Lotus Turbo Challenge Games

This week on Super Adventures, I'm taking a trip back to the past... back to the early days of Super Adventures, when I thought it was acceptable to cover a bunch of old-school arcade-style sprite-based racing games in one article. I'd give them each three screenshots and write things like "Dodging cars is hard!" and "Hey, I got first place!" underneath.

I eventually learned my lesson and realised that these kinds of games weren't going to give me much to work with. You have a sprite of a car and you slide it left and right to get around the other cars and obstacles, while also trying to avoid flying off the track on the turns. There, I just described all of them.

But I could never resist showing off screenshots full of art, and it occurs to me that I never got around to covering the biggest stars in the genre. No Out Run, no Road Rash, not even Lotus 1-2-3. Uh, I mean Magnetic Fields' legendary racing trilogy, not the legendary spreadsheet software. Speaking of spreadsheets, did you know Lotus made a car called the Excel?

Anyway, I'm going to play some Lotus games and I'm going to show off all the artwork, and if I can find anything to write about them, well that's a bonus. Screenshots will be from the Amiga 500 versions unless specified otherwise, though I will have a look at some of the ports as well. These games made their way onto all kinds of systems, like the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, C64, PC... though not the NES or SNES for some reason. I've no idea why Nintendo got left out.

There was another game called Lotus Challenge released on the PS2 in 2001, but that's entirely unrelated so I won't be playing that one.

Alien Storm (Arcade)

Developer:

Sega

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Release Date:

1990

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Systems:

Arcade, Mega Drive, Master System, Atari ST, Amiga, C64, CPC, ZX Spectrum

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing one of Sega's classic arcade titles: Alien Storm! Man, I don't like it when title screens peer back at me like this. The creature that eye belongs to seem to have problems of their own though, seeing as they're floating around space in a chunk of debris. Somehow I get the feeling they deserved it.

I remember seeing magazine ads for Alien Storm and thinking "Damn that looks crazy." Or maybe they were Alien Syndrome ads; I always get the two games mixed up. In my defence they're both Sega arcade games with gross looking aliens that ran on a System 16 board (or close enough) and were ported to everything. Anyway, I didn't really get around to playing either of them in the end, so I'm curious to see if this is going to be anything like the image I've got in my head.

One thing I'm pretty certain of is that this isn't going to be a long game. I usually try to show off the first hour or so of gameplay in these articles, but I have a feeling I'll run out of game before then so don't be surprised if I spoil the ending. Also don't be surprised if I can't actually reach the ending due to being terrible at it.

Awesome (Amiga)

Developer:

Reflections

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Release Date:

1990

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Systems:

Amiga, Atari ST, FM Towns

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm looking at classic 90s shoot 'em up Awesome, which was suggested by the folks on my Discord. They realised I'd gotten caught in a bit of a rut last year, playing so many great games, and felt I should bring Super Adventures back to its roots. Its roots of me trying to figure out what the hell I'm doing in some obscure old Amiga game.

You can tell that the game came out before the internet was a thing as Awesome is not a Google friendly title. It says on the box that it has an awesome t-shirt included, but search for 'awesome t-shirt' on image search and you'll be scrolling for a long while before you find it. That's a bit of a difference from Reflections' earlier game Shadow of the Beast, which has a very Googlable name. One thing the two games have in common is the box art, which was a painting by frequent Psygnosis collaborator Roger Dean. You could tell Psygnosis games right away at this point because they were the ones that looked like Yes albums. Edit: none of that is true, the cover is actually a painting from John Harris called MASS: The Building of FTL1, painted about 10 years earlier in 1979.

Alright I'm going to play this for an hour or so and I hope you like GIFs because I'm in the mood for some moving pixels.

Loom (MS-DOS)

Developer:

Lucasfilm Games

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Release Date:

1990

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Systems:

PC, Mac, Amiga, Atari ST, TurboGrafx-CD, FM Towns

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm writing about Loom, one of the final point and click adventures by Lucasfilm Games (because they became LucasArts later on that year). Lucasfilm Games was actually revived this January, but only as a brand to stick on licenced third-party games, so that's not much to cheer about.

My gimmick for Super Adventures this year is that I'm playing games that have appeared in someone's top ten list, and Loom made it to #8 in IGN's Top 10 LucasArts Adventure Games list (it could've possibly made it higher, but they were listed in chronological order). You might be wondering if LucasArts even released more than 10 adventure games, and they actually did! But only barely. (Spoilers: Zak McKracken and Escape from Monkey Island didn't make their list.)

