Gaming Zone

Developer:

Arkane, Floodgate and Kuju

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Release Date:

2006

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Systems:

Windows, Xbox 360

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Today on Super Adventures, I'm finally taking a look at Dark Messiah of... hang on, where's the 'of'? Everyone knows the game is called 'Dark Messiah of Might and Magic', that's what it's called on Wikipedia, that's what it's called on Steam, that's what is written in the press releases, so why isn't there an 'of' on the title screen? It's not there on the box either, or the manual, or the official website... huh I guess the game really is called Dark Messiah: Might and Magic.

Though 'Might and Magic: Dark Messiah' would've made more sense, seeing as it's part of the Might and Magic franchise. Just saying.

Anyway, this was actually the very first game I ever bought on Steam, way back in July 2012. It's not that I was still holding a grudge after 8 years for all the bullshit I had to go through to install my DVD copy of Half-Life 2... I'd just stopped buying PC games entirely by that point because companies were in an arms race to see who could develop the scariest DRM, and retail discs had become a minefield. Not that I didn't have a Steam library, but at that point it was basically a handful of Half-Lifes, a Humble Bundle or two and Ricochet. And yet it's still taken me until now to play the bloody thing.

Now I'm wondering what was I playing that month that was so much more worthy of my time. Hmm, my site notes say MDK, Superfrog... and Sensible Train-Spotting? I didn't even publish that last one until June the next year, so I don't know what the hurry there was. It's very annoying how my notes don't include explanations for all my bad decisions. Anyway, I'll be playing this for an hour (or more) and yelling out how it plays as I go. In text.

WARNING: EVENTUALLY SPIDERS.

(Click the screenshots to make them bigger).
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I had been following this really awesome looking tile based RTS 3D engine project (think Starcraft2 like) on the jMonkey Engine forums for a while, and it is now fully FOSS including the arts assets.
Don't expect a playable RTS game, but as you can seen in this video of the in-game level editor a lot of work has been done already:



You can contribute to the MIT licensed source on their github page (the author asks for help) and/or head over to the website of engine it uses, jMonkeyEngine, a great project written in Java.

Developer:

Edgar M. Vigdal

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Release Date:

1995

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Systems:

Amiga, Windows, Mac, iOS

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I don't play shareware games for Super Adventures as a rule, but I thought I'd make an exception this once, because I'm a sucker for a pretty starfield.

Deluxe Galaga used to be one of my favourite Amiga games back in the day, so I was always going to get around to writing about it eventually. The main thing that was putting me off is that it looks like... well, Galaga. It's not actually a licenced Galaga sequel, it's just inspired by the game, but it still features a lot of tiny alien sprites against black background and that doesn't necessarily make for the most interesting screenshots, or give me much to write about.

But then I learned that the game's creator, Edgar M. Vigdal, had died of cancer a few weeks ago on April 1st, and suddenly I'm feeling that it's been too long since I last gave the game some attention.
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Developer:

Sunsoft

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Release Date:

1991

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Systems:

NES, Genesis

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Today on Super Adventures I'm taking a look at Batman: Return of the Joker, the sort-of sequel to Sunsoft's Batman: The Video Game, which was released for the NES two years earlier.

Batman: The Video Game was a tie-in with Tim Burton's 1989 'Batman' movie (thoughtfully given a subtitle so that people wouldn't get them confused and end up shoving the cartridge into their VCR), and this also shares the movie's shiny golden 'BATMAN' text so I'm presuming they're part of the same continuity. But ~SPOILERS~ The Joker didn't just get locked away in Arkham or go into hiding at the end of the movie, he got dropped off a giant gothic church tower to his very definite pavement-assisted demise. In fact in the end of the NES game Batman punches him off the church roof, which is kind of hardcore for a man that never kills, but the end result is much the same. So if The Joker really has returned here, then he's come back from the dead.

Incidentally this has nothing to do with the 'Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker' animated movie, as that came out about a decade later and has its own set of games. Though it's still about The Joker coming back from the dead.

The guy is like... weeds or something.
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Developer:

Creative Assembly

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Release Date:

2014

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Systems:

PS3, PS3, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Windows

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Today on Super Adventures, I'm taking a look at scary, stealthy, 'Alien' sequel Alien: Isolation.

Isolation was in development at The Creative Assembly around the same time as Gearbox and friends were working on Aliens: Colonial Marines, but while that project was very public (with expensive consequences for Sega when the finished product failed to live up to the trailers), Isolation remained hidden in the shadows until the year of release. Another big difference between the games is that everyone loved this one! It was a huge success with both critics and players!

