Super AiG Screenshots of the Year: 2023

It's that time of year again when I have to update that picture up there to change the number. You've reached my annual Super Adventures Screenshots of the Year 2023 article, where I look back through the hundreds and hundreds of screenshots I've taken over the past year to find the absolute best. Or the least rubbish, depending on your point of view.

I have to be honest, this isn't the best selection I've put together as I just didn't cover many games this year. It was easy to find something worth showing off back in 2011 when I had 500+ games to draw from, but it's been a lot more challenging for me in a year with only 500+ screenshots on the site.

Uh, what I mean is that this is going to be an awesome article full of amazing pictures and they'll even have writing underneath. Plus some of them will be GIFs!

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~ JANUARY ~

At first, I didn't think any of my Body Harvest screenshots were worth showing off. It's a nice looking N64 game and pretty ambitious for the time, but not all that impressive to look at in 2023.

Then I remembered what protagonist Adam Drake is wearing. This outfit's just normal to me now, I've seen it too much, but that is a bloody weird costume when I think about it. That shoulder armour is extreme even for the 90s, especially considering his completely bare arms. Plus his torso is protected by a single orange plate which he sticks on in the intro sequence.

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~ FEBRUARY ~

 

The trouble with Amiga platformer Kid Chaos is that it isn't very good. I'd love to tell everyone to get hold of a copy and go racing around the beautiful scenery, looking at all the layers of parallax scrolling in the background, but I don't think you'd enjoy it much.

It's the kind of Sonic the Hedgehog clone that punishes you for racing off to the exit, as you have to slow down and destroy a certain number of objects along the way. You can't slow down too much however, as you'll run out of time and lose.

Those are some fantastic looking pixels though.

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~ MARCH ~

I wasn't a fan of Octopath Traveler's HD-2D look, with its excessive depth of field blurring and bloom, but somehow Octopath Traveler II makes it work for me. It's an extremely charming RPG that won me over far faster than I expected.

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~ APRIL ~

I was mostly playing the Xbox 360 update of N64 shooter Perfect Dark, but there's just something I like about the look of this room in the original game. Also, every time I see this shot I get the music playing in my head.

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~ MAY ~

Grand Theft Auto III is a little bit dated now, especially with GTA 6 on the way, but every now and again it'll do something to take me by surprise. Like maybe I'll find myself driving down a lonely foggy street with the streetlamps lighting up the mist, or I'll turn a corner and see a beautiful blinding sunrise.

And sometimes I'll find myself in a street full of people trying to kill me.

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~ JUNE ~

I wouldn't accuse indie FPS Dusk of being a pretty game, but every now and again it'll pull off some distinctive imagery. Like this weird spinning blender of a room you have to walk through. Probably best to keep your arms close to your body and not stray too close to the edge of the walkway in here.

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~ JULY ~

Jade Empire has some beautiful looking scenery... for an original Xbox title. It's a 20 year old game, but sometimes the art design shines through.

My Lotus Turbo Challenge Trilogy article was mostly an excuse for me to post GIFs, because the art in those old Amiga racing games is so good.

Look, it's a spinning 3D car!

It was more impressive back in 1990.

Remember when I screwed up this turn four laps in a row because of the lying signs telling me to turn right? Fun times.

Also, the sequel has you jumping over rivers using tree trunks! Fun fact: if you drive a Lotus Elise into a log it'll leap into the air and then bounce a bit when it lands.

Here's a bonus GIF from Formula One Grand Prix, seeing as I recorded it for the Lotus article. It doesn't quite have the frame rate, but this was possibly the best racing simulator you could get back in 1991. The Gran Turismo of its day.

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~ AUGUST ~

The original version of Crysis doesn't look quite as impressive in tiny screenshots. It's still a beautiful game though, even if it's not all tropical scenery...

I decided to cheat a bit here and boost the contrast to make the architecture of this weird sci-fi cave more visible.

Crysis 2 looks fairly stunning as well, but again that doesn't come across so well in a tiny still image.

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~ SEPTEMBER ~

Universe, on the other hand, is a game that looks great in a tiny low resolution. It uses arcane programming magic to fit more colours on screen than the Amiga is actually capable of displaying, allowing it to properly show off its painted background art.

