HE house is big and scary, blood is dripping from the walls and people are bursting into flame, yet no one leaves. In horror movies one wonders how anyone could be that stupid, and ghosts must wonder the same thing. It must be frustrating when, for all your best attempts to terrify the residents, they stubbornly stay in the house, watching TV or grabbing a snack in the kitchen no matter how many times you eerily wail or stack all the chairs in the middle of the room.

I experienced some of this frustration firsthand while playing Ghost Master, a strategy game from Sick Puppies in which one leads an army of the dead in a battle of wills against the living. In missions with titles like Calamityville Horror, Phantom of the Operating Room and Poultrygeist (which takes place at the site of an ancient chicken burial ground), you must choose a commando ghost team to lead into a haunting. Deciding whom you want to take into that sorority house or creepy cabin in the woods is vital; there are ghosts that can release a swarm of insects into a room or learn a mortal's secret fear, ghosts that can rattle chains, ghosts that can whisper warnings or possess young children. Choose well, and you can terrify mortals into flight or madness.

Each location also has some nonliving residents chained to the places where they died. If you can free these spirits, perhaps by avenging their murders or leading mortals to discover their hidden bones, they will join you in future hauntings.

Often a good deal of ingenuity is required to meet the challenges, like trying to figure out how to lure a child into a particular room or which ghost can be used to free prisoners from their jail cells so they can run screaming into the night. One by one, the mortals will flee until you finally have your entire ghost army chasing after the one poor stubborn fool who has yet to run away. Things become more difficult in the later missions where you will also run up against witches and "ghostbreakers" who can banish your ghosts.

Occasionally the game's campy horror-movie-voiced narrator will ask you to lead foolish students to a spell book to summon an evil beast or to convince a gangster that ghosts really do exist, but for the most part the goal is simply to instill terror. This can take a lot of effort, but when you see the last screaming mortal run from the house, it all seems worthwhile.

Master proves you can scare people out of the house, but Konami's action-adventure game Boktai: The Sun Is in Your Hand has a different method for forcing its players into the light of day; it's impossible to win the game indoors. Created for the Game Boy Advance, Boktai uses a solar sensor set in the game cartridge to tell whether you are in the sunlight. In the game, a boy must battle vampires and zombies with a solar-powered weapon that will charge up only when the player is outdoors.

It's a goofy idea but cleverly executed. Once set up, the game keeps track of the time and won't respond if you shine a grow light on it at night. (Of course, if you go on vacation in a different time zone it would also refuse to recognize the real sun.) Much of the game takes place in grim, sunless castles, but in certain rooms there are grated windows that will let in squares of sunlight from which you can recharge your weapon. Cover the solar sensor, and the square of sunlight disappears. I was also startled when I played the game early in the morning and found that the castle zombie guards were all sleeping.

Boktai is more about puzzle-solving and stealth than about action. You can't kill the zombies, only briefly stun them, so the best strategy is to sneak by. You can tap on a wall to lure one to a particular location, and some monsters are blind and will ignore you if you can move quietly.

The game's clever gimmick is also its biggest inconvenience. I usually play Game Boy games when I'm waiting for the subway, but while there are some alternative methods for charging your environmentally friendly gun without sunlight, you can't vanquish vampires unless you're in bright sunlight, meaning you must sit outside for these battles. Don't sit outside too long though, or the solar gun will overcharge and you won't be able to use it until the next day.

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