Loom's maybe not LucasArts' most famous adventure game, in fact I imagine a lot of people only know about it because of the dude with the 'Ask Me About Loom' badge in Monkey Island, but I believe it's fairly well liked. Personally though I don't have an opinion on the game, because I remember almost nothing about it. I've definitely finished it before, played through the whole thing, but I have zero memory of it past the first 10 minutes. Possibly not a good sign, but at least it'll be new to me!

As usual I'm planning to play the first hour or so of the game and then quit so I don't ruin the whole damn thing for people, but I promise you'll get more than your recommended daily amount of screenshots.

Golden Axe (Genesis/Mega Drive)

Developer:

Sega

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Release Date:

1990 (1989 in Japan and Arcades)

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Systems:

Lots

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing the legendary arcade game Golden Axe! On the Mega Drive!

It might seem a bit strange that it's taken me like eight years to finally get around to Golden Axe as it's fairly well known. Maybe not Mario or Doom tier, but definitely Alex Kidd tier. Higher than Toki, lower than Tekken. Anyway, one of the reasons I haven't played it yet is because when I started this site I was only writing about games I hadn't seen before and knew nothing about, and this is one I know a bit about. In fact it's probably the first Mega Drive game I ever owned. I wasn't very good at it and I've never reached the ending, but I've seen those first few stages at least a half dozen times!

The other reason I've put off writing about it, is what am I going to write? You walk to the right and you hit things, there's not much else to it. I suppose I could mention that the arcade game was created by the team that made Altered Beast the year before. Also, they were apparently going to call the game Broad Axe, after they couldn't use their first choice, but then the president of Sega US noticed that the dwarf's axe in the game looked golden and decided that they were going have to change the title to Golden Axe or else they weren't going to sell it. That's what I've read anyway!

By the way, the kanji in the logo with all the weapons hidden in it, "戦斧", means 'battle axe', which is what they wanted to call the game in the first place. I think Golden Axe is a better name to be honest.

Rod-Land (Arcade)

Developer:

Jaleco

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Release Date:

1990

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Systems:

Arcade, Amiga, Atari ST, CPC, C64, ZX Spectrum, NES, Game Boy, iOS

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This week on Super Adventures I'm taking a quick look at arcade action game Rod·Land! I'm tempted now to look up if there's some CSS trick I can use to display the title in color-cycling rainbow text. Though I'm not even sure if I've written it right, as sometimes it's called Rod Land and other times it's Rodland.

Rod·Land is one of the games I used to play as a kid on my Amiga, so I'm not exactly going into this blind. Though I used to cheat the hell out of it back then by pressing the 'Help' key five times and getting infinite lives; one of the few times that 'Help' button was ever helpful.

This is my first time playing through the arcade version though and I can already tell it's not quite the same. For one thing this title screen fanfare sounds terrible; it's all synth brass and clock chimes. Amiga wins this round.

The Secret of Monkey Island (MS-DOS)

Developer:

Lucasfilm

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Release Date:

1990 (1992 CD)

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Systems:

DOS, Amiga, Atari ST, FM Towns, Mac, Sega CD

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Today on Super Adventures... I'm sitting here listening to the Monkey Island theme. It's one of the all time greatest video game themes in my opinion and the internet agrees with me on this one. Here now that I've hyped it up, have a YouTube link: Secret of Monkey Island CD - Opening Themes.

By the way, it's The Secret of Monkey Island's 25th birthday this month! Or maybe next month, even creator Ron Gilbert says he doesn't know for sure on his blog. Either way it definitely came out in late 1990, just at the point where Lucasfilm Games was being renamed to LucasArts (it has both logos on the box). I actually only found out today which makes this the second time my site's benefited from anniversary serendipity this year, after I accidentally celebrated the Amiga's 30th birthday a few months back. Fate's not often on my side but it does seem to like my website at least.

The Secret of Monkey Island is about as famous as adventure games get, designed by famous developers Ron Gilbert, Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman, who also gave the world the famous Day of the Tentacle along with the also famous Monkey Island 2. It's so famous in fact that there's nothing I can tell you about it you don't already know, and nothing about it I don't already know, so me showing it off right now is utterly pointless on every level! But stick around anyway, it'll be nostalgic. Plus I made GIFs!

Super Mario World (SNES)

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.

Wing Commander (Amiga CD32)

The first 'W' game on Super Adventures this year is... Wing Commander, on the Amiga CD32!

Yeah I realise that the original PC DOS version is likely to be a better experience, but I got this version bundled with a CD32 years back (on the very same disc as that piece of crap Dangerous Streets in fact), and I really should give it a try at least once.

