Hunt Ghosts in Real Life With Ghostwire and the DSi

It's one thing for a game to bring you face-to-face with ghosts in a spooky alternate reality. It's another thing entirely for a game to bring you face-to-face with ghosts in real life.

It's a shame that potentially innovative technology often gets wasted on "gimmicky" addons - for every game that takes genuine advantage of the DS' touch screen or the Wii Remote, there are ten that replace mindless button-mashing with mindless screen-tapping or remote-waggling.

And then there are games like Ghostwire. Ghostwire is unique because its DS-specific gameplay doesn't revolve around the touch screen - it revolves around the built-in camera and microphone on the DSi. Effectively, the DSi becomes some sort of supernatural tool that enables the player to commune directly with the world of ghosts.

I doubt that it'll play anywhere as seamlessly as it looks in the trailer, but it's certainly one hell of a cool idea. This sort of "augmented reality" gameplay seems to be making very tiny inroads, a bit at a time, and the more I think about it, the more I become convinced that this could be the closest we get to the whole "virtual reality" concept that was all the rage a few decades ago.

If nothing else, you have to give the developers credit for trying something new, no?

(Penny-Arcade)