Super AiG Screenshots of the Decade: 2011-2020

This week's Super Adventures is going to be the last this year I'm afraid. In fact there'll be no more games until the end of January.

But seeing as this is the end of Super Adventures's 10th year, I figured I should expand the scope of my annual screenshot showcase to cover the entire first decade of the site! Every picture and GIF that's ever been posted here is eligible for entry, even this sketch of a cute bunny I drew for my Toonstruck post six years ago:

But it's bad enough that I inflicted my art on people the first time, so I'm mostly going to stick to the game screenshots.

I'm fortunate that I already did all those Screenshot of the Year articles and chose my favourite screens from each year, as it dramatically reduces the amount of images I have to look through here. But screw that! This is a special occasion, so I'm going to look through all 40,000 or so images in my archive and pick the ones that stand out to me in the blur of intense scrolling. With any luck I might find something to write about them as well.

I should mention that clicking on a highlighted game title will open up the original article, so you can visit the screenshot's home and find it hanging out with its friends. And if you come across a game released in the last 20 years then clicking the image itself will probably give you a bigger version to glare at. Not that big though I'm afraid.

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~ 2011 ~

Danger Freak's loading screen was the very first screenshot on Super Adventures, though I moved onto another game right after posting it. I just wanted to show off a picture; it hadn't occurred to me that anyone would be curious about what the gameplay was like. Fortunately it only took a month for people to talk some sense into me.

(Turns out that the game wasn't very good though.)

It took me even longer to get around to posting a full article to go with this screenshot of Blazing Thunder. It's the only game to let you play as Rambo and have a title screen drawn by the guy. Apparently.

I never did take any shots of gameplay for Fish! though. In my defence I thought this was the only art in the game, seeing as it's a text adventure, but that's not actually the case. It's mostly text though. Lots and lots of text.

You play as the fish by the way. They're an interdimensional spy trying to stop a group of anarchists from wiping out all life, so that's interesting.

Here's another artefact from those first few months where I thought it was a good idea to show a single screenshot from a game and then write basically nothing about how the game plays. Which is exactly what I'm doing here, now that I think about it...

Anyway this image is from DOS football management game On the Ball: World Cup Edition, and that's all I know about it (even though I clearly must have played enough of the game to take a screenshot of it). But it's obvious just by looking at it that this guy has been shrunk to the size of an action figure and he's just been caught nicking a tiny glassful of drink from someone else's massive regular-sized glass.

Finally, I've reached a game I actually played properly! It's a SNES scrolling brawler called Gourmet Sentai: Bara Yarou... or something like that. The title's in Japanese, along with the rest of the game, so it's hard to know.

I have absolutely no idea what's going on in Windwalker either, as this shot's from one of mecha-neko's guest posts. One of his earliest in fact.

He could've played Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, but he chose to go with this instead, and that's why he gets the big view counts on his articles.

Oh shit it's a raptor, from 3DO game Jurassic Park Interactive.

I played the game as part of an epic 'Adventures in Jurassic Park' marathon where I covered 16 of the first Jurassic Park games over 10 days. It must have worked out okay because I did the same thing with Batman (1989) games and Castlevania games later that year.

Here's another mecha-neko screenshot that I present to you without context. All I know about Space Dude is that the article was published during my epic Jurassic Park game marathon to give people a break from all the dinosaurs and sanity.

I also did a 'Good Retro Game Week' event where I took a break from playing games I'd rarely even heard of to play some games I remembered really enjoying when I was younger, like BC Kid here. It's also known as FC Genjin or Bonk's Adventure, as it seemed to get a different name everywhere it went.

If you're curious, the other good retro games were: Jumping Jack, Hunter, RoboCod, Sonic the Hedgehog, Pinball Fantasies, TIE Fighter, Donkey Kong Country 2, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, GoldenEye 007 and Final Fantasy VIII (plus mecha-neko played System Shock 2 and Wiz 'n' Liz). Man, those were some good games. Why didn't I just keep playing good games!

I really wish I enjoyed playing Amiga RPG Perihelion: The Prophecy, because the artwork in it is amazing.

