Geist Force

Anthaemia. · Jan 31, 2006

Had the prototype of Bare Knuckle 4 been pitched under its more familiar western name, a certain (fortunately) anonymous SOA executive might have greenlighted its development. Instead, this foolish individual approved the Dreamcast port of Zombie Revenge, which everybody knows the system could have "done" in its proverbial sleep as it was based on a NAOMI title. I don't really have anything against Zombie Revenge - actually, I quite like it - but surely the real thing would have been more welcome than a poor man's Streets Of Rage with elements from The House Of The Dead's storyline. To summarise, this whole episode wasn't exactly the best decision Sega ever made...

P.S. The video Yakumo posted screenshots from is the same one I have on a disc somewhere - anybody care for me to upload it, providing I can find the damn thing in the first place?

Yakumo · Jan 31, 2006

That video is on my FTP for anyone to download Actually a newer high resolution video will be coming soon thanks to a very nice member of this board

Yakumo

Perkunas · Jan 31, 2006

Yakumo said:

Yeah, the shots I posted are from a video. I also have the ones that you have posted above on my ftp with a few others. It's a real shame that this game was never released. Bloody politics ! They say it was canned due to quality issues which I find very hard to believe when loads of crap was released. Politics and dumb decisions made by suits who know sweet F.A. ! Same reason why there was no Saturn or DC Bear Knuckle / Streets of Rage game.

Yakumo
Click to expand...

Sonic Xtreme...

Sega should've forced their management to walk in a straight line.

HXC · Jan 31, 2006

Mike did NOT EVER work on this

Taemos · Jan 31, 2006

Yakumo said:

I'm really too kind towards youguys and gals :lol: More Giest Force pictures. The 1st two are taken from the intro while all the others are real time game play.

[pictures]

Did you like them ?

Yakumo
Click to expand...

Okay, now I want to play this game... Any news on the prototype?

GigaDrive · Feb 1, 2006

I would like to see a video of the E3 1998 'Dreamcast shooter' which was prerendered CG that Sega insisted at first was really running on Dreamcast. This was the (CG) version of Geist Force that everyone was so impressed with, even though the name Geist Force was not used until they showed off the real game later that year.

here's a description of the E3 1998 Dreamcast shooter video

http://www.tinyurl.com/cppxt

Then casually, as he walked off, Stolar said he would like to show us the latest work of one of Sega's American teams. "Bear in mind," he cautioned, "this is only using 20% of the system's capacity".

The screen came to life and we were plunged into the most incredible 3D space world ever seen. It was obviously a 3D shoot 'em up, from a third-person panzer-style viewpoint. The craft was a hyper-detailed X-wing style fighter (very large on screen). It swooped behind a huge spider creature scuttling through a canyon. This was enormous. This was in three seconds - the audience, genuinely, gasped and then laughed in delight. No such reaction had accompanied Tower of Babel. This was truly in another world.

The scenes flicked rapidly. Now the craft was careering through an asteroid field. Dozens of asteroids seamlessly animated. The crafted swooped below down into a cavern which concealed a huge metallic structure. the amount of movement on screen only ever seen before during FMV sections but you could TELL it was realtime.

We then had a glimpse of a craft select screen, hinting that ground-based player units were also available.

Next we saw third-person flybys of the craft battling hundreds of on-screen objects. We flew past huge floating islands with cities built on top of them.

The finale of this 30-second opus, was an astounding boss encounter. The craft came in behind a huge diaphanous jellyfish, its translucent bell billowing out before us. Like nothing ever seen before.

Reflecting afterwards, Paul Davies and myself agreed that the resolution was unprecendented, and that we saw no pop-up or fogging at all. This is not in the same league as 3DFX-driven games, smart-looking as they are. The jellyfish showed how 'real' Dreamcast can be. As for Model 2, Model 3 - these comparisions are now REDUNDANT. This machine can do VF3 standing on its head. The game we saw looked better than any Model 3 game out there.
Click to expand...

October 15, 1998 - Shown to an awe-stuck industry crowd prior to last May's Electronic Entertainment Expo, Geist Force was on display at the Tokyo Game Show in video-only form - and it's an almost entirely different game to the one we saw just five months ago.

The Tokyo Game Show demo was allegedly nearly 80% complete, but is largely unpopulated by enemies and suffers from occasional slowdown. What's odd is that the version shown at E3 was packed with enemies, was smooth as silk and was bristling with all sorts of special effects not in this version.
Click to expand...

