When the Ghen came to earth they were refugees. They helped
us in the realm of technology in return for a safe place to escape their
conquerers. Everything went as well as it could have until Titan exploded. Those
Ghen are jerks. They attacked like cowards and placed the blame on our own
mining team for the accident. This is the tale of the time we fought in the
Ghen War (don’t worry, no one else remembers that one either).
1995 was a fun year for video games. We were still getting
amazing 16-bit titles released on the Super Nintendo while other systems were
taking us “truly” into the third dimension. Ghen
War is one of those early games that came out on the Sega Saturn that
promised an adventure on a grand, intergalactic scale with polygons! What came
about was a muddy, graphical mess with weird controls that wouldn’t have
stacked up against Descent on the PC
or Marathon on the Mac. GW probably wowed a number of console
gamers who were still used to sprites and had no idea 2D graphics were going to
hold up much better in the long run; but hey, new tech!
Ghen War is a
graphical mess. The terrain is generally one “texture” stretched across a topgraphic
map with draw distances that would make the original Silent Hill blush. The character models are super simple with a
number of enemies being trapozoids of death barrelling towards you, though
there are a couple of neat spider walkers and what look like fish men that
proved they weren’t completely grasping at straws in the imagination
department. The most impressive thing is how fast the game runs, maybe I’m a
bit used to modern shooters rather than the old school “twitch” style of play. They
really could have done something better with your exoskeleton, I know it’s for
mining but it will save the world! Issac in Dead
Space looked like a total bad ass and he was an engineer.
The story of the Ghen
War is told through full motion video cut scenes between sets of missions.
To be honest I didn’t hate them. As far as 1995 FMV goes, they are on par with
a SciFi (pre-SyFy) TV movie. For a video game that’s huge. The cut scenes give
you the go ahead to shoot everything, and that’s all you need. The cut scenes
sound fine, you can understand the actors. The sound design for the rest of the
game is lasers and explosions with a rock track with vocals on the title screen.
In 1995 joysticks were for flight sims and analog sticks
were likely attached to a third party knock off controller that your friend
made you use as player 2. Needless to say, it takes quite a bit of getting used
to regressing to applying digital controls in a three dimensional enviroment. You
move forward and backward while looking left and right with the D-pad while
using the shoulder buttons to strafe. Circle strafing every enemy is crucial to
your success and is easy to pull off with a mid 90’s mind set. The six face
buttons are for jumping, shooting, sprinting, changing weapons, and angling up
and down; you can adjust what button does what.
I listed a few games that were solid but not notable and it looks like Ghen
War would end up on a list like that. Too bad it just doesn’t measure up.
If you have the opportunity to play this game, you probably are in a Saturn fan’s
presence and they will recommend a better title. Someone should rip all of the
cut scenes together and throw it on Youtube; a cheesy sci fi romp just the way
the fans like it.
