Gaming Zone

Welcome to the fifth annual Super Adventures Screenshots of the Year article, showcasing some of the most interesting screenshots and animated GIFs I discovered while sifting through the massive pile of them I've accumulated from playing 60-something games this year! I'm very tired now.

Clicking the highlighted game titles will take you to the original article so you can observe the screenshot in its natural environment. It'd be nice if they were some kind of affiliate link that earned me cash, but they're not.

(Every now and again you'll see a shot from a modern PC game, if you click them you should get a higher resolution picture to gaze at.)
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Hello everyone!

It's a cold and windy winter night here in mecha-neko-land, so I'm back with a Christmas present of sorts to warm you all up. It's called Mr. Nutz: Hoppin' Mad!

This is a 90s platformer which I'd thought had fallen through the cracks and never got a release. I saw a few previews of it in Amiga magazines, tons of adverts and then nothing at all. There were Mr. Nutzes for the SNES, Mega Drive and even the Game Boy, so I thought the Amiga had just been left behind. But in fact we did get Mr. Nutz right on time in 1994, well after everybody knew the Amiga was toast, as a small gift for the loyal or desperate few.

It's an Amiga 500 game though, so you might want to pack up whatever few expectations you have left right now.

That said, this is one swish title screen. Uncompromising. Nutz in your face, followed by a fist.

Boy, I could have described that better for sure.
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Developer:

Raven

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Release Date:

2003

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Systems:

Windows, Xbox, Mac

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This week on Super Adventures I'm talking about Star Wars! I saw everyone else doing it and I felt left out. If you're reading this in five years time, then I'm talking about everyone going crazy over the release of 'The Force Awakens' last week. I know it's weird to think back to 2015, when people were enthusiastic about Star Wars movies again and the series hadn't been utterly driven into the ground by a succession of annual sequels, but that's where I'm at right now.

But I'm not talking about a film, I'd need some kind of Super Adventures in Sci-Fi website for that... no I'm talking about Star Wars�: Jedi Knight� - Jedi Academy�! I'd make a joke about it being Star Wars: Dark Forces 4: Jedi Knight 3: Jedi Outcast 2 - Jedi Academy, but for once they've resisted sticking a number in there and making things more confusing than they have to be.

Jedi Academy is the last game in this prestigious sci-fi shooter series, but to be honest it's always felt more like a stand alone expansion pack to me, like Mysteries of the Sith was to Jedi Knight. Honestly I doubt I'll be able to say much about I didn't already say in my Jedi Outcast article a few months back, but it's Christmas so I thought I'd treat myself!

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Over ten years after the last stable release of SuperTux (0.1.3 released July 2005) the SuperTux team have announced the release of the first stable version in the Milestone 2 series.

Compared to 0.1.3, this release features:

• a nearly completely rewritten game engine based on OpenGL, OpenAL, SDL2, ...
  
• support for translations
  
• in-game manager for downloadable add-ons and translations
  
• Bonus Island III, a for now unfinished Forest Island and the development levels in Incubator Island
  
• a final boss in Icy Island
  
• new and improved soundtracks and sound effects
  
• new badguys, bonuses and power-ups (air-, earth- and ice-flower)
  
• a halloween tilemap
  
• new graphic effects (glowing objects, particles, ...)
  
• levels and worldmaps are scriptable using squirrel
  
• much more game objects: trampolines, switches, portable stones, wind, moving platforms, ... - most of them have scripting APIs
  
• improved statistics
  
• many invisible changes, like unit tests, efficiency improvements and more bugfixes
  
• much more...

And of course we updated the official levels to make use of all the new features.

SuperTux 0.4.0 Overworld

It has been a long road for the project, and a lot has changed as the engine seems to have been largely rewritten to make it suitable for more advanced graphics and scripting. Whilst the existing content has been updated, it would seem that the one area in which the project is short is new tilesets and levels, with only a partially complete 2nd forest overworld of the (originally planned) 7 desired worlds.

