Body Harvest (N64)

Developer:

DMA Design

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Release Date:

1998

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Systems:

N64

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I've always wondered why this space station has a skull painted on it. Up there at the top, next to the dish.

Anyway it's Super Adventures' 12th birthday today yesterday, so I figured I should write about a video game or something to celebrate. It has to be something a little bit special though, so I'm checking out DMA Design's notorious time-travelling alien-slaying action-adventure Body Harvest, on the Nintendo 64.

One thing I like about this era is that console designers were all making the leap to full 3D using different approaches, so you can tell an N64 game from a PlayStation game instantly just by looking at a screenshot. Even multiplatform games look different on each system. Body Harvest is a true N64 exclusive though. In fact it was supposed to be a launch title for the console, but original publisher Nintendo wasn't impressed with what DMA were coming up with. It didn't make it onto the system until two years later, when Gremlin Interactive bought DMA and published it themselves in the EU.

In fact it ended up getting released a month or so before DMA Design's other N64 game Space Station Silicon Valley. Except in America, where the two games were released a day apart! This was a bit of a problem as it meant they both came out right before The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and Nintendo fans were saving their pennies for what was certainly going to be the safer bet. Then a year later DMA released Grand Theft Auto 2, which was the beginning of the company's 'making nothing but GTA games for the rest of all eternity' era. Well okay they released Manhunt in 2003 shortly after becoming Rockstar North, but aside from that it's been all GTA as far as the eye can see.

Okay I'm going to do what I always do: try the game for an hour or so, type my reactions under screenshots, and then write a long review at the end with an unearned tone of authority, as if experiencing an hour of gameplay is enough to really get what a game is like.

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Aww, the poor little DMA logo man's been carried away by a slime monster. I remember he got run over at the start of Grand Theft Auto as well, so he's a bit like the LucasArts Golden Guy. Except with way worse luck.

The game let me choose my language and then started the opening introduction scroll rolling. I suppose it wouldn't have made much sense to do it the other way around.

The Earth lies in ruins? Well this sucks! It makes me glad that 2016 is still so far in the future. In fact it would've been exactly 20 years in the future if the game had been a launch title and come out in 1996 like they originally intended.

Fortunately there are still a few genetically enhanced humans alive on space station Omega (the one on the title screen) and they've got a plan to go back in time and prevent the alien harvest. This wasn't the first video game to have this plot and it wouldn't be the last, but it's a pretty decent premise I reckon. It means that developers can send the player to interesting historical locations with fascinating futuristic weapons for some epic action-adventure! Though sometimes they decide to just put us in Egypt for the whole game instead.

This games often start with the heroes having to escape their doomed future at the last moment, with the aliens about to overrun their base, and that's exactly what's happening here. The aliens have returned...

... and they're hungry. Well they should've stopped for some lunch along the way then! They can't just show up unannounced and expect a place at the dinner table.

The game cuts to real-time 3D intro showing the aliens driving up in their artificial comet, launching fighters, and breaching the space station's airlock. Meanwhile the hero is busy putting on his armour piece by piece, very slowly. It's okay though as it basically just consists of a plate to protect his abs, some giant shoulders, and a helmet.

It's genetically enhanced super soldier Adam Drake! I hope I got that right; I'm going from memory as it doesn't tell you in game. He's definitely not Cutter Slade, as that's the other late 90s space hero with an orange costume and a visor (from Outcast). The main difference between them is that Slade can talk, and has textures and a personality and stuff. This is Drake's special cutscene model and it's still kind of low detail. I can kind of make out his Judge Dredd mouth though.

Plus it could be worse. I caught a frame of him firing back at the aliens chasing him down the hallway, all lit up by the muzzle flash and...

... it's a bit washed out.

The alien invaders get close enough to shoot Drake in the arm, but that's his own damn fault really for taking so long to suit up... and still not getting around to putting any armour onto his arms.

Oh damn he's actually bleeding. In a Nintendo game.

