Super Adventures in Delisted Games Part 4: Race Driver: GRID, Anthem, Poker Night

It's Super Adventures' 15th anniversary today and to celebrate I'm taking a break from Dungeons & Dragons! None of this week's games are an RPG, they don't have dark elves, or clerics, or magic missile spells. One of them had actual missiles I think, but it's not really the same.

This week on Super Adventures, it's been 19 months since Delisted Games Part 3, so it seemed like a good time to get back to whining about games being removed from online stores due to licensing issues. And not just racing games this time! (To be honest, I'm just using this as an excuse to write about some games I probably couldn't get a full length article out of.)

I've found some fun covers here. The first game has Games for Windows on the top, the second has 'DOWNLOAD ONLY' written on it and a bunch of tiny text warning you that a persistent internet connection is required, and the third didn't even get an empty box with a download code in it. As far as I know.

But things aren't as bad as they seem! GRID doesn't have the actual Game for Windows Live DRM on it, that logo only means that the game runs in Windows. Meanwhile, Anthem and Poker Night... actually things really are bad for those two. They're really really bad.

Anyway, the first game is Race Driver: GRID, sponsored by eBay.

Micro Machines (Amiga)

Developer:

Codemasters

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Release Date:

1993 (Amiga)

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Systems:

Amiga, NES, SNES, SMS, SMD, GG, CD-i, GB, GBC, DOS

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing classic overhead racing game Micro Machines! It looks like it's called MicroMachines, but there is apparently a tiny imperceptible space between the words.

It seems a bit redundant to tell you it's a racing game seeing as I've already written up there that it's by Codemasters, but this was from way back in their early days when they were still allowed to dream of other genres. The title Micro Machines also seems like a bit of a giveaway, but I bet they could've found a way to turn it into a platformer if they'd wanted to. It wouldn't have been the first car platformer I've played.

Though hang on, is this actually the first Codemasters developed game I've played for Super Adventures? It doesn't seem likely, but the only other Codemasters game I can think of is Fantasy World Dizzy and that was developed by the Oliver Twins. Wow, 10 years and there's still veteran AAA developers I haven't played anything by. Though they were more of a B game dev before this came out.

My gimmick this year is that I'm only playing games that I've found on top ten lists, and Micro Machines was #6 in 1995s Amiga Power All-Time Top 100 list. Weirdly it started off down at #17 the year before but I guess it grew on them. The game started life on the NES a couple of years earlier, in 1991, but Codemasters didn't exactly have a licence from Nintendo, so they teamed up with Camerica to come up with sneaky ways to get around the lock out chip with their unlicensed cartridges. My favourite is the pass-through cart that comes with a handle to get it back out of your NES, because it's so distinctive looking. No handles on the Amiga disks though, sadly.

The NES game didn't go through quality assurance either, which made things a bit awkward when they found a bug after they'd started producing ROM chips. I don't know how many console games got a hardware patch, but this is apparently one of them as they stuck a device inside to correct the code. No chips soldered onto the Amiga disks though, sadly.

In fact the Amiga game's been a real let down so far and I haven't even turned it on yet.