Ghost Squad review

Nov 21, 2007

Despite being the staples of modern arcades, there are hardly any lightgun games on Nintendo formats. Ever since they went all out and created a bazooka instead of an ordinary gun peripheral for the SNES, everyone has steered well clear. There was nothing on the N64 and nothing on GameCube, while PlayStation and Dreamcast had so many of the things, you could choose from about 20 different types of third-party guns along with the official ones.

But now that we have a Nintendo format that seems purpose-built for shooters, perhaps we’ll see a few more of these arcade conversions popping up. And if they’ve had as much care and attention lavished on them as Sega’s Ghost Squad so clearly has, then bring them on.

Ghost Squad is a conversion of an arcade game that takes less than 8 minutes to complete. In the old version, you point the gun at the massive screen and blast away at terrorists until you either die because you got shot too much, or you make it all the way to the end with a high score. If you complete a mission, there are two others of similar length. Each have multiple branching routes, so you won’t get exactly the same scenes every time, but it’s going to cost you coins every time you want to try a new combination.

For the truly dedicated, there’s a memory card system that records your data and tracks your progress on any Ghost Squad arcade machine you find. But the cost and rarity mean it’s just an occasional treat at gas stations and movie theater arcades.