole or in part without express written permission.

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16 Responses to Screw the Internet

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    God damn, Scout, I’d never heard of this Lanier fellow, but that’s pretty profound.

    Information is not a manufacturable item… as you said, we are making less and less. This is either indicative of a larger-scale societal transformation, or a bad thing. I’m afraid I’m inclined to assumed the latter.

    Thanks!

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Steerpike, that was exactly the argument Lanier was having with callers on the BBC. Lanier was all fatalistic about society’s drop in real productivity while his opponents claimed that this was a huge transformation and that he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all. If you notice, the web address of that first Lanier link is well.com. I mean, that is old! The Well?

    Lanier’s thoughts were pretty much echoed by David Simon, one of the creators of The Wire. Here he speaks with Bill Moyers about the fate of paid journalism in the face of the web.

  • Spike

    I’ve read many criticisms of Facebook et. al.  I’ve also read contradictions of those criticisms, namely, that social sites are making people more connected than ever.  I think that that connectedness is an illusion.

    For several months at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 my daughter badgered me to join FB.  I could connect with her and some of her friends that I know as well as renew old acquaintances with some of her friend’s mothers.  I finally signed up so she’d quit the badgering. I used to check in every day to see what daughter and friends were saying because if I didn’t she’d ask if I saw her post, or a friend’s post. 

    What I’ve learned is this:

    1.  “Karen Likes John’s photo (or post)” IS NOT communication.

    2.  The reason I lost contact with some of these “friends” in the first place is that we no longer had anything in common.

    3.  I am bombarded with so many ads in so many places that I can do without more.  My policy is to never click on ads on FB or on many other sites. 

    4.  While FB’s original mission was connectedness/communication, I think it has become “Let’s make as much money from these fools as we can.”  “Wanna have gobs of fun playing a free game on FB?”  That game is gonna cost ya big, folks. 

    5.  Social sites are just more places where your personal info can be stolen.  There’s enough risk out there as it is.  Additional risk is not providing any valuable payoff for me.

    6.  Why do I want to “friend” a certain handbag manufacturer?  Why do I want to take a quiz that tells me what my personality is?  FB content providers tell you up front that if you click the link to take their quiz (goes for other types of content as well) you are giving them permission to access your profile info.  That’s ok.  I’ll also give you my SSN, bank account number and the key to my front door.  Not.

    7.  Don’t even get me started on the number of people who start an account in a pet’s name, and even have the pets making friends and posting.

    “…he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all.”

    No, it’s just that most of us get to the age when we demand a bit of wheat with our chaff.

    At 38 my daughter is older than the average demographic of social sites although I know that that demographic is skewing up.  She seems to be cooling on FB.  Some of her 221 friends are as well.  Many of them do want some wheat.  When more cooling has taken place I will unjoin.

    I wonder, though, what new fad will come along when FB, Twitter and others run their course?  MySpace, anyone?

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    My favorite line from the BBC interview was when Lanier was comparing MySpace and Facebook. He admitted that MySpace had some eye gougingly bad pages but said that he liked the “strangeness” of personalities that you get with it. With Facebook, he claimed that it was like looking at a tax form. A boring, watered down, bland presentation of people.

    I joined Facebook almost exactly a year ago. Apart from sparking up a new friendship with a very dear buddy, I’ve gotten about zero back from it. I sort of read with bemusement the activities of people I hardly know and could care less about. And when you consider how much information the devs harvest there…it’s scary. Lanier claims that the information is so far worthless to the investors and that the whole thing has become a sort useless ritual serving no purpose. He claimed that Google’s ads on the other hand will probably turn out to be the greatest advertising model ever created. He also thinks Google should stop before it’s too late but says they probably won’t. Just a glance at the side bar reveals about 4 ads for advertising agencies. Heh.

  • lokimotive

    Has anybody read Anti-Oedipus? I’m slogging my way through it (the third attempt I believe), and Deleuze and Gauttari’s ideas seem relevant to this in a way that I’m not sure I can articulate. This probably has something to do with a conversation I was eavesdropping on that, coincidentally, mentioned a lot of Deleuze and Gauttari’s theories. Someone was talking about another theorist (whose name I didn’t catch) who was defending “Generation Y” essentially. The argument went that Generation Y is an example of a “de-Oedipalized” cultural group (that’s Anti-Oedipus jargon, just stay with me). Apparently this meant that they made connections in a different manner than other generations, the idea of bricollage was brought up and things were generally mired in a lot of reasons why I don’t have my Masters in English. What I got from it was this Generation Y shoots out connections everywhere and attempts to make up a whole idea with them as opposed to relying on predefined pathways. In Deleuze and Guattari’s language: the schizo as opposed to Oedipus. In language that probably makes sense: Peer to Peer as opposed to client-server.

    So, of course, no one’s really right. I’m skeptical of the idea that Generation Y (full disclosure: I’m 29 so I’m part of that group) has enacted some sort of paradigm shift in how to operate in social systems, but facebook has changed how I connect with people. Then again, it’s not like I don’t value face to face communication.

    The future is somewhere in between. I’m really not cynical enough to believe that we are at the end times of civilized society because of Web 2.0. Instead society will change and stay the same because that’s what it does. Facebook is not the future; it’s probably a rung up the ladder though.

  • kaythomas

    To me, Facebook and Twitter are 0’s. They are not worth my time.  I do not care what someone I know or don’t know did a half hour ago or will do next.  I have met up with people on facebook I had lost contact with.  But, in truth, the reason I had lost contact was I was not that interested in staying in contact.

    I think for many people the Facebook/Twitter world is great.  For me it has nothing to offer. 
    kay

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    Tap has an automated device that twits… tweets… whatever whenever someone posts a new article. Just in case it draws some visitors.

