Super AiG Screenshots of the Year: 2025

This year on Super Adventures, I almost forgot to do the Screenshots of the Year article! I've been so focused on getting through these Dungeons & Dragons games at a reasonable pace that I wasn't even thinking about other things I should be writing about.

I struggled a bit last year with my 2024 article as I'd only played 11 games and half of them were racing games, but this year I was determined to do better. Unfortunately I got distracted with writing about Doctor Who for my sci-fi site and ended up only covering... about 11 games. But they weren't racing games this time! Not that there's anything wrong with the genre, I just don't think anyone wants to see 30 pictures of the back end of a car.

Plus I did take a quick look at some '80s RPGs in preparation for the D&D games, so that boosts the number a fair bit. I'm sure I must have something here worth showing off.

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~ JANUARY ~

For a screenshot to qualify for my 'Screenshots of the Year 2025' article, it needs to have shown up in something I published during 2025. That means I get to include a shot from Katamari Damacy, as it was featured in my Super Adventures: Game Awards 20X4.

I also get to include this ancient GIF from Ruff 'n' Tumble:

I'm not usually a fan of boss fights, but this tin owl is just too pretty to hate. If you think about it, an owl is actually a pretty good creature to base an attack drone with laser eyes on, as they can turn their head 270 degrees. I mean, if it absolutely has to look like a bird.

Ruff 'n' Tumble actually got a surprise sequel a few years after I wrote about it. Well, a surprise spiritual successor at least; there are some big differences. You see, this stars a blond kid in a red shirt with a gun called Ruff Rogers, and the other game stars a blond kid in a red shirt with a gun called Rad Rodgers. Completely different people.

There was also this from adventure game Universe:

This is another GIF that I must have shown four times by now. I don't really care though, as it looks awesome. You can bet I'll be dragging these both out again if I ever do a 'Best Looking Amiga Games' article.

Here, have another one from Beneath a Steel Sky, showing my ingenious attempt to subdue my pursuer and escape.

It might seem unfair that I'm grabbing a lot of screenshots from one article instead of giving other games a turn, but half the games I played this year were RPGs from the mid '80s so trust me I'm doing you a favour.

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a pretty great looking game as well. Unfortunately I didn't get much time to take screenshots before I got bored and turned it off.

Anyway, here's a game I actually did write about this year:

It turns out that I'm not very good at arcade brawler Double Dragon. The game properly kicked my ass.

Though sometimes if I'm very lucky I can pretend I know what I'm doing in Double Dragon Advance.

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~ MARCH ~

I can't remember why I skipped February this year. Maybe I was just too busy hanging out with my Palworld animal buddies. 

We had a fun adventure across a beautiful island, as we ran around capturing more creatures and sometimes people so they could work in my factories. Whether they wanted to or not.

Actually I didn't get far enough in the tech tree to have anything really stressful for them to do.

Plus I was so committed to their health and comfort that crafting beds for newcomers was always my #1 priority, even if I'd accidentally stepped in the campfire on the way over.
 

Yep, we were all just one big happy found family.

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~ APRIL ~

I reused this ancient screenshot for my Super Adventures in Rat-Infested RPG Cellars article, so now I get to use it again! It works even better coming after that Palworld shot.

Oh it's from Dragon Age: Origins by the way.

And this one was originally from Wasteland. It's a bunny!

I'm still not sure if I like Return to Monkey Island's distinctive art style, but the game did a far better job of recapturing Monkey Island's atmosphere and the basic layout of established locations than the last few sequels did.

It shows that if you're attempting to take advantage of an audience's nostalgia then everything you bring back has to match the audience's recollection. If you're trying to evoke feelings then it has to feel right. I don't understand how so many other things get this wrong.

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~ MAY ~

For a series shot in 2005 on a low res digital camera, the first season of the Doctor Who revival could look really good at times. The Empty Child two-parter in particular has some great shots that still hold up.

Sorry, Super Adventures skipped May because I was so busy covering Doctor Who, so I had to grab a screenshot from Sci-Fi Adventures this time instead. In fact I skipped June, July, August and September as well.

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~ OCTOBER ~

Okay I'm back to game screenshots now, honest. This is actually a shot from the demo of Star Trek: Voyager - Across the Unknown, which loves showing off how good its USS Voyager model is. And I love seeing it.

Issuing orders is such a bloody hassle in the original WarCraft. as you can only select four units at once. Still, it might be the first game in history to let the player drag a selection box around their troops, so I can't be too harsh to it.

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~ NOVEMBER ~

It took me a while to get the hang of my bouncing arrows in Cloudy Mountain, the very first Dungeons & Dragons game.

It wasn't my fault! Bows are complicated weapons that take months of training to master.

And I did get there in the end!

Oh sorry, this game belongs in December. I'll come back to it.

I was even worse at the sequel, Treasure of Tarmin. At least in Cloudy Mountain I could generally find where I needed to be.

When I played this I didn't have the context to fully appreciate what I was looking at. 3D dungeon games had been around a few years by the time this came out in 1983, and it seems about as primitive as they get... but it's really not. It's got full-screen colour graphics with filled walls instead of wireframe graphics, you step into the next tile instead of snapping straight to it, and you can even see enemies in the world from a distance. This might have been the most impressive console dungeon crawler of its day.

