New Review Posted: Ghosthunter

[Daniel Weissenberger]

I review Ghosthunter and realize that:

"I fell in love with Ghost Hunter twenty minutes in. I was directing Lazarus Jones, ghost hunting supercop, through the sewers underneath a public school where a massacre had taken place years earlier. A chain was hanging atmospherically from the ceiling. I directed Lazarus around it, just in case it turned out to be some kind of trap. As Lazarus proceeded down the hall, one of the chains struck the screen, shifted up it, then fell off to the side. All the dangling chains and hanging sheets in the game are moved by the camera. It's a tiny detail, but it's so rare that an Easter egg will surprise me that I couldn't help playing through the rest of the game with a bit of a smile on my face."

The rest is right over here: http://www.gamecritics.com/review/ghosthunter/main.php

[Daniel Weissenberger]

Given how completely wrong I was about emergence , I decided to check this one out to see if I'd been using the term wrong - I found this definition over at eeggs.com:

"In the context of software, an Easter Egg is a hidden feature or novelty that the programmers have put in their software. In general, it is any hidden, entertaining thing that a creator hides in their creation only for their own personal reasons. This can be anything from a hidden list of the developers, to hidden commands, to jokes, to funny animations."

I thought the idea of the game's camera actually interacting with the game's geography was entertaining enough, and obscure enough (you could easily go through the entire game without ever noticing it) to count as an easter egg - sure, it's not the killer mice in Max Payne or the Max in Shadows of the Empire, but it's not bad. Of course, the definition might be a little broad, after all, under those terms, Megaman's famous blink could be considered an Easter Egg.

(BTW - I only mentioned it once, the teaser paragraph in the post is always just the first paragraph of the review)

[ior]

Historically, easter eggs are truly hidden: a certain key combination is required at a certain time, or its necessary to walk through a specific wall, or find a magic pixel, or something of the sort to trigger the easter egg. The eggs themselves are then things like programming credits (to go way back), inside jokes, mocking or teasing of other software titles and the like.

Though I can understand why you called it that, what you encountered I would consider to be more of a design choice: a 'solid' camera, or perhaps more accurately a frustum object within the game itself.