There's a reason that videogames based on television series or films are usually the worst kind. Although theirs are the adverts you're most likely to see at the cinema or splattered over the billboards as you wait for the bus, usually the size of their marketing budget far outweighs the love the programmers felt for the game when making it. This is because the people that should love the storylines and characters the most – and therefore spend the most time perfecting their worlds – are the original creators. And they can't make videogames. So instead, the job is farmed out to a distant relative, far more concerned with pocketing the childcare allowance than demonstrating the commitment and devotion afforded by a parent.
Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex is the PSP game, born from the Japanese animated television series, born from the comic, born from the film, itself born from a comic. Perhaps this pretty distant and inbred ancestry is the reason the game never quite feels as nurtured, confident or intelligent as the brilliant source material.
GITS:SAC, underneath the convoluted acronym and Matrix-inspiring presentation, is a fairly straightforward futuristic shooting game viewed through the eyes of one of four members from the elite Section 9 police force. The story twists and turns with impressive Japanese over-complexity but, sadly, not much fun as you pick each character's inherent abilities ('Major' Motoko Kusanagi's agility, her partner Batou's strength, rookie Togusa's stealth, or Saito's sniper skills) to tackle a variety of situations in a battle against technological terrorists.
Fighting alongside you is Tachikoma, an upgradeable Tamagotchi-style pet mechanical spider. With the mind and tongue of a pre-pubescent pigtailed schoolgirl, these military robots are nevertheless extremely useful gunners and you'll often find yourself relying on their brute strength and, crucially, aiming ability to clear areas when your own is lacking.
See, the key to making a successful first person perspective shooting game is to allow the player to successfully shoot things from the first person perspective. And it's this fundamental building block of the game that seems to be missing, the result being that everything built upon it, from the stylish presentation to good-looking visuals, is ultimately unstable and broken.
Successfully aiming at enemies is made extremely difficult by a control scheme that struggles to make the best use of the PSP's admittedly inappropriate button set-up for first person control. While you have a choice of a few different set-ups, each with advantages and flaws, none of them work perfectly. The game proudly boasts 51 different weapons – all the usual projectile-spitting steel sights: handguns, submachines guns and rocket launchers – but all the arms in America are utterly useless if you can't aim for toffee. And in that respect the game is far from sweet.
Better is the option to upgrade your characters' kit as well as Tachikoma after each battle. Up to four different Tachikomas can be readied for deployment but only one can be picked to actually go into battle. Each machine has six different customisation slots which can be filled with everything from drills to Gatling guns. Picking the right equipment for the right mission becomes quite an art and, once you factor in the different personalities of the Tachikomas (picking an aggressive personality for a stealth mission won't work, for instance), the levels of complexity start to add up.
So, the controls are clunky, the storyline too quirky, too wild-eyed, and the gene pool for
GITS:SAC too diluted but, considering the circumstances, Bandai has done a decent job bringing it up.
Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex is on sale now. 