That's where the community comes in though. With a stable game to work with, hopefully players and artists can combine to extend the game and make it enjoyable for generations to come.

My own 15 year old son remembers SuperTux 0.1.3 fondly as, he says, the best game he played as a young child.

Developer:

Tendershoot & A Jolly Corpse

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Release Date:

2015

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Systems:

Windows, Mac, Linux

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This week the internet is going totally batshit Star Wars crazy due the upcoming release of 'The Force Awakens', so today I'm going to be playing.... another game about a clown. Didn't really think this one through did I? Next time I get ideas about planning ahead I'm going to look up some movie release dates first.

Anyway you've found your way to Super Adventures, where I'll be having a look at Dropsy, a self-proclaimed 'point and click hugventure game'. More like a drop and kick clownventure game...

It was a gift from a friend though (a friend who knows how much I like clowns), so I'll be nice and give it a fair chance. I'll even take some screenshots and write words under them so you can benefit from his cruel generosity!

I already knew beforehand that the game has something to do with folks on the Something Awful forums, but I've just done the bare minimum of research and it turns out that the character's first hugventure actually took place in a forum thread back in 2008. People would throw out suggestions for what Dropsy should do next and then the creator would pixel up the outcome in the form of a fake video game screenshot. Like a choose your own adventure story, in extreme slow motion. Three Kickstarter campaigns later and the clown's starring in his very own actual game, with clicking and animation and everything! So basically this is all the internet's fault.
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Developer:

Kemco

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Release Date:

1995 (EU)

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Systems:

Super Nintendo, Game Boy Advance

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This week on Super Adventures I'm taking a quick look at Kid Klown in Crazy Chase, the second in Kemco's Kid Klown tetralogy. The name reminds me of cult classic 'Killer Klowns from Outer Space', which is interesting because I'd no idea I'd even heard of the film until now. How is this clown movie knowledge leaking into my brain? I'm fairly sure they're unrelated though.

I have to admit that I'm not a huge fan of clowns, but I love that title screen. It's got to be some of the best title art on the Super Nintendo. It's a shame there's a Kid Klown standing right in the middle of it, but squint your eyes a bit and he could be Kid Santa. The music's a bit clowny as well, though I've heard worse. So far so good, but let's see what happens when I select 'Option'.
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Great news for the FOSS enthusiasts: after many years of constant nagging the latest release of the great parcour/arena FPS Warsow has now most of it's artistic content under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 license (with a few remaining but clearly marked ones under CC-by-ND).

Also updated particle effects in Warsow 2.0

You can find more screen-shots in the above link and the full changelog here.

Rendering speed was also increased (claimed to be 30-50% faster) and a movement tutorial is now included.

So far I always recommended Xonotic over Warsow as the coolest (=most competitive; Red Eclipse is also cool, but much more casual) open-source arena FPS, but I think I might reconsider this now...

Happy fragging :p

Developer:

Action Forms

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Release Date:

1997

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Systems:

PC

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Today on Super Adventures, I'm putting a few hours into Chasm: The Rift, a game in which you don't play as a zombie lizard jester with a circular power-saw hand. This isn't even the title screen, the game has no time for crap like that. It just dumps you straight to a typical 90s first person shooter menu screen floating above a typical 90s first person shooter gameplay demo.

Oh, I should mention that this is a typical 90s first person shooter. It's kind of an obscure one too, which is exactly what my site's been missing lately. I haven't had a DOS FPS on Super Adventures since Wolfenstein 3D back in March, and that's just terrible. The game I mean, not my FPS negligence (thought that's pretty bad too).