Wing Commander is one of the big games from the early 90s like Doom and Myst that made the PC into a serious rival to the 16-bit game machines of the era, with its advanced 256 colour VGA graphics and... music. Sound cards existed a couple of years before Wing Commander, but this inspired people to buy their first Sound Blaster and turn their sensible personal computer into a gaming platform. Amiga owners were already jealous of the Genesis/Mega Drive at this point, they were getting ready to be jealous of the upcoming SNES, and now they had to be jealous of really expensive 386 PCs too! Sure all three systems eventually got a Wing Commander to call their own a few years down the line, but none could pull the game off with the same speed and visuals as the PC. Probably.

Anyway this is going to be the same deal as ever: I'll play it for an hour or two, share my opinions of how it's been so far, and then leave a comment box at the bottom for you to tell me that it's a good game and my 'review' sucks.

Unreal (Amiga)

Whoa, look at the size of that title screen! That ain't normal for a 16-bit game man; you could fit six SNES title screens into that thing with room to spare.

Today on Super Adventures, I'm putting an hour or so into classic Amiga game Unreal, published by Ubisoft in 1990, eight years before Epic and Digital Extremes would borrow the title for their first person shooter and the infamous engine it runs on. I don't actually know much of anything about this Unreal though, except that it was ported across to the PC and Atari ST a year after the Amiga version, and the title screen is insane. It's a hand-pixelled reproduction of the cover to the 1979 edition of the Michael Moorcock novel 'Lord of the Spiders', which makes more sense when you know that the painting was also used for the game's box art. I guess someone at Ubisoft was a fan.

Neutopia (TurboGrafx-16)

"Neutopia" is the twentieth episode of the sixth season of the animated sitcom Futurama, and the premiere of Season 6-B. It is the twentieth episode of the sixth season in production order, and the 108th episode in broadcast order.

Actually ignore that, because the Neutopia I'm looking at here is a TurboGrafx game from Hudson Soft. I figured that my site could do with a few more of these around, especially after that run of modern 3D PC shooters I just played. The game's been described as 'a bit of a Zelda clone', so if this ends up being about stylish gunplay and gritty realism again then you can't blame me this time.

Speaking of Zelda clones, the way the logo has been skewered on a sword sure seems familiar. Though Nintendo didn't really start piercing its Zelda logos until Link to the Past two years later, so I'll let them off with that.

J.J. & Jeff (TurboGrafx-16)

Today's J game is... Turbografx-16 platformer J.J. & Jeff! Though it's possibly more notorious under its Japanese name of Kato-chan & Ken-chan.

The game was originally loosely based on a Japanese TV series called 'Fun TV with Kato-chan and Ken-chan', which was a problem when it (eventually) came time to localise it for North America, as no one there had ever heard of the series. So the two unknown Japanese comedians were taken out and replaced with... two unknown characters based on no one at all. To be fair it probably worked out much cheaper this way if Hudson Soft were paying Ken Shimura and Cha Katō for their likeness.

I should probably warn you now that the game's got a reputation for toilet humour, so it might not be a good idea to read this while you're eating. Then again it's only going to be 80s cartoon pixel graphics so how bad can it be?

Cyber-Cop / Corporation (Genesis/Mega Drive) - Guest Post

'Sup. I'm mecha-neko, and I'm going to be playing Cyber-Cop on the Sega Genesis!

Since Hardgrit is doing this alphabetical thing, my choices here are Cyber-Cop and Cartoon Kingdom, and I don't think we'd survive the latter.

Never heard of Cyber-Cop? Well, maybe you'll remember the Amiga game Corporation from waaaaay back. It was the 11th game that Ray properly played for this site back in 2011. He didn't get out of the first room because, well, by the looks of things the game was an inscrutable mess.

It was ported to the Sega Genesis two years later and given a sneaky name change in the US to Cyber-Cop, so people didn't mistake the game for being a business sim or something. Such as the earlier Commodore 64 game Corporation which really is a business sim about managing mining operations in space. (MobyGames link)

But I'm going to retrace Ray's steps and start with the original Amiga Corporation and see where that leads me. Here goes!

King's Bounty (Amiga)

Super Adventures in Gaming Replay 2014 - Game 5

Long long ago in the year of 2011, I took a look at a game called King's Bounty. It wasn't a long look though; in fact I only made it to four screenshots before I realised that it wasn't my kind of thing and turned it off. I think I just wanted to show off the character select screen really and that was about the limit of my interest.

