Geist Force is out

This one almost slipped by! Remember Geist Force? This game has already been talked about here in the 'Yard from time to time, usually when the theme is unreleased games, and the last post about it, dating back to last year, is actually about the blessed day when the guys over at assemblergames got their hands on a playable version of the game and promised to release it for free.

Time moved on and the game never got released, ending up forgotten by most people, but lo and behold, it finally resurfaced and in better shape then ever! It looks like the game was developed for Dreamcast hardware that wasn't final yet, so it couldn't actually run off the retail hardware we all have. That's why it took so long to come out, as the guys behind this release actually had to change a lot of the code in order for the game to be playable.



Now, from what I understand, it seems that in order to pay for their hard work, and the beautiful reproduction discs that we see in the video, you actually had to pay for one of these, and they made a somewhat limited run, making it extra hard to get. But I really hope that they, or someone out there, end up releasing the game for free, so that all of us Dreamcast fans can enjoy another piece of gaming history.

5 comments:

Caleb said...

Huh. That is really odd.

Like just sell the game or something if you have the rights to do so.

If they don't have the rights to legally sell the game then what the heck are they doing?

Like I took 10 seconds to look at their site and there doesn't seem to be a clear cut way to simply buy the damned game.

Caleb said...

I guess it's a cool little collectable for some Dreamcast gamers but certainly I don't want to jump through hoops to get a copy for a review. (Especially if nobody else will ever be able to play it)

NebachadnezzaR said...

Yeah, as you could probably tell from the post I'm not a fan of their system either. From what I understand they had one batch of copies made based on "pre-orders", and right now the only way to get one is to take the place of someone who dropped out. I still think that once all of their copies go out to those who paid, they will just released the game for free, or at least that's what I read somewhere on their site.

I really hope that will happen, because otherwise I won't get a copy either.

Tom Charnock said...

This is cool...Geist Force was one of the games I took an interest in way back when the DC was still an upcoming future release...but I'm a little confused. I gather that the game was never actually finished, so have the (obviously very talented) people behind this release completed the game or just released the unfinished build?

NebachadnezzaR said...

I can't say for sure, but from what I've gathered most of their work was just getting the game to run on a standard Dreamcast, since the game was being developed so early in the console life-cycle that they didn't even have the final hardware to work on, and therefore the game, but the time it was cancelled, would only run on special development hardware.

I think that, other than that, they might have polished the game a bit, removing bugs and the like, but as far as "completing" it, I don't think they did that.