Drake escapes through another airlock and an alien monster picks up a drop of blood with a twinkle in its eye. No serious, it twinkles for a moment. I'm sorry I haven't shown any shots of the aliens yet by the way; they're kind of shy and keep lurking behind corners. I'm sure they'll be all over the gameplay screenshots though. I mean it'd be a bit of a rubbish alien shooter if the aliens don't turn up. I'm also sorry that the screenshots are all a fuzzy mess. It's an N64 game, I don't know what to do with it.

The survivors launch their time travel pod and escape the station. The aliens attempt to give chase, but the pod disappears through a wormhole before they can catch them. And that's the end of the intro.

You see what I mean about being able to recognise an N64 game from a screencap. The menus alone give it away.

Okay I usually pick the default normal difficulty setting when I'm writing about a game, but these are the choices it's given me and the one that's selected is 'Zero'. So which one should I go for?

I have no idea what the difference in gameplay is, but I do know what the consequences will be, at least in the version I'm playing. The European release has a sneaky catch with Zero mode: it's unwinnable. You get to a certain point and it basically says 'Thanks for trying the easy mode, now play it properly.' After FIVE HOURS OF GAMEPLAY. There's a bit of a hint about this in the manual, but in game you get no warning. Well I'm only playing it for an hour, so I'll leave it on zero.

I suppose I should be glad that this kind of thing is pretty rare in games, even older ones. I've written about a thousand games now, but out of them the only ones I can think of that pull this are Castle of Illusion, Golden Axe, They Bleed Pixels and Bonk's Revenge. Well, plus DMA Design's own Lemmings, but that doesn't really count as each difficulty is its own set of levels.

I thought someone might want a look at the options screen. Not a lot in here to play around with, but it's always nice to find a game that lets you put the blood all the way up to 'full'.

That 'replay level' feature's nice as well. Though I can't replay anything until I've played it, so I should get on with that.

Alright, I'm a little orange guy in a big foggy world, but I'm not alone as I've got a friend giving me support over the radio. She looks like she's from an imaginary unreleased Japanese version of UFO: Enemy Unknown. Plus our time travel pod looks a bit like a UFO now that I think about it.

 

There it is. We've gone from space station Omega to the Alpha 1.

That's not some horrifyingly bad draw distance you're looking at by the way; we're fenced in here by a giant forcefield. I'm not sure the game's actually told me where 'here' is yet, but it said 'Greece' when I started a new game so I'm thinking I'm there.

Uh, what was I supposed to be doing again? Oh right, she said "Try the village ahead".

Crap, I was just walking over to the village when suddenly the action music came on and all these giant green alien bugs teleported in. I don't even know the controls yet!

I'm mentally comparing the game to DMA's next big open world 3D sandbox, Grand Theft Auto 3, and this doesn't happen a whole lot when you're exploring Liberty City. Fortunately it's easier to point the guns where you want them in Body Harvest, as I can hold R to switch the analogue stick from movement to aiming. It's very Resident Evil 4, except without the tank controls. Though with these creatures swarming around I'm getting flashbacks to Earth Defence Force.

It didn't take long to kill the bugs, and the music switched back from tense battle music to eerie atmospheric exploration music. The soundtrack definitely deserves a place in the 'positives' column for this game. There's no speech though.

 

I saw this Zelda-style sign so I went over to investigate. Seems I need to see Toll-Master before I can lower this bridge and continue to the next area. I haven't even explored this side of the bridge yet, I only just got here, but I might as well get this sorted out first.

There are a few houses here but most of them are boarded up, so I suspect it's not going to be hard to find the guy I'm looking for.

Hey why doesn't this guy look like an anime person? In fact he looks more like one of the portraits from the original Grand Theft Auto. He's likely got his own thoughts about Adam Drake, as they probably don't get a lot of time-travelling super soldiers wearing bright orange armour around here, but he's keeping them to himself.

