Dive Alert (Neo Geo Pocket Color)

 Considering how SNK are almost entirely known for their arcade games, it's surprising that there's quite a few RPGs on the Neo Geo Pocket Color, and almost all of them got English releases. (As an aside, a thought I had recently is that it would have been cool if there'd been a Suikoden-like RPG where you recruit King of Fighters characters on the NGPC.) Dive Alert is one such RPG, and it even has the post-Pokemon handheld RPG gimmick of having been released in two versions. As far as I can tell, though, the only difference is that one version has a female player character with a male AI sidekick, while the other is the other way round.

 

First impressions of Dive Alert will be very good: the game opens with an admirable attempt at approximating something like a anime TV opening within the limits of the modest hardware of the NGPC. In fact, it feels like the game in general has had a lot of focus put on this aspect, with a lot of the game being spent in lengthy dialogue and/or exposition scenes accompanied by some really great-looking pixel art filling the upper two-thirds of the screen. Unfortunately, the other side of this coin means that the game itself was severely neglected, in more than one way.

 

The thing is that you get a little scene at the home base when you get your mission, then you have to travel to where the mission takes place. Travelling is the most time-consuming and least enjoyable part of the game. You control a blue triangle that very very slowly crawls forwards, after you point it in the direction you compass says the objective is in. While you're doing this, indescript purple blobs with numbers on them will randomly appear and shoot red dots at you. you can shoot yellow dots back at them, but unless they're directly ahead of you, you won't have enough fuel to get to the objective if you try to engage them.

 

Once you get to the objective, there'll be another story scene, with some more great-looking and unique pixel art, before something else happens, often a boss fight. The boss will also be a tiny blob with a number on it, and you just spam yellow dots at it until the next cut scene starts. This "just playing to get to the next cutscene" structure is bad enough as it is, but when the actual game parts feel like they've deliberately been made to be as slow and boring as possible to pad out the length of the game, it's intolerable. 

 

I really wanted to like Dive Alert, it's clearly a game that was made with a lot of ambition regarding what could be done in terms of narrative on a handheld console in 1999. But it's also clear that all the ROM space and all of the effort in development was put into the cutscenes and story, with almost nothing left of either for the actual game. Maybe a remake on a system with the storage capacity for both would be a better game, but who's gonna remake an unloved, unremembered RPG a quarter of a century later?

Akuji the Heartless (Playstation)

 I remember this game getting quite a bit of hype in UK magazines, including a demo on the Official Playstation Magazine's coverdisc that included the whole second stage (it was an exciting bit of nostalgia seeing that place again, playing the full game for this review). Presumably because it was an original new series from Crystal Dynamics and Eidos Interactive, and Tomb Raider was insanely popular in the UK in those days. Akuji wasn't so lucky, though, as once it came out, I never heard mention of it ever again. Not from other people, not from magazines, not even online. It seems like no-one bought or played it.

 

Which, having played it for a few hours this past week, seems a little unfair! It's actually a pretty fun game. I don't have an excuse for myself, either: I remember enjoying the aforementioned magazine demo, and the game's aesthetic definitely appealed to me then and it's nostalgic now. I wonder why I never followed up on it until now? Anyway, the game's a 3D platformer in which you play as Akuji, a guy who is literally, physically heartless, the organ having been removed in a "voodoo" ritual to allow him to go to the afterlife to find the lost souls of his ancestors for some reason. 

 

Of course, this game is from 1998, so the "voodoo" isn't an accurate and sensitive portrayal of African/Carribean folk religion, but a bunch of imagery incorporating skulls, snakes, blood, and fire at random. In fact, with all that imagery, the constant use of coloured lights and soundtrack of ambiet, distant drumming, I actually thought the stages felt like a mix between an edgy horror/superhero comic (as was the style earlier in the nineties: Spawn, Perg, Hellstorm, and stuff in that vein) and a voodoo-themed family restaurant at a particularly high budget theme park. It might be culturally insensitive, but I can't deny that it makes for a fun atmosphere.

 

The game itself isn't anything mind-blowing or super original, but it is a decent, well-constructed 3D platformer. You run around, fighting badguys, climbing up stuff, finding keys, solving simple switch puzzles, and all the typical 3D platformer stuff. There's a little bit of collectathon in there, too, as you've got to find your ancestors' souls hidden throughout each stage. It's definitely not a Rare-level encumberence, though, as there's only four in each stage, they're pretty easy to find and get to, and you don't actually need to find every last one to progress, only about half-to-three-quarters of them. I was also pleasantly surprised by the bossfights: I was expecting the kind of boss fight where a large portion of the time is spent avoiding attacks until the boss reveals its big red weakpoint, but the bosses in this are essentially just big enemies on which you can wail. You can even shoot them when they run away to a far away platform!

 

Akuji the Heartless is a pretty good game, and it's definitely worth a look, especially if you've got a bit of nostalgia for turn-of-the-century spooky mallgoth aesthetics. It's got some flaws, like moderately terrible camera, and times where you can fall down to a lower area and have to climb your way back up (exacerbated, of course, by the camera), but I've mostly had a good time with it.