I watched both 'Alien' and 'Aliens' in preparation for looking at Colonial Marines the other day, so I'm in a bit of an Alien mood right now. The thing is though, I'm coming from the perspective of someone who's never gotten on with survival horror games, doesn't like pure stealth, hates replaying levels, and doesn't appreciate too much of a challenge, so the game might not be the perfect fit for me. On the other hand it was a Christmas present from someone who reads the site and I kind of know a couple of people employed at Creative Assembly so I can't actually say anything bad about the game. I'm sure you understand.

But It's a first person sci-fi game with amazing visuals and critical acclaim practically across the board, so chances are that I'm going to end up liking it. I'll give it a couple of hours either way, sharing my thoughts as I go.

BEWARE OF SPOILERS FOR THE GAME AND MAYBE THE MOVIES TOO I DUNNO.

(Click screenshots to view them at a very reasonable 1920x1080 resolution with all the graphics on high.)
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Some nice developments on the 2D game-dev front lately, and as you will later see, 2D with full shader, real-time lights and so on can be a quite awsome way to make games, without having to hire a full team of 3D artists ;)

First of all a great new 2D editor, Overlap2D, has been released under the Apache2 license:



Contrary to other popular 2D editors (for example tiled or DAME), it is not tile based, has a modern renderer and also comes with a nice GUI editor. It currently exports to a standard JSON file and has a libGDX runtime.

Godot 1.1 BETA

Really awesome are also the latest developments of the (often described as the open-source Unity) Godot engine which you can now easily try. For me the coolest new features are the new dynamic lights (shown here in the also new isometric game sample):



This of course requires a bit more than simple 2D sprites ;) If you want to create cool 2D normal-maps, this should give you an simple way to create them.
Also very nice is the now working graphical/node-based shader editor:



If this has raised your interest in developing a game with Godot, check out this nice series of tutorials or these. It's script language is a simplified version of python, so most beginning coders should feel right at home. Also check out this cool video of a mobile game made with Godot, if you still need convincing ;)

Developer:

Gearbox, TimeGate, Nerve

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Release Date:

2013

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Systems:

Windows, PS3, Xbox 360

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Last year on Super Adventures I decided that April 1st would be the perfect day to give a critically mauled Duke Nukem Forever a fighting chance to win me over. Because if I ended up liking it I could always pass my opinions off as being a joke and escape with my reputation intact. So today I�m going to pull the same trick with the hated Aliens: Colonial Marines and see if I can find the good in it too.

Like DNF, this is a first person shooter famous for taking ages to make and impressing absolutely no one by the time it finally came out, though it wasn't in the oven for quite as long before it got rushed out and served undercooked. It started late 2006 and finished early 2013, with folks saying that it spent 4 years at Gearbox, then around 18 months outsourced to TimeGate, and then 9 more months at Gearbox. Apparently huge chunks were reworked each time it swapped over, which left Sega agreeing to pay out $1.25 million to settle a class-action suit when people discovered to their dismay that the demos they'd been shown were demonstrating content and visuals that hadn't survived to the final product.

Anyway I'm playing the PC version here, which I've heard is the least crap of them. I usually only play games for an hour or two to get an impression of what kind of game they are, but this time I�m going to keep playing the single player campaign until either I start liking it or I really can�t take any more. I even watched both 'Alien' and 'Aliens' in preparation so I can nitpick about every tiny thing it gets wrong! I could end up spoiling elements of any of the films in the series though (plus a decent amount of this game, obviously), so if that's an issue you should get out now while you're still safe.

(Click screenshots to view them slightly bigger.)
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Developer:

Freestyle

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Release Date:

1994

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Systems:

Amiga

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Blobby blobby Blobby Blobby, Blobby blobby blobby blobby blobby Blobby Blobby blobby blobby Blobby! Holy shit I hate this character and everything related to him.

If you're one of the lucky ones who've gone through your whole life blissfully unaware of this guy's existence, Mr Blobby started out as part of a segment called 'Gotcha' on 90s British light entertainment program 'Noel's House Party', where celebrities would get punk'd in a manner not unlike American hidden camera show 'Punk'd'. Mr Blobby was one of the practical jokes, designed to deliberately wind up a celebrity who thought they were interacting with a legitimate established character for an episode of a kid's TV show. Blobby would drive the unwitting guest to the very edge of homicide with his antics, then take off his head to reveal that it was famous TV host Noel Edmunds in the suit the whole time!