Toll-Master's probably not really saying 'rumpus' by the way. That's just a translation for our benefit, as we're in Greece and he'd be speaking Greek. He's definitely the man I should be talking to though, as he told me to use the switch behind him to lower the bridge. So that's my first objective sorted out!

The sound of his fireplace was annoying so I went over and sorted that out as well. I didn't really mean to, to be honest, I just thought there might something hidden over there. But there wasn't, and I felt bad about it, so I lit the fire again for him before I went out.

Alright now that the bridge is down I've escaped this tiny island I didn't even know I was on. Well, it's tiny for me at least, seeing as the bottom half is blocked off by the forcefield surrounded the area. You can kind of see it marked on the map.

This map screen's really useful, as it doesn't just show me where I can go, it tells me where I should go. It has some nice map screen music as well. Why doesn't GTA 3 have a map like this? Or at all? 

I didn't mean to bring up the map screen though, I was actually looking for an option to save. I don't want to accidentally screw up and lose all this progress I've just made. Oh, maybe I need to go back and save inside the Alpha 1.

Damn, I wasn't expecting Adam's friend to be dressed like she's from an ad in a 90s PC game magazine.

Well it turns out that we're in Greece during the year 1916, so we've travelled to the middle of World War I, just before the country joined the conflict. It's also exactly 100 years before the scenes in the intro.

The good news is that I've found some tutorials in here, the bad news is that they say I can only save the game after I've destroyed an 'alien processor' and gotten a beacon. So it seems that I'll be stuck playing for a while.

I found a van parked nearby and got Adam to jump inside. Seriously, he does a little flip and leaps in through the roof instead of opening the door. Then I drove over that bridge I lowered and ran right into more aliens!

These aren't those guys though. This is a separate harvester wave that beamed in a little further down the road after I killed the other wave. Fortunately I'm a badass when I'm in a car. I don't even need to aim to kill these guys, I'm just tapping the shoot button and watching them explode.

It must have been a long while since I last played the game because I don't remember the enemies teleporting in all the time like this. It's pretty strange for a sandbox game. It's also pretty strange that the cars need fuel.

 

Plus everything's so spread out and quiet and lonely. I've reached another village, but all the houses are boarded up again and the only thing moving right now are the birds flying around.

There are some green markers on the radar letting me know that there's pair of fire trucks parked over on the right, but I'll leave them alone for now. In fact I'll leave this whole place alone because there's nothing to do here.

The road out of town led to a tunnel entrance, or at least that's what it said on the sign outside. It's not the kind of tunnel that actually goes anywhere however. I wouldn't even call it a dungeon, it's just a room with a chest inside containing dynamite. I'm suddenly getting Zelda vibes again, even though the game was actually released a couple of months before Ocarina of Time.

Alright I've got some dynamite now! I don't know how long it's been down here, it could be really old, unstable, and ready to blow up if I hit a speedbump, but it's dynamite nevertheless. I've got a vague memory in my head of driving past a boulder on the way here, so I'm going to backtrack and see if I can blow it up.

 

Oh there you go, the game just tells me where it is. There's no markers on the road to mark the route though, so I still have to find the way there by myself.

I left the 'tunnel' and caught up with my car before it had entirely rolled down the hill. I think Drake's doing pretty well driving a car from 1916, especially with those giant shoulders, so I'll forgive him for not knowing about the handbrake.

I selected the TNT as a weapon and planted it right next to the boulder. Then I ran far enough away to be safe, without dragging the camera too far away to get a good shot. At least I thought it was far enough away. Now I've only got half my life bar left!

 
Fortunately I'll probably run into another wave of aliens the moment I drive down this road I've just opened up, and they'll drop some health pickups for me to grab.

I miss when these jerks would drop health.

It's nice of the game designers to put another car out here in the middle of nowhere in case I needed it, but I'm doing fine. The auto lock-on means that enemies are fairly effortless to kill, they've barely scratched the van, and I've still got about 60% fuel in the tank.

