Ghost Master

aka: Guihun Dashi
Moby ID: 9400
Windows Specs
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Description official descriptions

Ghost Master is an innovative sim/strategy game with puzzle elements. The player works for the Haunter Committee, an astral realm organisation responsible for managing hauntings, possessions and all manner of astral disturbance. Starting with a small team of ghosts, the player must complete a number of missions in and around the city of Gravenville, recruiting new ghosts from the sites they are haunting to aid them in their future missions.

Spellings

  • Повелитель уМаса - Russian spelling
  • 鬼魂大师 - Chinese spelling (simplified)

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Screenshots

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Credits (Windows version)

104 People (103 developers, 1 thanks) · View all

Director
Game Design
Game Script
Producer
Lead Programmer
Lead Artists
Art Direction & Design
Character Design
Artists
Lead Animator
Animators
Additional Animation
Senior Programmer
Lead Visual Effects Programming
AI & Game Programming
[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 78% (based on 35 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.7 out of 5 (based on 42 ratings with 2 reviews)

Who are THEY gonna call?

The Good
In the grand tradition of Peter Molyneaux, we have ‘Ghost Master’. The main idea of the game is quite simple: scare the bejesus out of unsuspecting people in their respective domiciles with your legion of ghosts.

At first you have a meager assortment of ghosts, and you will collect more increasingly powerful ghosts as you advance through the game. The ghosts belong to different classes with their own unique aspects. For example, Elemental ghosts can manipulate nature, Vapor ghosts influence emotions, Horror ghosts shock mortals with grotesque visions, etc. Within the classes, each ghost has its own individual power. The power is determined by their “fetter”, aka a tangible object or place where a ghost can be bound, such television sets, bedrooms, or thoroughfares. If you’ve ever seen the ‘Ghostbusters’ films, you’ll know all of this ahead of time.

The mechanics of the missions are very similar to games such ‘Dungeon Keeper’ or ‘Black & White’. The interface itself even reminds me of the former. It may seem a bit clunky at first glance, but if you’ve played the aforementioned games, you’ll have no difficulty.

After selecting a mission from a world map, much like ‘Dungeon Keeper’, you’ll be taken to a screen to select the ghosts you want to use for the mission, or the game can choose for you. You are administered a supply of ectoplasm, which you mustn’t waste, or the mission will fail. Once inside the mission, you must carefully place each ghost at their respective fetter in order to make everyone pee themselves with fright. As the ghosts scare the mortals, your supply of ectoplasm will increase. Of course, the opposite will occur if you’re not scaring anyone.

This game is all about power and superiority, and I often found myself laughing maniacally as the pathetic mortals ran from the locale screaming and hands flailing. The manners in which one can frighten people are nearly endless as I attempted to find more effective placement methods for my haunts. Brilliant!

In addition, many of the missions are tributes (or parodies) of famous horror films; i.e. "The Calamityville Horror".

The Bad
The main issue with many god games is that the mission objectives often remain the same throughout the entire game, and ‘Ghost Master’ is not immune to this. “Scare the crap out of everyone” is certainly a fun objective, but it’s the only one, and it can definitely cause boredom after a time.

The game’s camera is among the worst I’ve ever seen in this genre. Rather than following a simple-yet-effective idea with the camera angles a la ‘Dungeon Keeper’, the game gives you too many viewing options, and you might find yourself struggling with finding a comfortable viewpoint rather than having fun. I myself found the “straight down” view to be the best.

Also, if you’re expecting an undemanding type of game, you’re gravely mistaken. Don’t let the cartoonish aura fool you; this is most definitely a game of trial and error. You may have several goes at a mission before finding the combination of ghosts that works best for you.

The Bottom Line
This is a very enjoyable and imaginative game that puts refreshing spin on the god game genre. If you are a fan of any of Peter Molyneaux’s work, or even Will Wright (creator of Sim City and The Sims), you will positively adore this game. Just don’t expect a plug-and-play gaming experience.

Windows · by HandofShadow (49) · 2004

The Planchette Points To Yes

The Good
The town of Gravenville isn’t taking the supernatural seriously: frat boys and sorority sisters mock the undead, a sinister professor wants to use the power of the spirit world for himself, and a bumbling trio of Ghostbreakers are running through town banishing specters with their equipment. As a ghost master, it’s up to you to change that. You must assemble a team of haunters and hit the mortals where it’ll scare them most: their homes, their police stations, their abandoned cabins in the woods. Your job isn’t over until the last sane mortal runs screaming from the city.