Anyway I had Chasm on a demo disc back in the olden days and remember thinking it had a surprisingly decent looking homemade 3D engine, but not much else. I pretty much forgot the demo entirely for a decade or two after the game disappeared off the face of the Earth. Or I assumed it'd disappeared anyway; turns out the game had actually been released the year after Quake and Duke Nukem 3D and I just hadn't heard about it. It wasn't exactly the next big thing, but it's the next thing on my site so I'm going to go into it with my best attempt at enthusiasm and see if I can get some fun out of it.
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Developer:

Wunderkind

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Release Date:

1994

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Systems:

Amiga

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This week on Super Adventures I'm playing the first (and last) game ever made by Wunderkind, run 'n' gun platformer Ruff 'n' Tumble! From what I can tell it's an Amiga exclusive released only in Europe during the end of the system's lifetime, so I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's probably fairly obscure to anyone who's never booted up an A500.

I used to play the crap out of this back in the day though. Well, I played the demo mostly, but I was young and that was enough for me... because I couldn't beat the damn thing. If I make it to the end of world 1 today I'll be shocked, and you should be too, but I'll give it my best shot.

Will it start with a forest level? Place your bets now! (PS. the game's also called Ruff 'n' Tumble in the Fantasy Forest).
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Developer:

Origin

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Release Date:

1991

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Systems:

MS-DOS

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This week on Super Adventures I'll be... looking for the quit option on this menu. I'm not giving up just yet, my attention span hasn't gotten that bad, but someday I will eventually want to turn the game off and I'm not seeing a way to do that. Do I just reboot my PC or something? See, this is what I don't get about classic DOS RPGs: how to do things in them. They baffle me. I realise that part/all of my problem is that I don�t read manuals, but have you seen those things? They�re nothing but words and pictures, cover to cover, and who can be bothered with that any more?

Anyway this week on Super Adventures I�m taking a quick look at Martian Dreams aka. Ultima: Worlds of Adventure 2 � Martian Dreams. You'd think this was the sequel to a game called Ultima: Worlds of Adventure, seeing as that's how titles typically work, but it actually follows on from Worlds of Ultima: The Savage Empire. I guess Origin got bored of the Worlds of Ultima brand after one game. On the bright side at least this is more alphabetically convenient.

Martian Dreams is one of the earliest Ultimas to be developed primarily for DOS PCs instead of Apple IIs, and the first to be exclusive to the system. More importantly it'll be the first of the Ultima games I've ever played... for more than 5 minutes. I was looking for an interesting space sci-fi RPG game to follow Mass Effect 3 and I found this in my GOG library, so I figured I'd give it a shot. I'm not deliberately picking out games with 'Adventure' in the title I promise.

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Wymrsun 1.6.0 was recently released (announcement on our forums and on Steam). Wyrmsun is inspired by the original Warcraft games and many reviewers on Steam compare it to Warcraft II. The project continues a steady development pace which is always a good sign so I encourage RTS fans to try it out.

Wyrmsum

Naev 0.6.1 has been released. After a long period without releases until release 0.6.0 appeared in March, this follow up release indicates a return to regular progress for the project. Naev is a 2D space trading and combat game.


I couldn't find a more recent video but here's a bit of a development log of some features for the 0.6.0 release.

Speaking of resurgent projects, Valyria Tear has some news.

The most noticeable change is that I killed a few days ago a very nasty bug that was there from the beginning, making the lua threads never freed from memory. This means the game won't end up anymore swallowing gigs of memory for nothing and crash due to some memory overflow.

Well that does sound like a bit of a killjoy, so good to see it fixed. Other changes are in the blog post.

Onto more things slightly more dubiously open source in nature...

ReTux 0.2 has been released. ReTux is a new Super Tux inspired game. It is a completely rewritten (in Python) codebase although uses many of the assets from the original Super Tux so naturally people will mistake the two despite the significant differences. I already covered the IndieGoGo campaign in a previous article.

ReTux

I'm not really on board with the way the developer Onpon4 is now soliciting $20 for access to the code. I think he's both hurting himself by limiting exposure of the game (you need a password to access the downloads) as well as asking for a fairly significant sum in an age where AAA games are of a similar price a year after release (and regularly on offer, as any Humble Bundle or Steam user will know).