Obviously the series couldn't keep up the joke past the first airing as everyone would know Blobby was a fake... but the character kept turning up anyway! Then he started turning up in other shows too; he had become a celebrity in his own right. Mr Blobby merchandise filled the shops. By 1995 he had TWO top 40 songs in the UK charts, the first so bad that one critic accused him of trying to "kill music". He had no less than THREE failed theme parks! And he also had a video game, which I've been asked to play for you.
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Developer:

Bizarre Creations

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Release Date:

2010

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Systems:

Xbox 360, PS3, PC

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Today on Super Adventures, I'll be playing some Blood Stone 007, or perhaps James Bond 007: Blood Stone if you want to believe the manual.

This came out in 2010, so chronologically it slots right in the middle of the four year gap between the movies 'Quantum of Solace' and 'Skyfall' caused by MGM's bankruptcy issues. In fact Skyfall spent so long in production that this may have actually started out as a movie tie-in, so lucky escape there perhaps. Sure GoldenEye 007 is the exception that proves that movie licences don't have to be terrible, but it's also exceptional in that it stayed in development until two years after the film came out. It wasn't as rushed as they usually are.

It's been years since did my 'Every Old James Bond Game' marathon, but I remember that when I got past Goldeneye and moved onto the EA era, I started seeing the same few developer logos show up over and over: EA Redwood Shores (AKA Visceral), Black Ops Entertainment and Eurocom. But EA passed the licence to Activision in 2006, Black Ops vanished that same year, and Eurocom were busy making three other games (and got shut down two years later), so this has a whole new logo at the start. Blood Stone is the first Bond game created by Wiz 'n' Liz, Project Gotham Racing and Blur developer Bizarre Creations, and also the last as they went and closed down four months later as well! I guess that's why there hasn't been any Bond games since 2012, as every developer the franchise touches ends up dying.

Activision only put out one more Bond game before getting bored with the licence, which incidentally is probably why we haven't been able to find Blood Stone on Steam since 2013. Fortunately I was able to find it on eBay, so I won't have to draw sketches of the game from memory. Oh right, should probably mention that I played this before a few years back, so I'll be slightly less ignorant than usual and will be able to mention stuff from later in the game. Like how it plays the Bond theme about 700 times in a row on the end credits.

(Click images to view them in a slightly higher resolution.)
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Developer:

J-Force

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Release Date:

1995

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Systems:

PC Engine CD

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Today on Super Adventures I'm ticking another title off my inexhaustible request list. It claims to be called Renny Blaster and I don't see any reason to doubt it. Maybe Lenny Blaster would've been a better way of reading the katakana on the box, but the title screen is pretty adamant it starts with an R.

It says 'TurboGrafx-CD' in my post title and labels for the sake of consistency (I strive for the highest standards of presentation for my jokey video game blog), but it'd make more sense to call this one a PC Engine game, as it never made it out of Japan. Just out of curiosity I did a quick calculation with the limited info I could find online in 3 minutes of half-assed searching, and it seems that less than a third of the console's library got a release on its American cousin. European fans of the console got it even worse, or to be more precise they got absolutely nothing. We may never solve the mystery of how the SNES and Mega Drive managed to outsell it four or five times over worldwide.

Oh right, I'm supposed to be writing about Renny Blaster. Uh... it came out in 1995, so that's pretty late for a PC Engine game, even a CD one. Castlevania: Rondo of Blood pre-dates this by a whole two years, and I always assumed that was one of the last of them. The game's also likely to be entirely in Japanese, being a Japanese game and all, but I'm hoping there won't be much text to wade through this time.
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Developer:

Yacht Club

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Release Date:

2014

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Systems:

PC, 3DS, Wii U (soon PS3, PS4, PSVita and Xbox One)

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Today on Super Adventures, I'm playing Shovel Knight's theme tune, over and over again. I'm kind of torn here because the music's saying "Go forth brave knight and hit evil with your shovel!" while on the other hand my head's saying "Hang on mate, just leave the tune playing for another minute first, okay?" Here have a YouTube link so you've got something heroic to listen to while you read: Shovel Knight Main Theme.

The soundtrack was actually created using a NES chiptune editor so that it could be as authentic as possible, give or take a few sound channels. The philosophy behind the whole game was that it should be absolutely dead-on accurate in look, sound and gameplay... to the player's fuzzy memories of their favourite NES games. It's an 8-bit game enhanced with rose-tinting technology.