There sure are a lot of enemies in this game though. I drove 10 meters down the road from here and another wave beamed in! 

The road lead to a room full of chests, but I've gotten distracted by Drake's armour. It turns out that it actually does have a texture on it! It's just really subtle.

Finding a single treasure chest is great, finding a whole room of them is a concern. Either I've got a boss fight coming up, or one of them's a mimic, or they've got nothing in, or something else, but there's going to be a catch. The game's not going to be this kind to me.

Okay it turns out that the game was just being kind to me. It's given me a machine gun, ammo, health, and a weapon crystal! I don't know what I'm supposed to do with a weapon crystal but I'll just hang onto it for now.

The road brought me to another dude I can talk to! I've spotted a few people hanging around outside waiting to be terrorised by the aliens, but it's rare to actually meet someone with a portrait and a couple of lines of text. I found a sign in the dynamite tunnel earlier talking about a guy called Jonathon Mackenzie who "was the first to approve the use of the tank" and I reckon this has to be him. 1916 was the year that tanks were first used in combat, so that part works. Not sure anyone called Mackenzie was driving them around Greece at the time though.

Anyway he told me to search in here for a key to a hangar above the dynamite tunnel and a wall opened up letting me into the rest of the house. I'm starting to get ideas about what's parked inside that hangar and this game had better not be setting me up for disappointment.

SOON

Another harvester wave all the way over there? Oh come on game, I'm right here at the hangar! I can just pop inside, grab the tank and then go.

Okay fine I'll go follow the red arrow and save the villagers first. I should probably hurry up too as there's a bar on my UI with a human face on it and it's starting to fill up.

 

Pew pew pew pew pew pew, hnng, pew pew pew pew.

The combat's not great, but it's not really frustrating either. Though I am a little anxious about the fact that they've set a building on fire and I've got 3 minutes to go find a fire truck, then find my way back here and put it out. Reminder: it hasn't let me save yet. At all.

 

Okay this guy's new. He looks like he's gotten lost on the way to MDK or something. He's also taking a lot more punishment than his giant bug buddies. That's not great when buildings are currently on fire and I've already lost half my health.

Right I've killed the monster, got 1500 points, and collected a heart pickup. Now that I've stopped the harvest I need to get on my bike and race back to wherever that fire station was. 2:30 remaining!

ONE MINUTE LATER

Alright I've got the truck, now I just need to shoot this building with water. C'mon c'mon.

And I got done with 1:29 to spare! Right, now I'm going to go get my tank from that hangar...

... by jumping across the river in my fire engine!

It's fine, I read a thing in Mackenzie's house that mentioned that they planted these trees to stop people using the ramp as a shortcut, so it's got to be possible to make the jump. I just have to line it up absolutely perfectly.

 

Okay, bad idea. Now I have to get out of the water quick before my suit explodes or whatever. It's special bio-armour that doesn't react well to liquid, so I can only swim for a few seconds.

I tried the jump again with a car this time just to double check, and yeah it's still a bad idea. Though I'm sure that a bike would be fast enough to… actually you know what, I'm just going to drive there the slow way by using the bridge. Or walk, whatever.

It wasn't long before I came across a bike, and it wasn't long before I got it stuck inside a sign and had to continue on foot again. But that's fine, because I've reached the hangar now and I'm ready to claim my ancient World War 1 tank! Man there'd better be ancient World War 1 tank in here.

Okay, that seems a little more high tech than I was expecting. I'm starting to think that the game designers got the dates wrong and this level actually takes place in 1936.

But hey it was actually a proper tank in there! Now I'm ready to go do whatever it is I'm meant to be doing now.

Okay cool, let's do that.

Wait, hang on, this sounds a lot like a boss fight. It also sounds like what I need to do to get my bloody save beacon and save my progress. If I get blown up now I (presumably) have to replay all this from the start.