I would say he should just get it on Steam, sell it there, and be open source outside of that. Perhaps have additional levels in the Steam version but accept that charging for the source code is as pointless as it is ineffective.

Developer:

BioWare

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Release Date:

2012

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Systems:

Windows, Xbox 360, PS3, Wii U

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm celebrating N7 day by replaying the first couple of missions in Mass Effect 3 and briefly... oh fuck it, I'm going to go and beat the whole game again. No sense in half-assing it after I finished the first two to get here.

Plus I remember there being a bit of controversy about how the game wraps up the (first) Mass Effect trilogy, so I'm going to go through the ending in excruciating detail and share my own thoughts on how it plays out, and whether people were freaking out about nothing. You're not going to get a 47 page let's play out of me, I haven't entirely lost my mind, but this shall be an epic four part article!





I'm going to be playing the Windows version so some of my issues will be PC specific (like not being able to click on anything without disabling the Origin overlay first). Also I'm using a fix to enable ambient occlusion on my Nvidia card, following this guide I found on the BioWare forums, so my visuals will look slightly sweeter than the default. Or maybe slightly glitchy and screwed up, it could go either way!

(Click the screenshots to expand them to their original resolution.)
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Welcome to part two of my epic four part review thing!

In part one I played through the prologue up to getting my ship back.
In part two I'll be going through a typical mission and talking about how the game progresses. I'll put my conclusion here along with the comment box.
In part three I'll be going one step further into madness and analysing that ending to figure out why people were so bothered by it.
In part four I'll be talking about the new ending, and whether BioWare did the right thing by retconning their art. Yes I realise that no one's going to still be reading by this point, but I'm putting a second comment box there anyway.

There'll likely be massive spoilers for the first two games, and I'll be talking about how some major storylines wrap up near the end. See, this is what happens when I actually finish a game for once, I feel like talking about all of it and end up ruining the whole story for people. You should be safe to skip to the conclusion though.
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THIS IS PART 3, YOU CAN FIND PART 1 HERE.

I've already talked about Mass Effect 3's gameplay, but now that it's three years later and emotions have calmed down I'm going to revisit the controversial conclusions to the Mass Effect Trilogy and finally answer the question "Is there actually anything left to say about this bloody ending that hasn't been said a thousand times before?"

And the answer is "nope".

Sorry, there just isn't. The game was so thoroughly torn apart back in 2012 that there's absolutely nothing new I can bring to the table.

Though I remember that reviewers at the time didn't really take issue with the game's ending, which is kind of bizarre considering how many of the fans did. My theory is that they were thrown off by the fact that you needed to play multiplayer to boost your War Assets for the best ending, and assumed that they must have gotten a crap outcome. Everyone else playing after release was able to check YouTube afterwards to learn that all endings are the crap outcome.

I don't usually like to call what I write for this site 'reviews' even though they can get a bit conclusiony down at the bottom, because most of the time I haven't finished the games I'm talking about and for some games that really matters. When a game's a story driven as this, that last 1% of plot can make all the difference, just ask a 'Lost' or 'Battlestar Galactica' fan.

So for once I actually am going to be finishing something. Twice over in fact; first with the original ending and then a second time with the reworked Extended Cut DLC installed. And I will have opinions to share.

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THIS IS PART 4, YOU CAN FIND PART 1 HERE.

Around four months after release, Mass Effect 3 received an alternate ending DLC, with a price of absolutely nothing. The Extended Cut replaces the original ending, but not by default; it needs to be downloaded and installed separately. Unless you�ve got the Wii U version that is, then you�re stuck with the new content.

I actually think it�s great that the original ending�s still there for people to experience first hand, as we should be preserving content like this. Plus developers shouldn�t be able to edit our copies of a game to change the story without permission anyway!