Ghost Master is a technically a real time strategy game, but really it’s the anti-Sims. Most levels take place on a map which offers a multilevel building. You can move the camera around in 3D and move between floors by clicking on on-screen up and down arrows. Some levels offer more outdoors (The Blair Wisp Project) while others involve a series of buildings (Full Mortal Jacket) and one standout level takes place on a cruise ship.

These levels are populated with mortals (sometimes around twenty) who move around the environments doing their own thing or reacting to what you are doing. We aren’t talking about ground-breaking AI here, but it is kind of fun watching a mortal decide to take a shower or sit down to watch TV, especially it that’s followed by the shower water turning to blood or the TV exploding. You'll have to watch out for some mortals (mediums, Ghostbreakers, wiccans, and priests), though. Either through superior technology or sympathy with the supernatural, they've found ways to banish your ghosts from hauntings. There will be an alert to let you know that a ghost is under attack, but you'll have to act fast.

The first level in Ghost Master is the aptly named, “Haunting 101.” Acting as a tutorial level, novice ghost masters learn how the haunting business works. After a mission briefing (including a fly-through of the level), you can either handpick your team of haunters or use a pre-selected team. The pre-selected team option is open throughout the entire game, but it’s more fun picking your own ghosts.

In all, Ghost Master offers almost fifty ghosts to choose from, but initially you just have a handful. There are two factors which differentiate the ghosts: their fetter and their powers. Fetters are objects or people to which ghosts can be bound. Cogjammer can only be bound to electrical appliances, Boo has free range of rooms or hallways, and Ghastly is bound to a place where violence happened. A ghost’s power is associated with its fetter: water ghosts summon rain or hail, earth ghosts cause tremors, and ghosts bound to children tend to be mischievous.

While on the surface, it might sound like you just plant a ghost in a mission and hope for the best, Ghost Master offers a fair amount of control over your ghost coupled with a bit of resource management. Ghosts can use powers to scare mortals, affect the weather, control mortals, etc, but using powers costs plasma. The plasma bar at the top of the screen shows how much plasma you have and if you start using more plasma than you have, a klaxon sounds giving you a bit of warning before you are kicked out of the haunting. Scaring mortals increases the amount of plasma you have, but ghost masters will often have to balance ghosts’ powers and bench ghosts that aren’t currently being used.

Ghosts are also receptive to orders and the more you use a ghost, the more orders it can follow. You can specify that a ghost only use a certain power or that it never does. You can tell the ghost to wait until mortals are near to use a power, or tell them to wait until a specific mortal is near.

Going into a mission, you usually have a clear idea of the main objective. “Haunting 101” just requires scaring the bejeezus out of people, so it would be hard to pick the wrong set of haunters. Later missions might require some replay to tweak the team, but more often you’ll need to find the right set of ghosts for another reason: freeing bonus ghosts trapped in a level.

Each level has a least one ghost who is trapped on the mortal plane, bound to a fetter it cannot break. Clicking on the ghost triggers a short cutscene where the ghost introduces itself and explains its plight. Clicking on it again triggers another cutscene where the ghost offers a bigger hint about what needs to happen for it to be free. Freeing these ghosts is where most of Ghost Master’s challenge comes from and you’ll definitely want to free them to swell your ranks.

After you complete a mission, you get a report of how effective you were. Points are awarded for numbers of times you made the mortals scream, or faint, or flee. Extra points are earned for rescuing ghosts and bonus points are awarded for getting the job done fast. These points are converted into Gold Plasm, which can be spent to teach your ghosts new powers. This quasi-RPG feature means that you’ll probably end up favoring certain ghosts over others, but each ghost has a starting set of abilities which makes them useful in the field.

Graphically Ghost Master doesn’t stand out. The fully 3D levels are nice, but the game has some clipping issues and (when you can see a mortal’s POV) the textures are low-res. Ghost Master has much better sound. I’m not sure if the music was composed for this game or borrowed from a library, but it works. Mortals use a form of Sims-speak, so you don’t hear the same phrases recycled. Ambient sound effects are great, as is the amount of localized effects. When you zoom in with the camera, it sounds like you are zooming in with a microphone, too.