There's been lots of waves of aliens beaming in along the way, but driving an actual tank hasn't made them any trickier. The main effect it's had on gameplay is that I'm listening to a different sound while auto-shooting everything. Speaking of sounds, the cars in this have some really unnatural droning engine noises and you have to listen to them for ages. Lots of driving in this.

Oh by the way, I got to test out a theory here and it turns out that health pickups do heal your vehicle if you drive into them! That's good news for me, considering I can't go and get a replacement tank if this one explodes or runs out of fuel.

Unless I can?

Alright, I've reached the boss, and it's a big immobile dragon thing shooting Star Trek torpedoes at me. They look very nice, but I don't want to get hit by them so I've been driving forwards and backwards to throw off its aim. And that's pretty much all I'm doing here really, driving forwards and backwards while holding down the shoot button. It's not great gameplay, but at least they've given the boss a health bar so I know my shots are having an effect!

Hey I wonder if this tank has a more powerful weapon I can switch to. Oops, too late, the processor already blew up.

And that's Greece stage 1 complete! It was very easy on this difficulty.

I have no idea if the score gets me anything but I recieved a bonus for not letting a single human die! No bonus for not letting anyone get harvested though. In my defence the harvest was happening way way off screen. I was miles away at the time, driving to a hangar to get my tank.

By the way, every now and again the game shows its goofy B-movie side for a moment, and here it's actually got the alien slimes carrying the numbers in for me. It's like it's turned into an arcade game for a moment, and it's weird because it's pretty serious and atmospheric most of the time.

My friend back in the Alpha 1 launched a status beacon missile that landed nearby. Very nearby, the thing almost hit me! Hey, this means I can save my game right?

I CAN FINALLY SAVE, IT'S A MIRACLE!

Half an hour without saving is a bit much for a sandbox action game. Actually it's more of an action-adventure. Anyway the important thing is that I've reached a good place to turn the game off. Oh hang on, I play games for at least an hour on Super Adventures, not 31 minutes. Damn, that means I need to keep going!

The game's a bit like Lemmings in how I need to keep a certain amount of people alive until the end of the level and right now I'm 20% of the way to losing. So it's basically the opposite of GTA. The number hasn't reset after finishing the stage, so my mistakes are going to haunt me for a while. Fortunately I have a plan to avoid paying a price for past failures. I'm going to quit... and then start a new game on hard mode.

HARD MODE

That's how you do the jump! I knew that a bike would have enough speed to get me over the river! They don't have a lot of health though, so I should probably swap it for something else soon.

Replaying the first stage on hard mode went a lot smoother than I expected, because it's still not that hard to be honest. It helps that this time around I know that I can search the barrels inside houses for health and fuel. But even though I'd done it all before and knew where to go it still took me 19 minutes to reach the boss and kick his ass again. So you can shave a bit of time off with practice, but not that much. If you die it's going to take a while to get back to where you were.

Alright here's what the Greece map looks like after completing stage one. It's giving me a weird urge to turn it off and play a Final Fantasy game.

Stage two is that area below in the bottom left, stage three is the entire right hand side of the map, and the middle bit is a boss fight to finish this time period off. The grey arrow's pointing to where I am right now after defeating the boss, so all I can do is head south. Unless I want to keep driving around this nice quiet corner of the map some more.

I saved my game, drove my tank through a hole in the forcefield barrier and entered the second area. Then my friend called me up with a new mission: go search in town for clues. Great.

LATER

Well I've found a lot of bookcases with a lot of text about Greek Mythology, but it's hard to know what's going to be relevant. I mean I'm not going to be picking up the legendary polished shield that Perseus used to slay Medusa.

What's annoying is that buildings can have additional entrances hidden around the back, each leading to a new room to search. Searching these villages for clues and fuel is already getting pretty tedious and I'm only half an hour in.

Screw it, I'm just going to check a walkthrough so I know exactly where it wants me to head next. Right, it says I need to... go visit the only bit of this tiny island I haven't already visited yet. Okay I probably should've tried doing that before looking it up, but in my defence I used all my patience up years ago and now I'm running on fumes.