Is it a good thing that BioWare �caved� to their fans at all though? Does it set the medium back as an art form when customers can demand changes when a story doesn�t match their expectations? And does it actually fix anything?
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Developer:

SCE Japan Studio - project SIREN

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Release Date:

2006

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Systems:

PlayStation 2

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This week on Super Adventures I'm having a look at FORBIDDEN Siren 2, or maybe Forbidden Siren 2 depending on whether you're going to trust the box spine or the manual. In North America it's known as... well, nothing actually as it was never released there. The first game was though, under the name of Siren.

I was going to start the article by dropping the bombshell that in five years of the site I have never once played a horror game for Halloween, not even accidentally. But I just checked and it turns out that I have, twice: DecapAttack and Blood. My memory betrays me again.

But the point I was leading to was that I'm not really all that interested in Halloween and never have been. Horror isn't really my thing and I find that horror games often involve way too much creeping around in the filthy darkness with awkward controls, looking for the door/cupboard/bookcase/piano you haven't examined yet. I'll still give the game a fair chance to win me over (I wouldn't have much to write about otherwise) but I can't help being predisposed to despise it.
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Developer:

IMakeGames

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Release Date:

2015

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Systems:

Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android

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Last week on Super Adventures, I played a game with 'Super' in the title and this time fate has given me one with 'Adventure'. Haven't had one of these on my site since, hmm... Squirt's Adventure around this time last year. Fun fact: through absolutely no effort of my own, 'super' and 'adventure(s)' are actually the two most frequent words to show up in video game titles on my site (with 'final' and 'fantasy' right below them). 'Nubs' on the other hand is definitely down near the bottom.

Nubs' Adventure is the latest indie platformer by the guy who created Rico: A Tale of Two Brothers, which I apparently thought was very playable. I mean I can't actually remember playing it (I've gone through about 150 games in the meantime, my poor brain can only store so many platformers in it), but the article I wrote seems positive enough. This time around I'm playing with a Steam key sent to me from the developer so I'll be wearing my 'serious video game reviewer' hat. Well my 'serious quick look' hat anyway, as I'll only be showing off the first hour or two.

(You can click the screenshots to view them at their original resolution if you feel like, but you'll mostly just get chunkier pixels for your trouble.)
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Developer:

Daft

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Release Date:

1993

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Systems:

Super Nintendo

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This week on Super Adventures, I've got a 'Back to the Future' game loaded up and it's playing the actual theme from the movie! It's funny how few of them do that.

It's Back to the Future Day today! We've finally reached Wednesday October 21th 2015, the day that Doc Brown and Marty McFly visit in the second movie, and that makes this the perfect time for me to take a look at Super Back to the Future, Part II for the SNES. Other good dates would�ve been November 12th 1955 and October 27th 1985, but I�ve already missed them, so I'm basically on my last chance here.

Weirdly there was never a Super Back to the Future or Super Back to the Future, Part III, despite the fact that SBTTF,PII came out long after the movie trilogy concluded in 1990. There were plenty of other 'Back to the Future' games released for other systems, but this is all the Super Nintendo ever got, and it got it 3 years late. Sorry I mean the Super Famicom, as the game was only ever released in Japan (presumably because it's not very good).

Oh right, I should put a warning here that the game's based on the film, so I'll be spoiling part of the movie's storyline along with the game's. Assuming that the game even has a storyline.
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Developer:

Obsidian

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Release Date:

2014

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Systems:

Windows, PS3, Xbox 360

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This week on Super Adventures I'm playing another game based on a cartoon series! It'd be fair to say that South Park: The Stick of Truth is a little better regarded than Family Guy: Back to the Multiverse though, as it's got over twice the score on metacritic.

In fact Stick of Truth gave Obsidian their highest metacritic score since Knights of the Old Republic II back in 2004, beating games like Fallout: New Vegas and Alpha Protocol. Which goes to show how broken metacritic is/how rubbish reviewers are, as Alpha Protocol's totally a better game than KotOR 2! It has an ending and everything.