The Bad
Ghost Master has a pretty big discrepancy between the difficulty of the levels and the difficulty of freeing all the ghosts on a level. For the most part, the main mission objective is clearly stated and it’s obvious what you need to do to complete it, but on a few levels, what you need to do isn’t clear and figuring out how to rescue ghosts is downright nasty. While the challenge is welcome, the game could make it a little bit clearer about ghosts can effect/control mortals and change the environment. Trial and error is nice, but if it weren’t for several walkthroughs, I could have easily lost interest on what turned out to be some of the more interesting levels.

I mentioned that graphics weren’t impressive, but they are more of a detraction when it comes to certain ghostly powers. Clutterclaws, a spidery ghost, has several levels of a spider-attack, but they looked similar to me. Blood dripping down the walls looked more like ink soaking through a paper. Weather effects: rain, gusts, tempests, all seemed muted, sounding more impressive than they looked.

If Ghost Master has any huge visual flaws, they come in terms of clipping and its result on pathfinding. Mortals routinely walk into, and through, each other. They get hung up on doorways, stuck on corners, and each other. In levels where you really need mortals to go somewhere and do something, this becomes outright annoying.

Finally, Ghost Master could have been improved with some streamlining. The fact that you really don't know which ghosts you need for a mission before the mission starts means that you'll find yourself restarting a mission to pick a better team. And levelling up ghosts is nice, but it would be better to do so on the team selection screen (when you have an idea about which powers might come in handy) rather than scouring the base for them between missions.

The Bottom Line
Ghost Master is a fun game and while it sounds similar to something like Dungeon Keeper, you haven’t played anything like this before. Fourteen levels may hint at a brief game, but puzzling out what to do extends the game’s length and the number of missions reduces the amount of repetition and keeps the story focused. Ghost Master’s self-awareness adds an additional level of freshness—where else can you find the Ghostbusters mixed-up with The Three Stooges, when’s the last time you played a game that referenced M.A.S.H., and have you seen a witty blend of The Evil Dead and The Blair Witch Project?

Sadly, coming up on three years from the game’s original release, we have yet to hear of a sequel or have Empire Interactive release the tools the more-than-willing fan community needs for mods. A downloadable bonus level briefly extends the game’s life (beyond the game’s strong replayability) and clears up matters brought up by the game’s cliffhanger ending, but currently the bonus level only works for the UK release and no reliable work-around has been found for other regions.

Windows · by Terrence Bosky (5397) · 2006

Trivia

Ending

Not satisfied with the ending of Ghost Master? There is an additional bonus scenario with a more "conclusive" finish that you can download. Class of Spook 'Em High is a 144M level that gives you a chance to unleash your veteran haunting force on (you guessed it) a high school. Along the way, you might also earn eternal peace for your haunters.

There is a catch however. The scenario is only for the UK release of the game (although it apparently works with some US versions also). You can find the bonus level with a web search for "bonus_Scenario.exe" (and other Ghost Master related terms).

Extras

Some U.S. editions of Ghost Master came with a coupon for a free copy of the movie Ghostbusters on DVD. The offer cost $3.95 for shipping and Handling and expired at the end of 2003.

References

Has references to popular horror movies like Evil Dead, Poltergeist, Ghostbusters, Sleepy hollow, Amityville Horror or Blair Witch Project. Also to TV shows like Emergency Room.

Information also contributed by ClydeFrog

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Related Games

Ghost Master: The Gravenville Chronicles
Released 2004 on PlayStation 2, Xbox
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Chessmaster 6000
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The Chessmaster 3000
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Related Sites +

  • Ghost Master
    Official Multi-Language Website
  • Ghost Master
    Fan site with news and resources
  • Ghost Master: Post Mortem 1
    A thorough blog post by designer Chris Bateman about the development of the game (part one).
  • Ghost Master: Post Mortem 2
    A thorough blog post by designer Chris Bateman about the development of the game (part two).
  • Official Webpage (Mac)
    The official product page for the Mac version of Ghost Master on the publisher's website, which provides a profile of the game, a trailer, hints and advice, a desktop wallpaper, a demo (English and Euro languages), and ordering information, among other such things.
  • The Horror, The Horror
    An Apple Games article about the Macintosh version of Ghost Master (October, 2003).

Identifiers +

  • MobyGames ID: 9400
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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Spiral Lobster.

Macintosh added by Kabushi.

Additional contributors: Unicorn Lynx, Indra was here, Sciere, Der.Archivar, Ivan Napreenko, Zeppin, Patrick Bregger.

Game added June 12, 2003. Last modified March 17, 2024.