Classic systems can only put so many colours on screen at once, in fact there's only 32 colours in this image, but they cheated here by making basically half of them brown and half grey. This meant that they had more shades available to them than you'd typically get, allowing for more detailed artwork. Plus it had a side effect of helping to make the art look really stylish and distinctive.

I love this dude from arcade fighting game Blood Warrior, he looks so... dangerous. Well okay he looks like a guy in a rubber turtle costume, but the fact that they went to all the trouble of making the thing and recorded him fighting in it is awesome.

My Karateka article probably holds the record for the fastest game over on the site, though I still have hopes of one day surpassing myself.

Here's Commander Benjamin Sisko crouching in his office and punching from side to side in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - Crossroads of Time on the Mega Drive. Why? Because jumping from side to side would've made it a bigger GIF I guess.

Alright that's all I've got for year #1. Here's a fun fact for you though: I posted more articles in 2011 than in the last eight years combined! This is because in 2011 I didn't know what I was doing.

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~ 2012 ~

I've never been that keen on space shooters like DoDonPachi, but man I love those spaceships. They may have overwhelming firepower but it's the pixel art I'm in awe of.

I'd complete forgotten about Burger Man to be honest. This title screen had been erased from my mind entirely. And now I have to work on erasing it all over again, from scratch.

Speaking of burgers, here have a shot from McDonaldland on the Atari ST (aka M.C. Kids). You wouldn't know it by looking at them, but these two are supposed to be around 10 years old. It's like one of those comedy sketches with adult comedians playing teenagers, except one of them couldn't be bothered taking the rings off his hand.

By 2012 I'd switched from publishing two game articles a day to just one, so I didn't want to spend so much time writing about entire game series anymore, but I did cover six licensed McDonalds games over March (and then mecha-neko finished it off with a Burger King game).

As long as The Chaos Engine exists I guess I have no choice but to be a fan of steampunk. I mean look at that beautiful menu screen! There's not an extraneous gear on the thing.

Earthworm Jim is a real pain in the ass, just like its sequel, but I have to admit that it looks incredible compared to the average Mega Drive or SNES game. It's way more imaginative than most as well.

It makes me wonder how different the 16-bit era could've turned out if Earthworm Jim had been released in 1988 instead of 1994 and this was the bar everyone was trying to surpass.

Hey, I remember The Adventure of Little Ralph! Well, I remember this screenshot at least. I do know that the game's one of the PlayStation's few 2D platformers, and I think I liked it.

What this article needs is more pictures of computer screens I reckon, like this one from Hideo Kojima's detective adventure Snatcher (Sega CD edition). I want to see grid lines, gauges, things spinning and lots of important numbers, dammit.

I didn't spend as much time on my game marathons in 2012, but I did spend a couple of weeks playing the first couple of decades of James Bond games. It was totally worth it just to get screenshots like this one from The Spy Who Loved Me on the C64. That pose is amazing.

I spent ages making these Photoshopped title images for each article, mashing up all the movies I'd covered into one cover, and only one person ever mentioned any of them in their comments! They said it looked bad and... well, they were right. But I'm still very happy with how the scratches turned out on this one. I think they look very authentic.

Amiga games can often look a bit basic compared to Mega Drive and SNES games, but they occasionally manage to impress. Though I have to be careful with this GIF from shoot 'em up Agony, because I end up getting mesmerised by it.

This was basically my experience of Beyond Shadowgate. My cunning schemes often led to hilariously tragic consequences. Sometimes because I didn't quite have the puzzle worked out, sometimes just because I got the timing wrong on my punch and received a bucket to the gut.

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~ 2013 ~

The intro from Barbarian II on the Amiga is still probably my favourite GIF I've ever made. The dude uses magic lighting to summon a cloud which he breathes in to burn the skin off his face. Then he just poses with his skull on fire. This is a thing that just happened right in front of our eyes and I have no idea why.

Here's possibly the first and only 'insert disk' jump scare in video game history, from an entirely different Amiga game also called Barbarian II. Though I suppose it would've been scarier if he stuck his hand out of the TV to insert the disk for you.

This GIF's from the intro of the Sega CD port of comedy platformer Popful Mail.

