Stop. Do NOT enter your local computer games store. Danger lurks. Manga cartoons are popular, computer games about Manga cartoons are likely to attract the unsuspecting, the gullible, the people who buy games before they've read the review. We know a lot of you were stung on Rise Of The Robots - we were helpless, the abomination was on sale before the magazine appeared.

Akira is on sale. It has been for weeks, cunningly timed to avoid as many magazine deadlines as possible. Probably. And by now, ICE have sold a few and recouped some 'development' cost. One of the games magazines was allegedly told not to review Akira unless they were going to score it 80 per cent or more. Cue belly laughs from the stalls. Eighty per cent? Or was it eight?

Akira is part platform game, part shoot-em-up, part motorcycle ride. Akira is a game which should have appeared on a budget label three years ago, and even then it would have been poor. Readers, this game has been in 'development' so long, one wonders exactly what the writers have been up to. And surely, in that time, someone must have happened by and suggested that, 'things weren't quite right'.

OK. So you start on a motorcycle. It's the Capsule Gang against the Clowns (right) and you dribble along streets avoiding fire, jumping craters and hitting cones. The bike is difficult to control, the graphics are poor, you throw the pad at the screen in dismay.

Bad people
On other levels you shoot teddy bears, ride a flying sledge, massacre a blob and battle a Scaramangian amount of baddies in a sewer. You really don't want to play this for more than five minutes. Offers to take up the joypad were spurned by colleagues hastily burying their heads in needlecraft mags.

The sprites have no character, the gameplay is shabby enough to warrant execution at the hands of bad people from the other side of the world, who first use torture techniques previously thought improbable. The graphics are faceless, the level design plain dull.

Akira is £30. If you've already bought it, one can only sympathise - and then suggest you should have learned by now not to dash out and buy games without reading AF reviews first. The shock of loading this up could kill the faint hearted.

Having suspiciously peeled the labels of your Akira disks to find they've been recycled from unsold copies of Total Carnage, you'll discover that the game opens with a horizontally-scrolling motorbike level.

You ride along from left to right avoiding obstacles and leaping over gaps in the road. The manual suggests you "Hit the cones for points and bonuses." Except they're not merely "bonuses" at all, as you'll discover when you can't get past because you didn't ick up any so-called "bonus" grenades earlier on, because you couldn't possibly have anticipated needing them, and you've no idea what sort of "bonus" the cones are going to give you until you've hit them, so you're got to hit them all if you're to stand a chance.

Similarly, you must be sure to pick up every single "bonus" fuel can, otherwise you'll run out of fuel. "Bonus" speed-up arrows are another matter, however.

Sometimes you'll drive past one only to find a gap scrolling onto the screen that you're now not going fast enough to jump over. So you'll hit the next one to be on the safe side, and discover that it propels you into a dead-end where you die and have to go back to the beginning.

Level one of Akira is a memory test, then, and so insultingly tedious that there's no way I'm prepared to play it long enough to memorise my way through to the end and see what the following levels are like. (They're platform shoot-'em-ups to judge from the picture on the back of the box.)

Were you to fork out the extraordinary £30 being asked for the game, I think you'd do the same, and feel thoroughly ripped off. And I can say this with even greater authority than usual because, even after we'd asked them politely several times, ICE failed to send us a review copy of Akira, and I was compelled to buy the game myself from WHI Smith's.

THE BOTTOM LINE
16%, then...
JONATHAN DAV...

Oh, all right. Given that I was already £30 down, and the importance of complete dissemination, I thought I'd better make the effort and find out what the rest of Akira is like. So I obtained a set of passwords from a suddenly-more-obliging ICE. Bear in mind, though, that unless you either do the same or have the patience o a gibbon, level one is all you'll ever see. THIS IS PROBABLY JUST AS WELL.

Persevering with the scrolling motorbike leads, as it turns out, to... another scrolling motorbike section. This is much the same, except you're chased by police cars who kill you if they catch up with you. And they always will catch up with you because they can go faster than you. Unless, that is, you collect EVERY SINGLE ONE of the "bonus" go-faster power-ups. Sigh.

NEO-TOKYO
But then... having typed in the next password, suddenly I longed to be back o that motorbike. For what come next are indeed platform shoot-'em-up levels, but of such lamentable quality that I, along with the rest of AMIGA POWER, weren't sure whether to laugh or cry. In the end they laughed while I, £30 lighter, elected to cry.

The budget doesn't appear to have stretched to a 'standing still' frame of animation for the little bloke you control, so instead one of the 'running' (or actually 'mincing') ones is used, thus giving him a permanent list to one side.