The '80s have been a bit of a blind spot for me when it comes to video games, so I decided to do some research, checking out games like the genre-defining King's Quest.

It only took me a few steps before I remembered why I hate Sierra adventures. I have "Thank you for playing Space Quest IV! As usual, you've been a real pantload" permanently burned into my brain. And what I did to the CD was equally permanent.

Damn, I hope that's not worth money now.

I have played a few ZX Spectrum games in the past, but I couldn't tell you much about about them because I never actually got anywhere. They're bloody difficult, and Knight Lore isn't the exception.

It does do a lot of clever things with objects in a 3D space however, paving the way for the isometric games that followed it.

This is pretty much how things went for me in all the classic '80s CRPGs I tried. Though Phantasie was the only one to have monsters do a little dance when I was defeated.

And then I ended up in the astral plane, where a demon brought my priest back as a zombie. I think this is a good thing? I really haven't got a clue.

The Apple II came out in 1977 and generated colours through trickery, so I can forgive its basic graphics. Plus it didn't exactly come with a mouse and a copy of Deluxe Paint or Photoshop for the developers to play with. Still, it was capable of a bit more than this.

Look at the giant cartoon gnomes in 1986's Might and Magic for example.

Though this was a long way from the graphics you could find in a game built for a modern system, like Phantasy Star on the Master System.

These two games were released just a year apart.

Fishman kicked my ass, by the way. It was a massacre. I learned to stay away from beaches after that.

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~ DECEMBER ~

It would be fair to say that Pool of Radiance doesn't have the greatest visuals, even for its time. But it does give you the option to be haughty, meek or abusive to wizards after you've broken into their house, which is a feature more games should have.

Plus the Macintosh version makes the best of the system's slightly higher resolution monochrome hardware, with its bold line art.

Here's some beautiful colour-cycling animation from Heroes of the Lance. Well it looks beautiful if you've been staring at Heroes of the Lance for half an hour at least.

Here's what the rest of the game looks like. It's not actually terrible for 1988 but it's very grey.

There is some nice art at the start of the FM Towns version, showing off the hardware's superior resolution and colour depth. Though they could've done a bit of manual clean-up to sort out the speckles on the face... never mind, it was probably fine on a fuzzy CRT monitor.

I'll end this by returning to Hillsfar, seeing as it's the last game I played this year. I was actually doing pretty well at the horse riding bit, until I wasn't. The game makes sure you get plenty of practice, as every time you want to save you have to ride to the save point, and then back.

Finally here's a shot of me getting destroyed by my opponent again, just so you don't have a GIF at the top of the screen, distracting you while you read the next bit.

SUPER ADVENTURES 2025 REVIEW

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Look, the number went up! For the first time in years the number went up! It's not a massive improvement, but it's definitely preferable to a sustained decline. The story's flipped over on Sci-Fi Adventures, that place is practically abandoned now, but that's what happens when all my favourite sci-fi franchises piss me off. Friendship ended with Doctor Who and Star Trek, now Dungeons & Dragons is my best friend.

Last time I promised that I would try to write about at least one Nintendo game this year, and I technically did. I played the NES ports of both Double Dragon and Pool of Radiance! Okay I admit, I dropped the ball there, in fact I skipped the Super Nintendo and Mega Drive entirely. Though that's mostly because I'd been splitting my attention between the very new and the absolutely ancient. I went from Palworld and Diablo IV to Cloudy Mountain and The Bard's Tale.

Hang on, I'll come up with some half-assed stats for you. I'll be including anything that got at least a couple of screenshots and a reasonable bit of description, so all the 'rats in the basement' games are disqualified, but the '80s RPGs are included in the count.

I found lots of excuses to not hand out stars this year, like 'I can't judge this without seeing the ending' and 'this is only an early demo'. But out of the games that were left, only 44% got a shiny star. That's the lowest it's been since 2012.		I only gave one game the trophy this year and that's Palworld.

SYSTEMS:

PC: 36%   Apple II: 24% Intellivision: 12% Other: 28%

PC wins again for like the 15th year in a row, huge shock. It's the most convenient system to take screenshots from. But Apple II and Intellivision making it to the top three is just crazy. That doesn't usually happen. I didn't expect that to ever happen! Clearly I need to play more games next year so I can minimise these statistical abnormalities.

GENRES:

RPG: 64%    The rest: 36%

RPGs vanished without a trace last year, but in 2025 they came back with a vengeance and if everything goes to plan then 2026 is going to have even more of them. So I apologise if classic platformers or third-person shooters are more your thing. In fact, if you feel like I've been neglecting your fav genre, let me know in the comments, maybe it'll inspire me to try something.

ERAS:

1980s: 80% 1990s: 04% 2020s: 16%

I've seen these stats shift slightly over the years, with the '90s typically in the lead and later decades slowly catching up, but this year everything got flipped. The 1980s absolutely dominated, with the 2020s in second place. The 2000s and 2010s didn't even make it to the board.

I have a plan for 2026 and it's already in motion. I'm determined to play through every title released during the first decade of Dungeons & Dragons video games, even if it takes me several weeks. So stick around if you want to see if I actually make it through to the end.

If you'd rather I played literally anything else next year, then I've got you covered as well, as there's no way I'm getting through this without taking some breaks to check out something completely different. Maybe even something from the '90s or 2000s for a change!

Thanks once again for reading, and Happy New Year!