Working Designs did a pretty good job of recording new English dialogue when they localised it I reckon. Unfortunately they also had to go and screw with the difficulty, so that it takes more hits to kill everything. Thankfully someone came up with a patch to put it back the way it used to be, because the internet can be awesome like that sometimes.

Here, have a loop of Sabin suplexing the phantom train from Final Fantasy VI, seeing as I'm going nuts with the animated GIFs right now.

I made it all the way from Final Fantasy to Final Fantasy XII in 2013, skipping VII and VIII because I'd already played them. Then guest poster Jihaus added Final Fantasy XIV a couple of weeks later to make my collection of articles even more complete. I never did try Final Fantasy XIII though.

Hang on, this isn't one of my screenshots! This is from that time a screen from VGJunk's A. B. Cop article crept into my Screenshots of the Year: 2013 post. I figured it could use a bit of extra exposure (the site and the screenshot).

Sadly VGJunk stopped being updated last year, but the site's still there with hundreds and hundreds of articles to read if you're looking for more words under screenshots.

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~ 2014 ~

In 1998, Mr. Pibb: The 3D Interactive Game finally answered the question: what if there was soft drink tie-in first person shooter set in a school?

The answer is, it wouldn't be as much fun as Pepsiman. Back in 2013 I called it "a tedious one-level scavenger hunt for keys and air vents" and I believe me.

Hey Sonic made the list, though not in one of his own games. This is Mega Drive Zelda 'em up Soleil (aka. Crusader of Centy) and Sonic's just making a surprise cameo.

I tried talking to him and he replied: "Ts... ts... ts...! I'm a gallant hedgehog. You'll get burned if you touch me." That's possibly the most Sonic's ever said on a Mega Drive!

I had a year-long gimmick for 2014: playing games in alphabetical order, and BCV: Battle Construction Vehicles was one of the Bs, along with Blade Runner, Bulletstorm, Blood II: The Chosen and, uh, the 'b'eta of Elder Scrolls Online.

I had a few screenshots from the game on my shortlist and it was a real struggle to decide which one to go with. Mostly because they were all of protagonist Hayato Kongo yelling something, or just grinning with his mouth wide open. He's always pulling this face, he's very emotional.

Here's some gameplay footage of me getting confused about why I couldn't hit this boss in arcade platformer Osman. I got him in the end though! Well, something got him.

If you want more GIFs like this you should click that link and check out the article, as the game does not disappoint. Or you could play it I suppose!

Everyone was making a cute mascot platformer in the early 90s, but not many heroes looked as distinctive as Quik the Thunder Rabbit, from Amiga game Quik the Thunder Rabbit. Though they kind of ruined his specialness by making his special ability being able to run really fast like Sonic.

He's the blue one by the way, like Sonic.

I've sometimes described Super Adventures as being about me going sightseeing in games and taking photos. Truth is though most of my shots are about showing off how a game plays rather than taking snapshots of the scenery.

But sometimes the scenery does tell the story, like in this shot of The Saboteur. The game takes place in Nazi occupied France: a land of perpetual night with a Sin City-style black/white/red filter over it. As you complete missions and inspire the locals the sun comes out, in one neighbourhood at a time, so you end up with views like this.

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~ 2015 ~

I kicked off my fifth year with a 'Mario Marathon Month' where I played the first decade of the Marios and gave people Mario facts like this:

The Commodore 64 once got a cheeky Super Mario Bros. clone called Great Giana Sisters, which was quickly shut down by Nintendo. But it also got this official Mario game the same year! It's just a port of the old arcade game Mario Bros. and not a particularly great one, though it does have this beautiful original title screen.

You know what sucks? Getting put in a HR Giger painting and having an evil embryo fired into your skull. It's a pretty memorable opening for a game though, and that's good because Dark Seed really isn't the greatest adventure game to come out of the 90s and I'd rather remember the good bit.

I've got to be honest, Sam & Max: Hit the Road is another adventure game that doesn't quite live up to its intro for me, but man that intro is good. It's so damn good.

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~ 2016 ~

Here's a nice looking shot from the beginning of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, which stands out from the regular Final Fantasy games on account of it being a movie.