I walked into very obvious tunnel covered in corpses that laughed at me when I examined them, then collected the legendary polished shield that Perseus used to slay Medusa. It was right near the entrance as well, and I didn't even have to complete a challenge or go to ancient Greece to get it. 

Now I have to go light Talosous' fires so I can cross the river and complete the rest of stage two. Fortunately the walkthrough mentioned what to do.

 

I equipped the shield like a weapon and used it to fire a beam of sunlight at the torch of one of the statues standing either side of the river. It's fortunate I checked the walkthrough as I couldn't even see the torches when I was walking around. I had no idea there was anything here to shoot at.

The bad news is that I've just got an alert telling me that a harvester wave has arrived and the arrow's pointing to the other side of the river. Okay I lit the torch, now what do I do? Is a bridge going to rise up out of the water or something? C'mon, hurry up game, I've lost zero people on this run so far and I don't want to spoil that just because you decided to troll me by putting the harvester somewhere I can't even reach.

SOON

It only took me a second to figure out that lighting the torch unlocked the door, and I darted inside and raced through the underground tunnels as quickly as possible. Unfortunately I was still too slow; the harvester had finished collecting humans before I even got there. It didn't help that I had to leave my tank behind, so when I reached the other side I was stuck jogging to the harvester on foot.

Being a slow moving fragile human has its benefits though. For one thing I can use the sun shield, which utterly destroys anything I put it at. Plus I can do a little dodge roll. I haven't been doing that, I haven't needed to, but it's nice to know that the option's there.

Okay this howitzer truck I've found is amazing. I just fired at an alien and the whole landscape behind him exploded into fire! Didn't hit the alien though, which is a bit of a problem.

Oh crap, I just triggered another harvester wave! These things aren't random, the game's doing this to me deliberately. I can't go rescue people in this thing though, I'd fire at a bug and end up incinerating the whole village! I've already lost so many people in this sector, I can't afford to lose any more! Damn, this is actually stressing me out. I don't do well with time limits or missions that tell me to protect people.

 

The harvester wave is on the other side of water again? Seriously? Does the game not know that I can only swim for like 5 seconds before exploding?

Man, half of me feels like I've already lost and I should load my last save, and the other half of me would rather not replay the last twenty minutes all over again. Sure it'll go faster without me reading all the books, but I'll still have to go exploring in every house for fuel and health. Because I have no bloody clue where I found it last time.

The game informed me here that I'm in the right place to clear a blockage. No idea what that's about, but I fired a few shots with the howitzer in the vague direction of where I thought the blockage might be, then dived into the water to deal with the more urgent harvester problem. Turns out I could make it across this gap by swimming, but by the time I got there and blew up the main harvester bug the bar had already filled up even more.

Hey I've found a boat! This will be useful to get back to the other side of the river. I found the 'blockage' that the game told me about and it turns out to be a blocked road, and it'll need another shot from the howitzer to clear out.

Fortunately I remember where I parked. Well, I know the general area... I was in a hurry to jump out and race off to deal with a harvester wave at the time so I'm a bit hazy on the details. The game marks the vehicles on the radar and the map, so it'll be no trouble to find.

Drake really doesn't know about handbrakes does he?

The good news is that I can apparently reset all the vehicles back at the Alpha 1, so I'm not in an unwinnable situation! The bad news is that the Alpha 1 is ages away. I could fast travel using the status beacon left behind after killing the first boss, but that's ages away too. Plus I'm already at 36% humans dead halfway through stage 2, so this run is feeling pretty doomed.

In the end I decided to load my save game and play the second stage again from the start, armed my time-traveller foreknowledge of where the harvester waves were going to be. But as I was driving back to light the torch with the sun shield I realised I couldn't remember if any buildings had fuel in and just the thought of checking them all again made me realise I couldn't be bothered anymore.

