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Ghost Master Possesses Your Mac

By Brad Cook
Tales of the supernatural, things that go bump in the night, eerie sensations of not quite right; it’s the time of year for chills, thrills and goose bumps. In a spooky twist Feral Interactive’s Ghost Master puts you in charge of your own creepy tales. Command a legion of ghosts and send them off to frighten mortals. Direct them to complete certain tasks with their scary powers and free imprisoned ghosts who join your forces. Amass gold plasm points you can use to enhance your ghosts’ abilities before tackling tougher challenges.

We Scare Because We Care
Ghost Master takes place in Gravenville, where 15 scenarios await you in 3D environments that include a family home, a police station and an asylum. You can watch the mortals as they go about their daily lives, driven by artificial intelligence that makes them act according to their natural tendencies, which you can read about in their onscreen bios. Three meters measure their levels of terror, belief and madness; scaring them enough to fill any of the three meters causes them to flee, but that’s not a requirement in every scenario.

ghost

The more you scare them, though, the more plasm you gather, which allows you to deploy additional ghosts and direct those in the field to use more effective — but more draining — powers on the mortals. If you don’t keep frightening people, though, their meters drop and your plasm level falls accordingly. Allocating more plasm points than you have causes an alarm to sound, forcing you to remove ghosts from the area or scale back the powers they’re using. You lose if your plasm drops so low that you can’t afford to keep any ghosts in the scenario or if the alarm sounds for too long.

You decide which ghosts you want to bring with you to each haunting, but you don’t have to send all of them into the environment at once. Each has a specific strength, such as inhabiting electrical appliances or causing objects to fly around a room, that dictates when and how you should deploy them. Use the same ghosts more than once to build up their abilities between scenarios.

Make a Lasting Impression
You bind each ghost to a fetter, which is a room, object or person that they stick with exclusively. Where you bind your ghosts and how you direct them to use their powers causes the mortals to react in certain ways. For example, you can place a ghost that produces rattling chain sounds in a locked upstairs room that you need opened as part of the requirements for the scenario. This will cause a mortal to investigate the noise and open the room.

Many scenarios also feature trapped ghosts who you can free and add to your spooky arsenal. Their bios reveal clues that will help you figure out how to release them. (Read the Tricks and Treats section below for hints that will help you with a couple of them.) There are 47 haunters in the game, and they have access to more than 125 distinct powers.

Your ultimate goal is to make the Haunter Committee happy by restoring a healthy dose of fear to Gravenville’s mortal population. Accomplish that and you can truly consider yourself a Ghost Master.

If you liked this game, check out:

Black & White

Mummy Maze Deluxe

The Sims

Available from Feral Interactive

Welcome to the Neighborhood. Unlock new places in Gravenville as you complete each scenario.

Electricity in the Air. Dig deep into the supernatural well to scare the wits out of the mortals.

Ghost Master Media

	View QuickTime trailer

	Download the patch

System Requirements:

	Mac OS X version 10.1.3 or higher (10.2 recommended)
	700MHz PowerPC G3 processor or higher (867MHz recommended)
	256MB of RAM or higher
	750MB of hard disk space
	16MB graphics card (32MB recommended)

Tricks and Treats

ghost

In the Haunting 101 tutorial, free Weatherwitch from the vacuum cleaner by taking a ghost who likes electrical tricks, such as Cogjammer, and placing him in the nearby stereo. Have him use his Wild & Crazy power to cause all electrical equipment in the vicinity go haywire, thus freeing her for use in your team.

If you run into trouble and find your plasm level dropping rapidly, scale back your forces by pulling all but one or two ghosts from the scenario. Concentrate on the remaining ghosts by moving them close to areas where mortals tend to congregate and use the best abilities you can, given the current plasm situation. The mortals will start getting scared again and your plasm level will rise. Don’t put all your ghosts back in play all at once, though; bring them in one at a time and make sure they produce a few scares before calling on others.

If you’re unsure how to assemble your team at the start of a haunting, click the “Recommended” button and go with that.

In the Calamityville Horror scenario, you might notice that luring a man into the room Maxine Factor is trapped in doesn’t free her. That’s because men aren’t interested in the beauty box that keeps her from leaving. Try a different gender.

Ghosts that you can bind to a single mortal are useful when you need that mortal to do something as part of the requirements for a scenario, but you get more scare for your plasm by deploying spirits who can scare a group of mortals at once.
sleeping

If you really want to increase a mortal’s terror level, try the pinball technique: Watch their movement patterns and place ghosts in the two rooms they frequent the most, with a third ghost in the hallway between. Pretty soon they’ll bounce between supernatural horrors and become scared out of their wits.

Use the Time Gate to revisit a haunting that you’ve already completed if it contains trapped ghosts you weren’t able to recruit the first time. Any ghosts you’ve picked up since then are available to you the second time around, which can be helpful.

To get Windwalker on your team, lay at least one ghost to rest during the Usual Suspects scenario and he’ll be waiting to be rescued during the Ghostbreaker mission. He’s a valuable spirit to use when revisiting past hauntings through the Time Gate.

Mortals who carry gifts are especially susceptible to such powers as fascinate and obsession. Employ a ghost with those powers to draw those mortals near.

Unlike the way it happens in most horror films, frightened mortals are less likely to investigate strange noises than calm ones.

Look at the orders available for each ghost. It makes sense for many of them, especially the ones capable of telekinesis, to use their powers only when mortals are around. Otherwise they’ll wind up putting on a good show for no one.

There’s more than one way to scare a mortal. Every scenario features multiple ways to accomplish its goals.