Before I continue, first I have to apologise for the quality of these screenshots. Usually I try to capture pixel art in its purest unfiltered form, but the game seems determined to scale it up and ruin the clean edges. Then on top of that I needed to scale my screenshots back down again so that they fit my site, which left them so fuzzy that I figured I might as well just save them as JPEGs and save a few kilobytes.
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Developer:

Disney Interactive

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Release Date:

1995

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Systems:

Genesis

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Today on Super Adventures, I'm taking a look at Genesis/Mega Drive platformer Gargoyles, because everyone keeps asking me to. Apparently it's got some fans. Actually thinking about it, this is really just a Genesis game, as it was only released in the US and never made it to the Mega Drive regions.

It's based on the Disney cartoon of the same name that started in 1994, which ran for three seasons but somehow passed me by every time. I only caught the one episode and I don't remember it, so my knowledge of it is kind of limited. I do remember that it stars Keith David and half the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation... but that's entirely irrelevant as it's a 16-bit cartridge platformer so I'm likely to get 4 words of dialogue out of this at best.

Well I'm only assuming it's a platformer to be honest, I haven't actually checked, but it's an early-mid 90s cartoon tie-in so what else is it going to be? Look on my Game Series page, click 'Disney' and see how many of them aren't platformers. And that ain't because I've been deliberately avoiding all the 'Animaniacs' first person shooters.
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Developer:

MachineGames

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Release Date:

2014

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Systems:

PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One

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Today�s game on Super Adventures is recent first person shooter Wolfenstein: The New Order, which is the something like the seventh game in the series, and the fifth single player first person shooter. Who even knew there were so many of the things?

That's not even counting the original pair of Castle Wolfenstein stealth games by Muse software that inspired the id Software franchise. Not that The New Order was made by id, nope they haven�t developed a Wolfenstein game themselves since 1992�s Spear of Destiny. This is actually the debut release by MachineGames, formed in 2009 by seven key members of Escape from Butcher Bay developer Starbreeze. I try to come into games with an open mind, without studying reviews and bringing too many expectations, but I have to be honest with you here: I'm expecting to love the shit out of this one. A sequel to Return to Castle Wolfenstein by the people who made an actual good game out of Chronicles of Riddick? Fuck yeah, sign me up for that.

I'll be playing the PC version due to the system's convenient mouse and keyboard full of potential screenshot keys (and because it's the one I own), but it should work out well because I believe that all formats got pretty much the same game here. As usual I plan to stick with the game long enough to reach the regular gameplay and get a decent impression of how it plays, so be aware that I'll likely end up spoiling huge chunks of the first hour or so. No seriously, I get the impression that this actually has some kind of worthwhile plot to it.

(Click screenshots to view them slightly bigger, but not by much. Let's not go crazy here.)
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Developer:

id

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Release Date:

1992

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Systems:

DOS, SNES, Mac, Jaguar, 3DO, GBA, Apple IIGS, PC-98, Archimedes, etc.

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Today on Super Adventures I have another requested game for you: Wolfenstein 3D, or (Wolfenstein 3-D according to the title screen). And it's got the Nazi Party's theme tune playing right now as its title song, that's just... great.

This of course is the earliest first person shooter ever made, except for all those other ones that came before it. Even if you don't want to count things like 1974's Maze War, 1980's Battlezone, or even 1987's MIDI Maze, you've got id Software's own Hovertank 3D and Catacomb 3D released a year earlier. Granted they don't have assault rifles, but they're so similar in style and gameplay to Wolfenstein 3D that it's hard for me to look at them and say they're not the same genre.

Either way this is definitely the first of the Wolfenstein series; except it kinda isn�t as it was inspired by a 1981 stealthy action-adventure called Castle Wolfenstein and its sequel Beyond Castle Wolfenstein. When id Software realised the trademark had lapsed and was up for the taking, they took it and made their own series out of it. And I don't blame them, as it's a cool title.

Is it the first World War II themed first person shooter at least? I've no idea, but let's say yes. Medal of Honor, Call of Duty... they're all this game's fault. Anyway, I have played Wolfenstein 3D before, but not recently and not for long. In fact I've never even finished a single episode, so that's what I'm planning to do now.
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Developer:

Nintendo

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Release Date:

1992 (JP)

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Systems:

Game Boy

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Today on Super Adventures I'm playing the final game of my Mario Marathon Month, finishing off the first decade (or so) of Mario's big platformer games. So if you were hoping to see Hotel Mario or Mario is Missing show up then I'm afraid your princess is in another castle, so to speak.

Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins is also the final game in the Mario Land series before the villain hijacked it and turned it into the Wario Land series (like how Yoshi stole the Super Mario Bros. series and turned it into Yoshi's Island after the fourth game). Don't feel bad for Mario though, he had things like Super Mario Kart, Super Mario RPG and Super Mario 64 to keep him busy through the mid-nineties (when he wasn't playing Go Fish in Mario's Game Gallery.)