2016 was the year I launched Super Adventures' sister site Ray Hardgrit's Sci-Fi Adventures and I decided to use Spirits Within to kick it off, with both sites getting the same review as cross promotion. It probably would've worked out better if I had carried on writing about video game movies on my sci-fi site instead of getting stuck writing about 100+ episodes of cult sci-fi series Babylon 5, but hey I reviewed the first Doom film at least!

You know, I think the CGI on SiN's loading screen is actually pretty great considering that the game came out in 1998. It still cracks me up though.

2016 was Star Trek's 50th anniversary, so to celebrate I spent a whole week playing games that had a connection to the franchise. Like Ice Trek had 'Trek' in the title, and Stardew Valley had 'Star' in its name.

I finished with Star Trek: A Final Unity, which surprised me with how bad it was. But it did give me this amazing GIF of Geordi LaForge taking 3 seconds to realise he should fall down, and then trying to make up for it by doing a flip.

Congrats to Grand Theft Auto IV for being one of the very few full 3D games to make it onto this list.

GTA IV is notorious for the way the protagonist's cousin phones you up all the time when you're busy doing stuff. The guy also seems determined to screw up his own life with bad decisions so I decided to help him out with that by launching some of his taxis into the river.

 

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~ 2017 ~

I love the artwork in time-travelling Amiga action-adventure Legends, it's so horrifying.

Oh right, this happened. My creepy ransom note-looking update message.

I've always tried to have a buffer of articles already written up and ready to post so if I was busy one week and couldn't write anything the site would still keep going like clockwork. But by 2016 my tank was running dry and I was skipping the occasional week, and in March 2017 the site had been silent for an entire month.

I take two month breaks all the time now, it's no big deal, but back then I figured I needed to put a message up to reassure people that I'd have new posts up soon. And I did, I got my Broken Age article finished two days later. Trouble is that the letters in the picture hint at the games that were supposed to be coming up, and you should never tell people your plans if there's any chance they'll fall apart!

Here's what all the games were and whether I got the article finished in the end:

Ben There, Dan That!	No	Broken Age	Yes
Broken Sword II: The Smoking Mirror	Yes	Castlevania: Symphony of the Night	Yes
Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller	No	Day of the Tentacle	Yes
Demolition Man	Yes	Doom 2016	Yes
Edna & Harvey: Harvey's New Eyes	No	Flight of the Amazon Queen	No
Hector: Badge of Carnage	No	Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge	Yes
Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent	No	Nikopol	No
Phantom Brave	Yes	Primordia	No
Serious Sam	Yes	Technobabylon	No
Teenagent	Yes	The Blackwell Legacy	No

So just 50% of them. The moral of the story: finish writing about the game you just played before starting the next one.

Here's some more Amiga art for you, from platformer Rolling Ronny. I've noticed that Amiga artists really loved their detailed shading, even on cartoon characters. I mean if you look close you can see that his leg's casting a subtle shadow across his ass. That's some unnecessary attention to detail right there.

Even when the artists tried to tone the shading down, their characters still looked shiny. Like the wizard and his poor victim Bob in Bob's Bad Day for example. It's doubly weird in this case because the sun's clearly behind them. Everything else about this intro is perfectly normal though.

Bob's Bad Day was part of a mini Amiga marathon I was doing to celebrate the A500's birthday, so the next game's going to be an Amiga game as well.

There's some familiar names on my Sensible Soccer team here, at least if you've been checking out my comments section. (No Gary Lineker hasn't been leaving me comments, I left him on the team as a joke).

Not everyone on the team's been reading my site though, as the first five are actually names I used to use in distant Super Adventures history.

There's a Mega Drive game called Syd of Valis (a mistranslation of Valis SD, as in 'super deformed'). The hero, Syd, has blue hair and an ice cream that transforms into a sword and for some reason the character stuck with me. When I played dungeon crawlers that let you import your own faces I always used to bring her onto the team. Her and the velociraptor from Jurassic Park Interactive.

Rad Air is from Mega Drive racing game Quad Challenge (he's the daredevil quad bike racer who fires up the crowd). Stoned Link turned up in ZX Link's playthrough of Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.

