Shirow Masamune‘s Ghost In The Shell is one of my favourite Anime movies, and with it being one of the principal influences for The Matrix (another of my favourite movies)… any games based on it tend to make me drool.
So imagine my anime-esque cow-eyed look when I found out that Nexon (known for Maple Story among other things) are looking to unleash a free-to-play online FPS for the PC based on the Stand Alone Complex series.
There have been Ghost In The Shell games before – most notably for the PS2 and PSP. These haven’t been great, but I did remember having fun with the Spider Tanks.
For the uninitiated, Stand Alone Complex revolves around the members of “Public Security Section 9” – predominantly Major Motoko Kusanagi as they track an elite cyber-terrorist known as “The Laughing Man”.
What draws me towards GITS more than most other anime is the cyberpunk style and setting… much like the style of Neo Tokyo in Akira. With games like the Deus Ex series and movies like The Matrix, I really can’t get enough of the cyberpunk and hacker genre. However… I’m not a particularly patient man.
The release date is tentatively set for the first half of 2014, so I have the agonising wait of potentially over a year… and just like Nexon’s other free-to-play titles the game will be supported by microtransactions.
Nexon have also confirmed that this will not be the first project with Kodansha Ltd (the comic book publisher responsible for GITS:SAC)… so could we possibly see a Battle Angel Alita game sometime in the future? We can hope, can’t we?