But since then I've learned that this game is actually a precursor to the long running Heroes of Might and Magic series as well as a new King's Bounty franchise. It even got a PS2 remake called Heroes of Might and Magic: Quest of the Dragon Bone staff. I know even less about HoMM than I do about King's Bounty so it's not like I can compare the games, but it's triggered my curiosity now; I want to know what this actually is.

So I present to you an idiot's guide to playing King's Bounty. Uh, I mean a guide to how an idiot plays King's Bounty. The game came out on PC, Genesis/Mega Drive, C64 and Amiga, and I'll be playing the Amiga game as I've heard that it's the better looking one.

Mercs (Arcade)

Super Adventures in Gaming Replay 2014 - Game 2

This one might seem like a bit of a strange choice to replay as it's a pretty basic run and gun arcade shooter, not the kind of thing you need to play much of to get an impression of how it's going to carry on. Plus I got two levels into the Genesis/Mega Drive version the first time around, so it's not like I didn't give it a fair chance. But I'm reasonably sure I promised someone I'd take a look at the arcade version at some point, so here it is.

Here's something I didn't mention last time: Mercs is the second game in the Wolf of the Battlefield series and a sequel to 1985's Commando (which has absolutely nothing to do with 1985's Commando movie). It started off as an arcade game in 1990 and was ported to around seven home systems the following year (and there's no way I'm going to be comparing them all this time, sorry.)

Parodius (Arcade)

Today I'm taking a short look at Parodius, the second game in the Parodius series, confusingly. They call it パロディウスだ! －神話からお笑いへ－ in Japan, which translates to It's Parodius! From Myth to Laughter, a play on Gradius III's subtitle 'From Legend To Myth'. Because Parodius is a parody of Gradius you see! You'd think it'd be impossible to make a comedy spoof of a side scrolling shoot 'em up, but they went and did it anyway.

The game originally hit Japanese arcades in April 1990 and was happy enough to stay there for whatever reason, though most of its various console ports eventually made it over to the West. Well they were released in Europe anyway; poor America was left out entirely for whatever reason.

Turrican (C64)

"Hello and welcome to Turrican, be my guest! Another day another try, but remember... shoot or die! Ha ha ha!"

Today I'm playing legendary run and gun platformer Turrican, created by two of the blokes that brought the world The Great Giana Sisters: designer Manfred Trenz and musician Chris Hülsbeck. Apparently some anonymous artist with the initials 'MT' thought it'd be good idea to entirely rip off this badass Manowar album cover for this loading screen artwork, and hey it probably was. Definitely smarter than ripping off something like Lovesexy by Prince anyway.

Turrican came out on a lot of systems and is probably best known as an Amiga game, but I'm going to be mainly focusing on the C64 version as it's the original all the others were based on. Shouldn't take me long to regret that choice I expect.

Final Fantasy III (NES)

I took a look at Final Fantasy I and Final Fantasy II on the NES recently, so Final Fantasy III seemed like the logical next step, but I've stumbled across slight snag in my scheme: It turns out that Square never actually released the game in English. At all. The game wasn't ported across to the WonderSwan like the last two due to it being huge, so there was no PlayStation Origins release and no Dawn of Souls style port for the GBA.

Okay sure it got a full 3D remake for the DS in 2006, but that's not really the same thing. I want to see what the original game was like in all its low-tech pixelly glory and rule #3 in the column on the right says I can't play a fan translation. But I'm too stubborn to just skip the game entirely and move onto FF4, so I'm gonna do this the hard way: with a chart of Japanese letters and Google Translate.

I bet I don't even make it past the first quest.

Final Fantasy (NES) - Replay

Super Adventures in Gaming Replay 2013 - Game 2

This is a pretty terrible choice of game for me to replay really, considering that I didn't play it myself the first time around and the original guest post by Ocean is actually fine. Plus the game isn't exactly photogenic enough to be worth showing off a second time. Not that the art's bad, it's just that it's an 8-bit NES game and even at their best they don't tend to be eye candy.

This didn't even reach the West until 1990, well into the 16-bit era, so it must have looked pretty basic to Westerners even at the time. In fact the game didn't get a European release until 2003 as part of the Final Fantasy Origins compilation on the PlayStation. The first FF game released over here was actually Final Fantasy VII, which hit shops a full decade after the franchise began in Japan.

Uh, what was I even talking about again? Whatever, here's a quick absurdly long look at the original Final Fantasy on the NES.

Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (PS2)

Today I'm having a look at Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, the second attempt at making a sequel to Metal Gear, this time by the original creator Hideo Kojima. This one is considered to be the true follow up though, kicking poor Snake's Revenge out of the franchise.