Alien Front Online (Dreamcast)

 This is a game from the latter days of the Dreamcast's official support that I always wanted a copy of after seeing it in magazines,  but it was slightly before the time when I was able to import games and it only got released in North America. It's probably for the best, though, since many of my Dreamcast play at that time was multiplayer, with four people crowded into my room, and as the name suggests, this one was online only.

 

Anyway, it's a game about groups of tanks waging battle against each other, one side humans, the other aliens. The single player arcade mode is actually a lot like a game I wrote about not long ago, Polygonet Commanders: you fight against the opposing force, and there's a strict time limit. Killing three enemies gets you ten extra seconds (and it really does mean you have to do it, any enemies killed by your AI comrades don't count towards this), and winning a battle (by killing fifteen of their tanks before they do the same to you. AI contributions do count towards this, at least) gets you a whole bunch of extra time depending on your performance. Usually about forty seconds in my experience. I haven't actually lost a battle in arcade mode yet, though I always get a game over via timeout three or four stages in, which is a little frustrating.

 

There's also a "tactics" mode which is an attempt at a longer single player campaign. It's not very fun to play, though, with missions like "drive over all the stationary targets within the time limit" and "shoot all the stationary targets within the time limit". It does eventually go on to give you proper battles, but there's no reason to pick this over arcade mode, to be honest.

 

Actually playing the game feels pretty good. Each side has three vehicles, filling the roles of light, heavy, and medium, of course. The human vehicles are all tanks, and all basically feel the same to control, other than their movement and firing speed. The alien vehicles are much more interesting, being made up of a hover tank and two- and four- legged walkers that all feel very different from each other. The controls are pretty old fashioned, using the analogue stick to both steer and move forward and backwards (there's no vertical aiming), and you can use the shoulder buttons to strafe, too.

 

Though I obviously haven't been able to play this online, thanks to the existence of ancient textfiles online, I have been able to find out somethings that are mildly interesting about the experience. Firstly, though the game doesn't support the Dreamcast Broadband adaptor, it apparently does support voice chat over its dial-up connection, and was even packaged with a mic! This might have been a contributing factor in a common complaint across the accounts I've read though: difficulty connecting to matches, and even worse, difficulty staying connected to matches. Most amusingly of all, though, is that there were a couple of secret match types that were accessed by inputting cheat codes as the name of your online lobby. However, lobbies couldn't share the same name, so only one group of players could use these cheats at a time!

 

Though obviously it can no longer be played as originally intended (as far as I know?), I think Alien Front Online is still worth a look. Even single player, it'll provide you with an hour or two of decent tank fun before you get bored of it. That assuming you're emulating, of course. The prices legitimate copies fetch online are not a good investment.