VIDEO GAMES 'Ghosthunter' stands out for genuinely creepy fun

By JUSTIN HOEGER
SACRAMENTO BEE
Like Hollywood films, the video game industry tends to not release much of note this time of year, saving its best stuff for the holiday season. Thus, "Ghosthunter" comes as a nice surprise.
The premise is pretty much a "Ghostbusters" rip-off crossed with a buddy cop movie. Rookie Detroit police officer Lazarus Jones is on his first assignment at an abandoned high school, the site of a mysterious mass murder years before.
Checking on a disturbance call, Jones and his partner, Anna Steele, split up to search the place. Jones finds a strange array in the basement, pushes a big red button and unleashes a swarm of angry ghosts that someone else had imprisoned there, one of which, the fallen crusader Lord Hawksmoor, makes off with Steele to prepare for some nefarious scheme.
Another shade, called Astral, possesses Jones himself, but she's a friendly ghost who lets Jones see the dead people, which he'll need to do to find Hawksmoor and his partner.
Warp gate
Dragooned by the array's artificial intelligence into hunting down the spooks he loosed, Jones uses a convenient warp gate to travel to the spirits' old haunts, finding clues along the way.
Of course, ghosts can't be killed, so Jones needs some specialized tools for the job. The most important is the capture grenade, a reusable ghost trap that doubles as a way to make the wraiths vulnerable to his weapons.
Looking good
On the visual end, things are looking good for "Ghosthunter." The characters are detailed and their mouth movements and expressions are convincingly realistic.
The game's creepy, but a "Tales from the Crypt" sort of creepy; it's played for camp and with quite a bit of humor thrown in -- humor that avoids falling flat, as it so often does in games. It's not for little kids, since there are some startling and violent parts, but it's no brainless splatterfest.
Even the characters' spoken lines are well done. Jones, as played by prolific voice actor Rob Paulsen, is glib, cocky and a little irritating without getting on one's nerves, and Lord Hawksmoor (given voice by Michael Gambon, Professor Dumbledore from "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban") is arrogant and haughty.
Entertaining and fun to play, "Ghosthunter" is lucky in its release timing. A clever little title like this would likely have gotten lost in the swirl of holiday games in the coming months.
X"Ghosthunter," by Sony for PlayStation 2, is rated T for teens.