Most of the other Mario games I've played so far I've been very familiar with, but this one's a big question mark (block) for me. I've only seen about 10 seconds of gameplay and I don't even know how others rate it, so I get to go in entirely blind for once! As usual I'll give it an hour or two, share my first impressions, maybe a few second impressions, then find something about it to nitpick afterwards.
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Developer:

Nintendo

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Release Date:

1990 (JP)

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Systems:

SNES

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Today on Super Adventures I'm taking a brief look at Super Mario World (AKA. Super Mario Bros. 4: Super Mario World in Japan). After this the numbering gets a bit crazy though, as you've got Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, which presumably counts as Super Mario Bros. 5, and then it jumps right up to Super Mario 64! No 'Bros.' for that game though, as Mario decided to go solo that time.

Every Nintendo console but the Wii has had a Mario (or Luigi) game as a launch title, and this is the game that was relied upon to kick off the era of the Super Famicom in November 1990. This and Mode 7 racing game F-Zero, but don't expect to see that on the site any time soon as I am astoundingly terrible at it.

Amazingly for a series with such highly regarded soundtracks, in Japan this was the first of the Super Mario games to have music on the title screen (though the Western version of Super Mario Bros. 2 does have a tune.) Even more amazingly... I don't really like it all that much. It's twee and grating and sounds like it belongs more in a nursery rhyme than a Mario game. Here have a youtube link, listen for yourself.
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Developer:

Cyberdreams

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Release Date:

1992

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Systems:

PC, Amiga, PSX, Saturn, CD32

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Today on Super Adventures, I'm taking a quick look at the long awaited, repeatedly requested, HR Giger illustrated, horror adventure Darkseed!

This was released on more systems than you'd think, even making it across to the PlayStation and Saturn in Japan, but I'll be playing the original PC version released back in...

Actually no, I can't do this. There's a reason I put this off for so long, and that's because I really can't stand this game folks. I can't really remember why exactly, but my brain's telling me I want none of this and it's usually right about this kind of thing. Life's too short to play terrible adventure games, and you don't want to sit there sifting through 30 screenshots worth of complaints and whining anyway. So instead I'm skipping ahead to something else, something less dark...
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Developer:

Nintendo

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Release Date:

1989

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Systems:

Game Boy

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Today on Super Adventures, Mario Marathon Month drags on even longer with Super Mario Land, for the Game Boy! There's our heroic plumber up there on the top of the sign in fact, shaking his fist at the sky and yelling at strangers to get off his Marioland.

This was the fourth Super Mario game in Japan and Europe, but the third to come out in America. It doesn't count as part of the main Super Mario Bros. series though because Luigi hasn't bothered to turn up this time. Can't give it the Bros. label without Mario's bro around.

Though if it was a Bros. game it would've been the first Mario Bros. produced by Gunpei Yokoi since Mario Bros., and the first created without the involvement of Shigeru Miyamoto. It's also the first developed for a proper cartridge-based handheld system, and if you're wondering where you've heard the name Gunpei Yokoi before, it's possible that you remember him as being the designer of the Game Boy itself. Super Mario Land was a launch title for the system and was originally intended to be the first pack-in title until Nintendo were persuaded that Tetris would more universal appeal... because it's Tetris.

Can't really disagree with that logic, especially as 25 years later I still haven't even really played Super Mario Land yet, but it says that it's "his best adventure yet" on the box, so I'm pretty hyped.
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Developer:

Nintendo

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Release Date:

1988 (JP)

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Systems:

NES, SNES

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Today on Super Adventures my Mario Marathon Month continues with Super Mario Bros. 3, the final Super Mario for the NES! It's not the last game he showed up in on the console though, as he got his medical degree just before the SNES was released. Sadly his career as Dr. Mario lasted just four months and then it was all Yoshi games and edutainment after that.

I've timed this one better than most, as today is the game's 25th anniversary... in the US. It's not a particularly special date to me seeing as it came out 18 months later in Britain and a year or so earlier in Japan, but I'm being impatient considerate of my American readers. Whoa, I just did the math there: that's three years that we were left waiting for this, while Americans were already playing Super Mario World! I say 'we'... I didn't get a NES until something like 2001, so it's not like I was personally inconvenienced by any of this.

Super Mario Bros. 3 has actually appeared on Super Adventures before, about four years ago now, but I wasn't the person who played it and the guy who did absolutely hated it. Seriously, I found someone who dislikes Super Mario 3, how amazing is that? Uh, not that I'm implying that I like it, I'm not giving that away until the end, but I have definitely played it before and I have... opinions.
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