Why Game? 1 - TextFiles.com

into the Electronics Boutique where I worked.
One of my coworkers, Tim Smith, was big on
Japanese imports, and during my trip I had
bought him a copy of Tobal 2 and an original
PS1 single shock analog controller. I handed
these over to him and as he put them into his
bag he flashed me another game - Ghost in the
Shell. He told me that the game was made by
Exact, the people who made Jumping Flash, and
that you played as a Fuchikoma - so that was
what that red spider was! I had seen the movie,
and all I knew was that it was about a hot anime
babe named Kusanagi that got naked whenever
she had to use her invisibility suit. The store
died down a bit and he popped the game in. He
showed me a few seconds of the anime intro
before skipping past and beginning the first
stage. Watching him play, I could tell that the
game offered much more than the video had
indicated. The Fuchikoma could grip to walls and
slide along them while mowing down monsters
with its machine guns. This was incredibly cool.
A far cry from Jumping Flash, but an even
further cry from what Ghost in the Shell meant
to me.
As he slid up the side of a giant pillar
that rose into the sky I asked him what it had
to do with Ghost in the Shell. He said that it
was closer to the manga than the anime, and
that the Fuchikoma were actually a big part
of the manga. I’ve read the manga since
then and aside from a few instances of comic
relief, the Fuchikoma were minor characters
at best. Before I could get a chance to play
some customers came in and we had to get
back to work. We worked for the rest of the
night and I didn’t get my hands on the controls
until the game was finally released in America
in late 1997. The game’s controls took some
getting used to, but after letting them sink in
they became tight and smooth, really making
you feel like you were sliding the Fuchikoma
all over the huge buildings that make up the
backgrounds despite being an analog game
stuck on a digital controller. Using the strafe
to weave back and forth through enemy fire
was so much fun that it was easy to forgive
the fact that most of the games battles could
be won just by strafing. Zooming myself to the
top of the tallest buildings echoed the feeling of
looking down on the world from high above that
only Jumping Flash had previously provided. I
ended up finishing the game in a day or two and
set it on my shelf, never to pick it up again until
a few days ago while researching for this article.
Now that I had played the game, I had full
confirmation that it really had very little to do
with the anime. Yes, the action was broken up
by over 30 minutes of animation by the original
Ghost in the Shell staff, but despite its beauty,
the story that those cutscenes told seemed so
disjointed from the actual gameplay that I often
found myself skipping them to keep myself
immersed in the action. As I slid around the
playfields dodging fire and gunning enemies
into oblivion, I came to the realization that I
loved the game for what it did as a game, not
what it did with the license. I liked Ghost in the
Shell, and bought the game because of this,
but it really didn’t matter that this was a Ghost
in the Shell game. To me, this game may as
well have been an alternate character in a third
Jumping Flash game. I had played too many
disappointing licensed games to think that a
game could be faithful to its source material
and still be good: Spiderman and Venom in
Maximum Carnage, Batman Forever, Wayne’s
World, Toys, Home Alone, Fantastic Four, The
Incredible Hulk: The Pantheon Saga - they were
all terrible. But this. This was how a licensed
game should be made. It made me decide that
Within the Shell of a License 19