It's only a week into this happy new year and we've already been faced with one of those huge questions that consumes our curiosity, our waking thoughts, and our dreams. Even though many of 2004's biggest conundrums remain unanswered: we still don't know how Bush was re-elected, how to get our mitts on Charlotte Church's assets or how to control the Nintendo Revolution; there's now a new need to sharpen our investigative powers. The big question, of course, is: who is Greg Hastings? We ask [rhetorically] because we have just taken reception of a US-sourced Xbox game called Greg Hastings' Tournament Paintball, and some form of explanation is needed. It's the ultimate celebrity accolade to have one's name attached to a video-game title, and is normally a privilege reserved for the most commercially savvy sports stars like Messrs Woods and Hawk. And Emlyn Hughes. So, Greg Hastings, we have deduced, must be of similar importance; he's not just a paintballer, he's a paintball uber-celebrity... the duke, the king, the overlord.
A few hours after the start of a Google-fuelled red fishing expedition and we had two main variations of a potentially sort-of-famous Greg Hastings. The first is a didgeridoo player who lives in Perth, Australia. The second is some American bloke with considerable sideburns who appears across a variety of specialist paintballing sites. Bingo. That’s got to be our man. And indeed he does seem to be the David Beckham of the paintballing world, with super snazzy shades and a reversed baseball cap comprehensively proving his affinity with fashion. Men want to be him, and women want to be with him. And now Greg Hastings fans all over the world can rejoice at the opportunity to do so.
So away from our incisive detective skills and onto the game itself. As you will have noted, it features both Greg Hastings and paintball tournaments. And at first glance, there seems to be little else on offer. On the surface, it's a depressingly sparse take on the already saturated first person shooter genre. But when you actually get stuck in, the format presents itself as something altogether more interesting. As hopefully suggested by the use of a 'big name star' in the title, GHTP loosely resembles a sports game. Whilst the developers might have chosen just to make an FPS with paint instead of bullets, luckily a much tighter framework has been selected. Battles take place between two teams in a restricted playing field - a specifically designed paintballing 'pitch' - if you will. And in the absence of a storyline, the challenge is simply to become the best paintballing team on the scene. All quite straightforward, but surprisingly compelling.