Basically no other games have character art quite like this. Well, none that I'm aware of anyway.

The game doesn't feature scrolling backgrounds; I suppose that's due to the trick it uses to display all the extra colours. But just out of curiosity, I decided to see if I could stitch some of the screens together and the result was fairly seamless.

This background turned out even better. That thing looks like it should be on the box cover. You could sell sci-fi novels with that artwork.

Sorry, I'll stop showing Universe shots now. The game's really been the highlight of the year for me though. When it comes to GIFs I mean; the actual gameplay is horrible.

Marvel's Avengers also has its moments. More than I expected, to be honest. Especially because I was playing it with the graphics on low.

This is what the game looks like on a 2GB GeForce 750Ti from 2014. It's a better game than Universe too! It's a shame you just can't buy it anymore, not digitally anyway.

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~ DECEMBER ~

Here are some shots from the Game Over - Continued article I just posted, to keep this going a little longer.

I didn't actually mean to post two shots of a forest in a row, but it works. You can see 30 years of graphics evolution at a glance.

Here's a classic Continue? screen from the arcade Ninja Gaiden.

I was actually a little disappointed when I finally got to see this in context. Because if you press the button to continue you don't get an animation of Ryu breaking out of his chains.

I was hoping for something more like the continue screen from Super House of Dead Ninjas.

Here's one last image for you, so you don't have a distracting GIF at the top of your screen. This cryptic screenshot is from Bust-a-Move 4's edit mode and if you stare at it for too long it'll haunt you forever.

SUPER ADVENTURES 2023 REVIEW

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I didn't write about many games last year, just 15 of them in 12 months, and I decided that I wanted to do better this year. A lot better.

So for 2023 I put the effort in and gave Super Adventures more of my attention. I just kept going and going, playing one game after another on all kinds of different systems. In fact, I even started the next game before I'd finished writing about the one I was on. The end result: I wrote about 13 games in 12 months.

This isn't the first year this has happened, though this time around I didn't let myself get stressed out and frustrated about it. I followed my heart and my heart was more interested in playing a little bit of everything instead of enough of one thing. That's just how it worked out. Hopefully next year I can be a bit more focused and productive... or I could always change the format of my site so that I only write about the first 10 minutes of a game instead of the first hour. Super Adventures in Unskippable Intros. Or Super Adventures in Inescapable Tutorials.

I only played 13 games this year so coming up with stats is starting to seem a bit pointless. But it was always pointless, so that's fine!

I gave 85% of games a star this year, which is another way of saying that only Body Harvest and Universe didn't get one.		38% of the games I played this year got a prize, which is almost double last year's 20%. (The winners were Octopath Traveler II, Perfect Dark, Dusk, Crysis and Crysis 2. No prize for GTA 3.

SYSTEMS:

Windows: 38%   Amiga: 31% N64: 8% PS2: 8% Xbox: 8% Xbox 360: 8%

PC wins every year, so there are no surprises here, though it usually wins by a lot more than that. This time the other systems have been gaining ground, and if you count mecha-neko's Kid Chaos review the Amiga actually matches it. On the other hand, this is the third year in a row without a single NES or SNES game and the second without a Sega game. That wasn't a conscious choice, it just worked out like that. Xbox is doing well though.

GENRES:

FPS: 31%   Action-adventure: 23% Racing: 23% RPG: 15% Adventure: 8%

This might be the first year where the first-person shooters have taken the crown. I mean I only played four of them, Perfect Dark, Dusk, Crysis and Crysis 2, but they all won a trophy. On the other hand, I didn't write about a single platformer, brawler or shoot 'em up this year.

ERAS:

1990s: 38% 2000s: 38% 2010s: 15% 2020s: 15%

I still think that the 90s is the best place to go for good screenshots, but time keeps marching on and I'm being pulled forward with it. Though maybe next year I'll have more games from retro systems like the Xbox 360 and Wii U.

Thanks for turning up, reading my words, guessing what the next game will be and sharing your comments, I hope you'll return for 2024. I hope I return for 2024 as well, otherwise you'll have nothing to read.

Happy New Year, by the way!