The King of Fighters - Battle de Paradise (Neo Geo Pocket Color)

 Something that not very many people remember is that there was a cross-system link cable between the Neo Geo Pocket Color and the Dreamcast. This is one of the few games that uses that function! Obviously, I haven't got any way to try it myself, but a little bit of research online suggests that strikers levelled up in this game can be uploaded to the Dreamcast port of King of Fighters 99, where they'll have stronger attacks. The game itself is, in keeping with the Dreamcast theme, a King of Fighters-themed Sonic Shuffle-like (or I guess you could call it a Mario Party-like if you're boring).

 

You pick a character, and you play a board game, and some spaces on the board trigger minigames. Oddly, the characters you play as aren't King of Fighters characters, but a small collection of original teenagers. You do pick an actual KOF character as a striker to represent you in the minigames, though. Very strange setup. The aim of the game is to get stars, and there's one space on the entire board where you can buy them for twenty coins each. There are spaces on the board that increase or decrease your stock of coins when you land on them, and you can also win or lose them in minigames. But I'm getting a little ahead of myself, now.

 

To go back a little: after picking your character, striker, stage, and game length, you'll appear on the board. You take turns rolling the die, and occasionally choosing a direction to go in. Prety standard Sugoroku-type stuff. But there's a few special space types! Exclamation marks will trigger a weird little event where your striker will interact with some other KOF characters, and you might lose a turn, gain some coins, or some other thing along those lines might happen. The VS. spaces are the game's main draw, and they'll trigger as soon as you get to them, you don't need to actually land on them. Of course, they'll pull you and your opponent into a minigame.

 

There's a fair few minigames, and they all include references to the King of Fighters series, as well as other SNK games. Some of these references will just be cards with characters' faces on them, but others are more deep. My favourite is the one where you're given a clue, and have to pick the right character from a lineup of three. It actually requires some knowledge of these characters, their personalities and lore! That's so rare in a fighting game spinoff! Other standouts include a little dancing game starring Mai Shiranui, which seems impossible to win (there's even a FAQ written in 2001 that agrees!), a game that's like SEGA's ancient arcade game Head On, but it's about Sie Kensou eating meat buns, and a game where Chang and Choi have to choose the right doors on their escape bid from prison. 

 

After each game, whether you win or lose, you get a bunch of points, that gradually unlock stuff: new boards to play on, the ability to play the minigames from a menu, and most interestingly, a gallery of twenty pieces of pixel art with text attached. These can be ads for upcoming SNK games from around the same time, like King of Fighters 2000 or Cool Cool Toon, little design notes about this game or even classic SNK games, and more. It all really adds up to this game being a great little love letter and time capsule for SNK fans, especially now that there's a fan translation. 

 

And that really affects whether or not you'll want to play it. Like I said, my favourite of the minigames really relies on the player having knowledge of SNK lore, and a lot of the appeal elsewhere is in the references to other SNK games and their lore. So if you're a big SNK fan, you should definitely give it a try. One thing I can say in its favou is that it's a lot quicker and less painful to play as against a CPU opponent than other games in this genre. I'd love to play it against a human opponent someday, but I don't know how I'd ever be able to make that happen for a number of reasons (does anyone know anything about setting up multiplayer stuff on modern emulator handhelds? Is that possible?). I'll bookend the review by bringing up another feature I wasn't able to access via emulation: apparently, if you put the cartridge into a non-colour Neo Geo Pocket, there's a remake of SNK's 1979 arcade game Yosaku! Unfortunately, though, I couldn't force the emulator I was using to load the ROM in monochrome mode.

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?

Oekaki Puzzle (Neo Geo Pocket Colour)

Long time readers might remember that I've always said that Logic Pro (and its sequel, Logic Pro Adventure) are by far the best nonogram videogames around, with all others being mediocre by comparision. Well, it's time for some exciting news: I may have found the all-time worst example of a nonogram game in Oekaki Puzzle!

To start with, it has the same big flaw as so many others: non-existant stakes caused by a lack of any real lose condition, with the added caveat that you get zero feedback at all on whether you're marking the right or wrong squares. It's also missing some common quality of life features, like highlighting the row and column your cursor is currently on so you tell where you are at a glance, for example.

Then there's the puzzles themselves, which are completely joyless things to solve. I think there's three main reasons for this. One: a lot of the puzzles turn out to be things like letters or numbers or just simple shapes when you complete them. Two: a huge amount of the puzzles are symmetrical, so when you've solved half the puzzle, you just go and do the same thing reversed on the other half of the grid. There's a soul-crushingly long series of near-identical animal faces that are all particularly egregious offenders in this department. Three: a lot of puzzles also feature a lot of rows where the numbers have a lot of ones and twos. This is a hard one to explain, but it makes the puzzles really tedious to solve, and also removes the mild satisfaction of filling in a long line of squares with reckless abandon.

I've actually gone back to the original Logic Pro recently, attempting to finish it in a single credit like I did with Logic Pro Adventure when I reviewed it last year, and the differences between that game and Oekaki Puzzle really show how such a simple concept can be executed by two games with such a vast chasm of quality between the two. Don't bother playing this game.