Fabrizo, yup, that's the descrepancy between the impressive version (CG) that was shown at E3 1998 and the realtime game shown at TGS 1998.

it is *possible* that this screenshot below is from the prerendered CG version

because it looks different from the other, real-time screens of Geist Force.

edit: ohhh sweet. I just saw the screens of the intro that Yakumo has on the 2nd page.

GigaDrive · Feb 1, 2006

digging through GameSpot's news archives I found these
small blurry pictures of the E3 1998 Dreamcast shooter
(the prerendered version of Geist Force) taken on a small digital camera at the conference.

In a surprise showing, Stolar introduced footage of the first game being developed for the US Dreamcast. Stolar said that the game was only 20 percent complete. Then the game ran...

As the room became silent, the game being shown ran smoothly at 60 frames per second or more showcasing a first person shooter that looked a great deal like Panzer Dragoon. The graphics definitely made it stand out from anything we'd ever seen on a console, imagine if the graphics from Rage's Incoming were adopted for Dragoon. In the few short minutes of footage, the vibe in the room had switched to a lot of smiles and a lot of exclamations that the graphics were truly unreal.
Click to expand...

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2463839.html

Yakumo · Feb 2, 2006

Stolar, kiss my arse !! What a prick that guy was !

Yakumo

HXC · Feb 3, 2006

I'm working on something with this guys I got a list from Chris Senn of who the main staff on this were

Yakumo · Feb 3, 2006

Nice one ! Looking forward to seeing what you can come up with.

Yakumo

HXC · Feb 4, 2006

I haven't got any replies yet but I appear to have got in contact with 3 people without dead emails....

Yakumo · Feb 4, 2006

well let's keep our fingers crossed !

Yakumo

drx · Aug 13, 2006

Sorry for the bump, but I wasn't aware of this topic until now, and I have contacted Ben Fischer, a GF developer a while ago, and I thought I'd share a few things with you.

http://forums.hidden-palace.org/viewtopic.php?t=8

A while ago I contacted Ben Fischer regarding Geist Force, that nice unreleased 3d shooter for Dreamcast. He kinda stopped writing after a while, but I managed to ask him some quetsions, and he even answered some of them.

1. From what I seen and read, it was near completion. Why was the game canned then?

It got canned for a number of reasons. From my perspective the 2 basic issues were that it took 25 minutes to complete the first 7 levels, and there weren't that many more than that. (Bad consumer value.) The second thing, ( and this was something I used to harp on,) but it wasn't all that fun, kind of a bad thing for a game. The art direction was epic, and technically it was way ahead of almost anything else. We developed a toolset for 3'rd party development teams that proved to pretty usefull, but it added to the development time, and it added to the development costs, and time of Geist.

2. Could you describe what monsters and textures have you made for the game? Do you have some images of them or some concept are left?

I am a production artist, so non of the designs are mine. But anything on my site is 100% textured and modeled by me. The Giant fat worm in the video was mine, but all these concepts were provided to me by either Peter Kim (Lead concept artist) or Shin Chien. (I think I may have mispelled his name. Shin Chien was a great art director. He was hard to work for and demanding, however he garnered great respect form the other artists, because not only did he demand very high standards of production, but he also delivered them, and had a thourough understanding of the technical needs of game art, and had a powerful creative energy. I think I made 10 monsters/ enemies, about 70% of the terrain, and window dressing for one level. I did a lot of early fleshing out of Shins conceptual vision, (No where near the caliber of Peter Kim, and all dropped from the game.) and for 6 months of the 2 years I was on this I worked with a proprietary real time FX tools, creating the presets for many/many different particle effect for the game. (Fire, explosions, Burning smoke, sparks, etc....
Click to expand...

Yakumo · Aug 13, 2006

Thanks for that information drx ! I still think the excuse of completing the first 7 levels in 25 minutes is crap. I've played many games that I can complete in under half an hour. Something else was the reason why it never saw the light of day :cry:

Yakumo

Alchy · Aug 13, 2006

Interesting stuff, thanks drx.

drx · Aug 14, 2006

managed to contact him again, though he's a little busy. hopefully we'll have more answers in a week or two.

Geist Force

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Geist Force

Anthaemia. The Original VF3 Fangirl™

Yakumo Pillar of the Community *****

Perkunas Intrepid Member

HXC Guest

Taemos Officer at Arms

GigaDrive Enthusiastic Member

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Yakumo Pillar of the Community *****

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Yakumo Pillar of the Community *****

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Yakumo Pillar of the Community *****

drx BLAST PROCESSING. SITE SUPPORTER 2015

Yakumo Pillar of the Community *****

Alchy Illustrious Member

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