Vincent Gilgamesh is from SNES platformer Time Slip, while Sven Svardensvart is the hero of Amiga shoot 'em up Banshee. They like to fight off alien invasions single-handedly and pose with their arms crossed. And they both have awesome names.

Sadly Super Adventures only lasted for two more games after this. It was taking me longer and longer to write each post as I didn't have the enthusiasm for it anymore, until I finally stopped altogether. And that was the end of the site... for a while.

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~ 2018 ~

I ended up taking the whole of 2018 off, but guest poster mecha-neko came to the rescue and wrote about post-apocalyptic anthropomorphic animal adventure Inherit the Earth in August. This means that technically the site hasn't missed a year since 2011!

The game did get an Amiga port, but I think this is the original DOS version, with its DOS game shading.

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~ 2019 ~

But now I'm back to the Amiga again, sorry.

There were so many images from my Amiga Fighting Games article I wanted to use here, I suppose that's why I made an Amiga Fighting Games article in the first place, but in the end I had to go with a shot from Fightin' Spirit. The only thing that would make this picture better is if you could actually see the fighters against the background.

Here's the only Saturn game on the list: cute platformer Keio Flying Squadron 2. I knew I was going to include a shot from the game here, that was never in doubt, but choosing which to go with was a real struggle.

In the end I went with the shocking reveal of this boss's final form (though not his identity). But if you want to see all the GIFs I made of this beautiful game you can just click that link up there and they'll be there waiting for you.

I don't know what to say about this screenshot from PC adventure game Normality that I haven't said before. In fact I don't know what to say about this screenshot at all. Normality's a weird game.

I've been fascinated by this video at the start of The Bard's Tale IV from the moment I saw it. My first reaction was that it looked kind of hilariously bad, the way they'd composited real people into a painted scene.

Then I discovered that they're actually sitting there in painted clothes in a forced perspective set! It was supposed to accurately replicate the box art from first game and they actually more or less pulled it off. It's damn weird though.

Bard's Tale IV didn't get a full post, but I did write a few sentences about it in my Xbox Game Pass article.

I didn't actually give Disgaea 5 its own article either, but I included it in my Super Adventures Games of the Decade: 2010-2019 post, so I've got this screenshot of a special attack to show off.

The series is going full 3D in Disgaea 6 so this is the prettiest the 2D will ever look, sadly.

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~ 2020 ~

I had to include this shot from Metal Gear Solid 2 as Otacon thinks it's the funniest thing he's ever seen.

I can't believe I've gotten this far without including any ZX Spectrum screens. But I've finally made up for it by grabbing one from my Super Adventures in the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality article.

This is actually from a 2019 indie game called The Curse of Trasmoz, but it still runs on a Spectrum, it still counts!

This shot's from one of the RPG battles in PlayStation platformer Valkyrie Profile. I thought 2D platformers were supposed to be rare on the PlayStation, but they're all over this article!

I'm probably giving them a disproportionate amount of attention because late 90s pixel art could look amazing. Especially that harpy.

Here's a scene from one of the many introspective interludes in multi-genre arcade action indie game 198X, which I wrote about in my Humble Monthly Bundle article.

It's a loving tribute to coin-op games from the 80s, but they accidentally made the graphics too pretty to be an authentic pastiche I reckon.

80s pixel art wasn't always so great I'm afraid. But Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure on the C64 did manage one thing that all these shiny Amiga games, pretty PlayStation platformers and slick 16-bit console games couldn't: it got to be the last screenshot on the page.

I left so many good pictures out, it's depressing! But if you want even more quality screenshots and massive GIFs, click the 'Articles' button on the right of that bar on the top of the website and then click on a 'Screenshots of the Year' article. Or you could go check out some game posts and see if you get lucky.


SUPER ADVENTURES: THE FIRST DECADE REVIEW

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Ten years is a long time on the internet. When I first started Super Adventures in 2011 I was already an idiot for writing about games instead of having a YouTube show. A few years later I was an idiot for writing instead of streaming on Twitch, and now I'm an idiot for writing instead of streaming on Twitch disguised as an anime girl.

