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.

Hokuto no Ken - Shin Seikimatsu Kyuuseishu Densetsu (Mega Drive)

 This game recently got a translation patch, which is pretty good timing, as I've recently started reading the post-timeskip part of Fist of the North Star (via the classy hardcovers Viz are currently putting out), and the game provides a surprisingly close adaptation of that storyline. Of course, it wasn't always thus: back in 1989, SEGA's western branches saw fit to "localise" the game into Last Battle, removing all the gore, and giving the characters names that would be more relatable to western kids, such as Aarzak. A wise move: I was born in 1986 and there were three Aarzaks in my class at primary school. (But seriously, the Fist of the North Star TV series was already popular in mainland Europe, and Viz had recently started translating the manga for the US market, so this was, as usual, a terrible decision.)

 

I was also a terrible decision for a reason besides marketing synergy, though: the unfortunate truth is that this is a game that heavily favours style over substance, and without the gore and the tie-in, it doesn't really have much left. It's mostly a pretty basic single plane beat em up, with most stages seeing Ken walk from one end of a location to the other, punching guys so hard that their heads explode. There is a power meter that fills up a little bit for every exploded head, and once it's full, Ken's jacket shreds to bits, and all his attacks become significantly more powerful. Without the power-up, boss fights are a tense battle of attrition, where you have to learn your foe's attack pattern and evade it. With the power-up, you'll kill them in a few hits, which is a kind of satisfaction in itself, to be honest. The power-up lasts until you finish the current chapter, of which I think there are four, which the entire game being about an hour long if you know what you're doing.

 

There's other kinds of stages, too, though! There's boss fights, as already mentioned. These will be against prominent foes Ken fights in the manga, like giant Hulk Hogan, the weird little cigar troll, and golden Dolph Lundgren. When you kill a boss, they'll have a special little death animation, and some of them have to be killed with a normal standing punch. There's also what I think of as the "maze" stages. These take place inside buildings with very few enemies, but lots of things being fired at you from offscreen, like arrows, axes, and boulders. You've got to navigate around these big buildings, falling through holes in the floor and climbing through holes in the ceiling until you find whoever you're supposed to meet in there. They're a lot more time consuming than the other stages, and a lot less exciting. All of the stages are placed on a big map, and to get through each chapter, you've got to go from location to location, but the order you're expected to the stages in isn't always obvious. You'll pick it up after a few plays, but like the maze stages, this feels like another way of padding out the scant runtime.

 

I think I've already made it clear how good this game is, but in summary: not very. It's a mediocre game slightly elevated with some amusing gore and the novelty of seeing a story you already know in a simplified videogame form. If that appeals to you, give it a try, but otherwise don't bother. And double-don't-bother with the western version Last Battle, since as mentioned, it doesn't even have the good stuff in it.

Panel Ninja Keesamaru (Game Boy)

 Despite having a translation patch, this is a game that I've never seen mentioned before, anywhere. I only found it myself because I was copying Pipe Dream over to the Game Boy folder of my RGB30, and decided to copy over some alphabetically local games that caught my eye alongside it. Also, there's almost no text in the game, and what little there is wouldn't present any barrier to progress, so it's an odd choice for having a translation patch.

 

Each stage is a single screen puzzle, in which you have to literally leave no stone unturned in seeking out the exit door and the key to open said door. Your main action, other than moving, is to flip floor panels. When you do this, you flip the panel in front of and behind you, toggling those panels between two positions: blank, upon which you can walk, and shiny, upon which you can't. So you have to flip tiles in such a manner as to make your own way through the stage, and also to leave blank spaces onto which stones can be rolled. There's also enemies wandering about in some stages, that can be defeated by flipping the tiles they're walking across.

 

After fourteen stages, you'll also face your first boss fight! The boss wanders back and forth at the top of the screen, shooting at you, while you have to roll stones into pits, looking for the switch to step on that kills the boss. Interesting that they'd make the boss fights into puzzles, when there are (mostly pointless) single-use weapon items hidden around the stages. Obviously, this is the kind of game where everything has a clear and specific purpose in the world (a quality I've referred to in the past as "purity"), and every stage is an arrangement of those elements that tests your understanding of them, with new elements being introduced every couple of stages. It's a surprise that it doesn't have a stage editor, actually, since similarly constructed Game Boy games did, like the pirate cart classics Pitman and Hyper Lode Runner.

 

Unfortunately, while I was enjoying this game for a couple of hours, disaster eventually struck! Eventually, you'll "level up", and instead of just flipping the tiles directly in front of and behind you, you'll flip the four tiles orthogonally adjecent to you. I feel like this might have been implemented without it having been properly tested, as it mostly makes things more difficult, rather than easier, and I eventually reached a point, almost twenty stages in, where it just made progress impossible, as it prevented me from making a space to roll a stone, and then clear a path back to the other side of the stone to do the pushing. So, I'd recommend the game, were it not for that one small, but devestating flaw. Never mind.