0 to Z of Playstation 1 Games - Alive

        

Alive is a futuristic Full Motion video and live action game, developed and published by General Entertainment, the game was released exclusively in Japan on the Playstation 1, on the 6^th of August 1998.

In 2003 a world watched by an omnipresent surveillance system, you play as a 20 year old Japanese woman named Atsuko Kawada who has been framed for murder, as you try to avoid capture via a series of interconnected video clips you have to get to the bottom of what happened, why this is happening, who wants you dead.

During the course of the game the player needs to make quick movements and commands to making the corrects decision is vital with the player hitting a game over screen if they fail. During some of the games sequences the player has three choices Active, Clever and Escape you are limited in the amount of times you can use each option, with the wrong option delaying the player and sometimes causing a game over.

Later the game has some driving section were the player can choose which direction to go in, later in the game the player does get a weapon, with a moving target indicator appearing on the screen when it can be used, timing of shots is vital.

Reviews for this Japanese and niche title are impossible to find with information in general for this game hard to come by. So we head over to GameFAQs for their user data, which is limited as well with only 5 users rating this game.

The game currently sits at a rating as average as you can get with a 2/5/5 score from the 5 users, a couple of decent users rating though with one user awarding the game a 3.5/5, with another couple of users scoring the game a 3/5. One of the remaining two users gave the game an average 2.5/5, the other user brought the average down with their 0.5/5 score, bringing down the games average from a 3/5 to a 2.5/5.

This is the part of 0 to Z where is visit five online retailers and see what the availability of the title is, and what price you would be looking at if you wanted to pick this title up, the sites that I will be using for this are Amazon.com,  eStarland.com, retrogames.co.uk and Gamedude.com I know the last one is very location specific, but from a podcast I listen to I’ve heard they have a huge stock of older games, I will also be including Ebay.com as well

So lets get down to business with Gamedude, where it is no surprise this Japanese only title is not available, likewise Retrogames.co.uk and eStarland.com don’t stock this title either. Heading to Amazon.com who do have the game stocked and plenty of it, at the time of writing this there are 45 new and used copies available.

Starting with used copies for a complete used copy in very good condition, you can picked one up for $15 this comes with free shipping from Japan (As previously said this is a Japanese only release you will need a Japanese console to play this game).

The $15 price converts to £11.71 in the UK, if you are in the Euro region countries you are looking at a price of €12.74 while in the Solomon Islands it will set you back 115.73 Solomon Islands Dollars.

If you are looking for a new copy of the game, well there is a huge heap of them available with prices starting at $47.05, this comes with free shipping something that the majority of new copies of this game come with. New prices copies of the game reach a high of around the $80 mark, you could possibly understand the higher price if you were getting you copy sooner, however delivery dates for all the copies I have seen available are between mid September and mid October so no real advantage to paying more for a copy.

Ebay.com is much lighter on copies with just three available at the time of writing this, the first copy and cheapest only ships to the US, it comes with free shipping and is priced at $18. The second copy a good quality used copy from Japan, and priced at $24.99 this comes with free economy shipping to the US, however if you are in the UK a $5.90 shipping fee is in place.

I checked a few other nations to see what the shipping fees will be Germany, Poland and Spain as well as likely the rest of Europe have a $5.90 shipping fee, Australia also has a $5.90 shipping fee for Economy International shipping as does India.

The final copy on Ebay is a very good quality used copy and is much more pricey even after adding the shipping to previous copies, priced at $54.73 it comes with free economy international shipping but for over $20 more is it really worth it.

Written by

P J Gibbon