Then, when you tell him to jump, he floats about in the air imprecisely, without even a suggestion of inertia. Running jumps, essential to clear certain obstacles, are achieved by first pressing down-and-right to run, and then somehow switching to up-and-right at the appropriate moment to jump. It inevitably ends in disaster.

Your opponents are titcy little sprites which take loads of shots to kill, the game having presumably started out too easy. Either that or they skulk around on the floor where you can't shoot them because your gun will only fire horizontally.

Once the platform levels are out of the way (through) judicious use of the Escape key and some more passwords), you're into the scrolling shoot-'em-up levels. These are perhaps the only bits of Akira which work even slightly, but you'll soon tire of having to pump four or five blasts from your twin laser cannon into the casually-dressed baddies before they'll stop throwing grenades.
And lastly there's the final show-down with Tetsuo.

At no point does Akira even begin to approach the quality of the original film (generally agreed by AP to be pretty good, if unnecessarily hard to understand). The graphics aren't even remotely stylish or Japanese-looking, with feeble animation and messy colours. The presentation, involving digitised still from the film, is fairly slick, but serves only to make the actual game look even more terrible.

And it's incredibly difficult. Being difficult isn't a bad thing in itself, of course, as long as it's done properly. But Akira is more unfair than difficult, with its loads-of-shots-to-kill baddies and unanticipatable dead ends. And it doesn't earn your respect in a way that makes you want to persevere with it, like a proper difficult game should.

Which is why you won't ever get past level one.

Wer den Test zur Standard-Fassung im letzten Heft gelesen hat, weiß, daß wir auf den Umbau des unsäglichen Gameplays anläßlich der CD-Konvertierung ohnehin nicht zu hoffen wagten - aber zumindest ein bei diesem Thema doch eigentlich unvermeidbares Movie-Intro oder wenigstens die originale Musik von CD wäre doch nicht zuviel verlangt gewesen, oder? Anscheinend doch...

Bei ICE hielt man jedenfalls unbeirrbar am bereits Bekannten fest, es sollten wohl nur die Akira-Fans mit CD32 ebenfalls geschröpft werden. Und so darf man sich erneut auf öde Motorradjagden samt Benzinkanister-Sammeln und Granaten-Werfen, einfallslose und mit unfairen Stellen reich gesegnete Plattform-Hopsereien oder eine lachhafte Ballerszene, wo mittels eines horizontal fliegenden Hovercrafts angreifende Jetpack-Akrobaten vom Himmel geholt werden, "freuen".

Und wenn man bedenkt, was alles aus dem kultigen Stoff des japanischen Comic-Zeichners Katsuhiro Otomo zu machen gewesen wäre, kommen einem glatt die Tränen:

Das an "Bladerunner" erinnernde Szenario präsentiert das Neo-Toko des Jahres 2019, wo sich Kids brutale Kämpfe mit der Militärpolizei und Wissenschaftlern liefern, welche ihrerseits katastrophale Experimente an PSI-begabten Kindern durchführen.

Bei einem Verkehrsunfall wird da Tetsuo, das Mitglied einer Motorradgang, entführt und der Spieler als Rettungskommando engagiert: Als Kaneda soll er den Kumpel befreien und das Geheimnis um dessen rätselhafte Kräfte entschlüsseln. Doch wer mag das schon, wenn die launige Story in ein bodenlos schlechtes Gameplay mündet, das streckenweise weit, weit unter PD-Niveau liegt?

Außer praktisch unwirksamen Zusatzwaffen hat Akira nämlich nur laue Sammelextras wie frische Lebensenergie zu bieten - wenn hier mittels Schlüssel ein Tor geöffnet wird oder sich ein 16 Pixel schmaler Plattfom-Aufzug in Bewegung setzt, dann hat man die innovativen Höhepunkte des Spiels bereits gesehen.

Zumal sich trotz der Levelcodes wohl kaum ein Fan der Dark-Future-Vorlage die komplette Jagd auf knuddelige Teddybären und Schildkröten antun wollen wird! Denn vom frustigen Gameplay einmal abgesehen: Was haben blaßgraue Abwasserkanäle und kunterbunte Spielzeugfabriken hier überhaupt verloren?

Und was haben die sieben Levels eigentlich auf einer CD verloren? Allein das softe Scrolling und die netten Zwischenbilder sind erwähnenswert, die dilettantisch gezeichnete Grafik stammt jedoch aus dem gleichen Software-Gruselkabinett wie die offenbar zweistimmige Begleitmusik, welche auf Wunsch anstatt der kaum besseren Sound-FX erschallt.

Also alles wie schon auf der Disk, so auch das Fazit: Hände weg von diesem Müll, egal ob man nun ein CD32 oder einen AGA-Amiga mit CD-ROM besitzt! (rl)