I still can't believe that Obsidian of all developers were working on a 'South Park' RPG, though in retrospect I suppose I should be more surprised that they finished it, seeing as they have the worst luck with their licensed games. The original publisher for Stick of Truth went bankrupt a year before release, Aliens: Crucible and their 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarves' prequel were both cancelled during development, and in a parallel universe they would've made a 'Wheel of Time' and a 'Star Trek' game as well. We're never going to get a proper single player 'Star Trek' RPG at this rate.

Though we did get a 'South Park' RPG and it's right in front of me, so I guess I should play it already.

(Click the screenshots to examine at their original resolution. It's not a great resolution, but it's bigger.)
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So, as I sometimes peruse various forums, the occasional gem pops up. This is one of the best hidden gems in Open Source gaming.

Anticube 2 is a map for Tesseract / Cube 2 that is inspired by the game Antichamber and NaissanceE. If you are unfamiliar with those, that means it is an abstract FPS puzzle game where things are not quite what they seem. Or, as the creator Lord Kv probably better explains:

Anticube 2 is a puzzle map for Tesseract. You'll find yourself in an interactive, dynamic, non-euclidean world. Supported by 5000+ lines of Cubescript and GLSL code, this map will do things no other Cube 2 / Tesseract map has ever done before.

Here is the trailer:


There is also a gallery of screenshots for you to check out. I won't include them here because, to be honest, the screenshots won't mean much for this kind of game.

I'm calling it a game, even though it is just a map for a game. You can tell it is worth checking out because of the reactions it elicits from the Tesseract developers (warning: NSFW language). Here's what developer ImNotQ009 had to say about it:

Whoa, I would NEVER have though I'd see anything like this on BARE Tesseract.
This is one hell of an astonishing piece of work, the music is great, the whole atmosphere and the aesthetics are really good as well. With the exception of a little bit lousy looking (compared to everything else) terrain on the very last part but nevertheless I genuinely couldn't stop "wow-ing" through out the whole thing.

Anyway, check it out, let us know how you get on. This definitely deserves more attention than it has gotten up until now - but then again how does this kind of thing get more eyes on it when it is just a game within a game and one which is currently suffering from a severe lack of a player base? Hopefully we can change that starting here. :)

Developer:

Heavy Iron

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Release Date:

2012

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Systems:

Xbox 360, PS3, Windows

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This week on Super Adventures I'm playing Family Guy�: Back to the Multiverse! Because suffering builds character.

Actually I'm genuinely curious about the game. I remember that reviewers thought it was terrible, but I don�t remember why. Do the jokes just not land or is the gameplay itself rubbish? I�ve a feeling the answer�s going to be �both� but I�ll keep an open mind.

By the way did you know that 'Family Guy� has been on air for 14 years at this point? It would�ve actually been 15 but the series took 2004 off due to being cancelled. The PC version of the game has taken a year off too, as it suddenly vanished from Steam back in December 2014. It's not alone though, as publisher Activision have pulled a bunch of licensed games over the years, including Deadpool and 007 Legends (it's like they don't even care about my plans to play every Bond game ever). But Deadpool eventually came back, so there�s still hope for Back to the Multiverse!

(Click the screenshots to view them in their original resolution.)
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Great news for people who like GGGGames ;)

The author of the new action roguelike dungeon crawler kind of darwen mayham game Gorynlich was so kind to inform us his game. It comes with this funny trailer (and some great programmer's art :p ):



The code is licensed under the LGPL, while the assets are only freeware right now. But the author seems to be open to look into replacing the assets with Creative Commons licensed ones if someone is interested in doing so.
Gorynlich is done by the same author as the ASCII game Goblin Hack by the way.

Another nice game starting with G, is the awesome remake of the oldie Megalomania, appropriately called Gigalomania!


The author is still looking for improved art asset contributions, but the game itself is already quite playable (even on mobile devices and a bunch of other rare systems!). Also check out the other two cool games by the same developer: Erebus RPG and Conquests (a Civ like game).