    To be honest, though, I’m on Kay’s side of the fence, I don’t understand Twitter and I don’t understand why it’s so popular. I barely care what I’m doing from moment to moment, why should anyone else?

    I don’t get Facebook either, though I’m a member to keep track of all the girls who wouldn’t give me the time of day in high school.

  • Lewis B

    Tweets are great for giving me snippets of news.  If I like what I’ve read in the short paragraph tweets give, then I will visit the main page for that tweet. (Very good for following world news, favourite columnists, etc.)

    However, reading tweets from people such as “Just woke up, Madonna is giving me a massage while I shave my nuts” is not my idea of a good read.

  • Toger

    I use tweets the same way Lewis does. Of the people/things I follow, if the tweet is interesting I’ll follow the link to read the entire article. I follow fairly intelligent people, so I’m not subjected to the idiocy of “Just brushed my teeth while sitting on toilet”.

  • Gregg B

    @loki: I’m afraid I’ve not heard of them. I’m a couple of years below you so that puts me in the same Generation Y as well. I read through a few of those links Scout posted as well as a few more on Lanier’s new book “You Are Not a Gadget” and it took me a fair while to get to the crux of what he is saying and he has a lot to say, most of which I find very confusing.

    As a graphic designer the whole “everything is becoming advertising” thing has been bothering me for years. The incessant barrage of advertising is like fingernails on the chalkboard of my soul, which sort of makes me a hypocrite. After all the years of tuning my art and design skillz my creative abilities have amounted to nothing more than crafting pretty ads that sell things. Non of it speaks any truth or has any sort of ‘beauty’; it’s just stone cold mechanical capitalism. Granted there are ads out there that are beautiful, clever and visionary but the front line stuff is as dull as it gets. I’m sure this isn’t strictly what he’s getting at but it’s definitely something that irks me in relation to Scout’s last remark.

    Anyway, I remember Twitter just exploding in what seemed like the space of a week and I still can’t fathom the allure of it aside from providing a direct stream of consciousness from famous folk to their ravenous fans. I wish I’d thought of it to be honest. I can see the creators sitting around a table staring at Facebook and then saying “I know! We make a website that’s just about status updates! You can even update them with your mobile phone!”.

    With regards to Twitter news snippets, unless it’s for a phone, I don’t see the point because RSS feeds do a great job. At present too great; I simply can’t keep up with my subscriptions. There’s too much information on this super highway.

  • Jen

    Twitter is officially the dumbest thing ever.

    That said, it looks like I will have to be the official “tweeter” for my day job before too long. I can’t wait! (roll eyes)

  • xtal

    I’m with everyone else here. I’m glad to say I’ve never signed up for Facebook; I fear that if I ever had I would have long ago died from loss of brain cells due to reading moronic status updates. It’s as Kay said: ninety-five per cent of people with whom you lose contact are probably no longer in your life because you have nothing left in common. And echoing Steerpike’s comment, me eating toast and jam on a Sunday morning watching Fawlty Towers is not interesting, not to me. Why the hell would anyone else give a shit?

    Twitter I signed up for about a year ago, not really understanding what it was. I now understand it…but don’t care to use it often. I have made 58 tweets over that year. I suspect for some that is a daily or weekly average. It’s just Facebook status updates without all the drunken photographs. I admit it can be mildly useful for following, say, a news site. Usually when I hop on my twitter (once every two weeks??) it reminds me that I should read The Onion more often. That’s about it.

    Let’s see… looking at the actual humans I follow, um… Wil Wheaton is happy that the LA Kings have won 9 games in a row, my sister-in-law thought our dinner tonight was “delicious,” and Kevin Smith’s batteries are recharged … or something.

    Wow, my life is already getting better!

    p.s.  <—– Gen Y'er (can we call ourselves that?) and proud that when I Google my own name a real estate company pops up.

  • Fraser

    Twitter is exactly as useless as the person who’s writing it. If someone is telling you boring shit over Twitter, it’s the person wasting your time, not the delivery channel.

    MySpace is the same, but it seems more intrinsically garbage because for some reason almost everyone who used it was an intellectual embryo with a fetish for unreadable hyperneon text on top of garish uninteresting photos. Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.

    That’s the argument against the whole of this post: the internet isn’t evil, but the people who use it might be. It’s people who make business models successful; people who make money flow to advertisers instead of artists, by buying into the advertising.

    This has been a pretty didactic post, so let me compensate by saying VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOOO!!!

  • Gregg B

    Good point about not blaming the delivery channel Fraser. I seem to recall Lanier saying that he preferred the personality that MySpace has over Facebook despite its Craptastic Pages of Illegibility. I’m trying to think of something intelligent to follow that up with but my brain is failing me at the moment, so…

    VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOO!!!

  • Jason Venter

    Fraser, I really loved your following comment:

    “Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.”

    I think that may just be one of the most hilariously true comments I’ve read in a comments area on any video game web site ever.  That sounds overly dramatic, I know, but I actually mean it.  Kudos to you!

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Yeah but don’t you miss all the ugliness of MySpace? All those hideous pages at least had personality or what Lanier called the “strangeness of the person” to them.

    I actually don’t agree with a lot of what Lanier says esp “the hive mind must die” stuff. But I do think he is right about the spirit shriveling blandness of Facebook.

    I also suspect that Twitter is going to be around for a while. It will be more and more influential. People are simply not as willing to ingest huge amounts of information in the form of pages of text anymore. The delivery systems that succeed will be those that can communicate a lot of information in a short amount of time. Most days we want “glimpses” or “snapshots” not total immersion. Lewis, Toger and Fraser are correct in that you get out of it what you decide to follow.

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