But all I really wanted to do was show off some screenshots without people on IRC yelling at me! It was never my plan to play the games properly, do research or come up with some kind of review at the end. I figured I was the last person who should be sharing an opinion on games and I could never think of anything to say about them anyway. I got lucky though, as people actually turned up and gave me the feedback I needed to transform this into something anyone would want to read. It was you guys that turned Super Adventures into what it is.

Hang on, didn't I write all this already for my Screenshot of the Year: 2017 article, back when I quit forever? Man, I can't believe that was 79 posts ago now.

This is post number 1281 and according to my calculations the site's covered 1286 games to some degree, not counting all the posts early on when I just showed a single picture. I really wanted those two numbers to miraculously work out to be the same, despite all the games I replayed and those multi-game articles, and they came really close. I should've asked mecha-neko to turn his Speris Legacy review into a 9 part article. It hasn't just been mecha-neko and me all this time though, so here's a quick shout out to all the other guest posters that have contributed to Super Adventures over the last 10 years:

Faust, GreatOldOne, Jake Milner, Jihaus, K-Hos, Kraed, Nessiah, Nintondo Man, Ocean and ZXLink.

Alright, here, you can have some stats for the first decade of the site:

Overall 29% of games got a 'Not Crap' star, which means I'd play just under a third of them again. Doesn't mean 71% of the games I've played are bad, they just didn't interest me.		Only 5% of the games I've played have won the prize and some I'm having real second thoughts about. Rage, really? Quake 4? Wasteland 2? The first game to win was Portal 2, by the way.

SYSTEMS:

PC: 36% SNES: 15% Amiga: 11% Mega Drive 10% NES: 5%

I'm honestly a bit surprised to see NES made it to the top five systems, with the PlayStation lagging just behind it with 4%. Nothing surprising about the top four though; I do play a lot of 16 bit console games. The poor TurboGrafx-16 only got 2%, I've really let it down! Though to be fair I have covered games on almost 50 systems so far. The BBC Micro, FM Towns Marty, Intellivision, MSX2, PC98, PC-FX, SG-1000, Xbox 360 and Atari 8-bit systems are the biggest losers, with only one game each.

GENRES:

Platformer: 30% FPS: 12% RPG: 11% Action: 6% Adventure 5% Shoot 'em Ups 4% Action-Adventure 3% Run and Gun 3% Fighting Games 3% Driving/Racing 3%

Wow, what I'm getting from this data is that I need to play more first person shooters and role playing games, because they are falling way behind platformers. I definitely need to play more third person shooters, or third person action games in general, because they're somehow not even top 10. Apologies to fans of visual novels and hidden object games as they're way down near the bottom, and I don't think I've even played anything that could count as a 'walking simulator'. Of course genres are awkward and subjective, and you could likely shuffle these around a bit. I mean, what's 'action' anyway?

ERAS:

1990s: 63% 2000s: 15% 2010s: 13% 1980s: 9%	Here, I'll give you a graph for this one. Everyone likes a graph. Man I play a lot of games from the 90s, though far fewer games released in 1992 than you'd expect for whatever reason. It's a mystery!

Okay, one last thing, and this time it only covers 2020, not the whole decade.

For the last six and a half years I've been putting tiny images taken from the next game under each article and asking you to try to identify it in the comments. But this year I decided to do something a little different: I've been secretly keeping score. So here are the 'Next Game' rankings for 2020!

1. KelvinGreen - 11
2. El despertando - 3
3. DeuilAsh - 2
3. Werdito - 2
5. Anonymous - 1
5. Ashens - 1
5. Josh Gallichan - 1
5. Unknown - 1
9. Alex Romanov - ½ (they said Breath of Fire instead of Breath of Fire 2)

Congrats to KelvinGreen, who clearly deserves to walk away with this for his superior game identification skills:
Really I'm amazed that anyone ever manages to guess any of them. The images are only 80x62 pixels big!

Okay, I should remind you that Super Adventures is taking the next two months off, but come back at the end of January and I'll have some more words under screenshots for you. With any luck. Plus you can always drop by the Official Super Adventures Discord Server while you wait.