CONCLUSION

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Body Harvest is a good title for an arcady B-movie horror game where alien come down from their comet and send slimes out to swipe humans for food. The weird thing is, the game doesn't really have a B-movie tone to it. Especially if you've got the volume up, as the soundtrack is the most serious, dramatic and atmospheric part of the package. You're playing as an tiny orange man with huge shoulders blasting away at bug monsters for points, but as far as the soundtrack's concerned you're on a lonely desperate battle to save the human race. Not bad considering it's an N64 game and doesn't have the benefit of CD quality music. The graphics were apparently bad for their time, but only because it came out in 1998 instead of 1996. These days it just looks like an N64 game and that has a lot of appeal to me. 

I've heard Body Harvest described as being a proto-Grand Theft Auto III, and I can see where people are coming from (especially as the two games are by the same developer). But I was surprised by how much it reminded me of an older open world game called Hunter:

Hunter (Amiga)

And you thought Body Harvest looked basic.

Both games have you roaming a large 3D landscape, checking out houses for NPCs and loot, and the selling point of both games is being able to jump into any vehicle in the world. In fact finding new vehicles is a big part of Body Harvest's appeal, as each time period comes with a different set and they each have different weapons and abilities to experiment with. Open fire in a fire truck and you get a jet of water, while the howitzer will light up an entire hillside in flame. Plus there are helicopters and planes that I didn't even get to, and the game introduces challenges that require them. It keeps evolving and throwing new stuff at you; the developers didn't front-load all the ideas into the first couple of time periods under the assumption that no one would ever get to the end (even though that's a good assumption). Unfortunately both games also have fuel to worry about. Exploring is less fun when it's using up a finite resource.

Body Harvest is a pretty different experience from Hunter though. For one thing everywhere you go enemies are teleporting in and you get a screenful of explosions as you shoot them all. But also it's got clear objectives that tell you where you need to go and what you need to do... well, a lot of the time. Sometimes it just says 'go look around, figure something out', which put me off to be honest as somehow checking buildings isn't much fun. Most of them are boarded up, so I had to go wandering through the fog to investigate each one in turn, checking every side to see if there's a working door. Then I'd forget which ones I'd done and end up searching the same place twice.

There's one thing that really puts me off getting anywhere in the game though. Wait, hang on, I just remembered how the PAL version makes you play it on hard mode to get past the third time period. Okay there are two things that put me off, and the second one is the saving system. A good save or checkpoint system can take a lot of the frustration out of dated game design or janky gameplay, as it cuts a long stage into separate challenges. But Body Harvest expects you to do a whole third of the map in one go! Running out of fuel on your boat or watching your mission critical truck go rolling down a hill into the water isn't so funny when the punchline is spending 30 minutes repeating all the stuff you just did. The game gets really tense, but it's a 'please don't let there be a power cut before I can save' kind of tense.

And the way you can only lose so many humans during each time period is just cruel. That's hours of gameplay to replay if you find you screwed up too much at the start, and the difficulty only ramps up from here. I found it frustrating enough even though I never made it to the bullshit zone, where stepping out of your car is a death sentence and staying in it only delays the inevitable for a short while. The game reaches a brutal level of difficulty in later time periods and has punishing consequences for failure. Though it seems like all the harvester waves are triggered by the player, so it's possible to learn the level through trial and error. You can git gud at this and finish the whole thing without losing a single human. But it's a challenge best suited for stubborn players with endless reserves of patience.

Funny thing is, failure hasn't been my problem so far. I never got Drake killed, I never hit the harvest limit, I never found myself in an unwinnable situation, even on hard mode. But the game still knocked the motivation to continue right out of me.
 

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Super Adventures will eventually return with a new game, though it might be a while because writing words is hard. On that subject, why not leave a comment below sharing your own thoughts about Body Harvest! You could even take a guess at what the next game will be from that tiny clue I've given you on the left.