Fallout 4 (PC)

Developer:

Bethesda

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Release Date:

2015

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Systems:

Win, PS4, Xbox One

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This week month on Super Adventures I'm spoiling the first couple of hours of Fallout 4!

You might be wondering why I'm writing about a complicated modern RPG again when I should know better by now. There's already a hundred reviews, streams and YouTube videos out there about it, so it seems a bit redundant. I have a good reason though: I already played all the others (aside from Fallout Shelter and Brotherhood of Steel) and it seemed wrong to leave it out.

Plus it means I get to mention the drama going on in late 2013 when there were competing teaser sites like thesurvivor2299.com and thepropheteer.com all appearing to be revealing the game's existence, and people were trying to figure out which of them was legit and which were fake (they were all fake).

Thankfully the game actually was being developed in secret, because that's typically what you do when your last game was a huge hit (unless you're Valve). Though it seems weird to me that after all this time this was only Bethesda's second attempt at a Fallout RPG. Obsidian were the ones that made Fallout: New Vegas and I'm curious to see if Bethesda decided to take anything from it. Or take anything away from their last game.

I'll be playing it without any mods, by the way, because I'm not really keen on tweaking my game. I feel like opening the box like that lets some of the magic escape (plus I'd be too tempted to give myself an infinite ammo rocket launcher and fly around on a fire-breathing unicorn or something). Also this means I get to ignore the Creation Club entirely and all of the bullshit that goes along with that!

(Click the screenshots if you want to make them very slightly bigger.)

In the Hunt (Arcade)

Developer:

Irem

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Release Date:

1993

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Systems:

Arcade, PlayStation, Saturn, PC

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This week on Super Adventures I'm playing an arcade game, because I feel like showing off some pixels and I figured this'd be a good place to find them. Plus I haven't played a single arcade game for the site all year and I'm running out of time to make up for that.

My first criticism is that it needs more space between the words in the title. It looks like it says "INTHEHUNT", and that's not what it's called!

In  the  Hunt came out in arcades first in 1993 and was ported to PlayStation, Saturn and Windows 95 a couple of years later. It almost made it to Super Nintendo as well, but it was getting a bit close to the system's end by that point, and Irem's game development department departed soon after. The team that made this were apparently already gone by then though, as they formed Nazca in '94. I've already played one game they made as Irem, scrolling beat 'em up Undercover Cops, but they're more famous for what they made afterwards... Metal Slug! Which I'm totally going to play one of these days, maybe.

Wasteland 2 (PC)

Today on Super Adventures I’m taking a relatively brief look at the actual sequel to Wasteland that now actually really exists in the world for real. It hasn’t been all that long since I wrote about Skyrim, and yet here I am writing about another insanely massive RPG, I guess I must just hate having free time.

Wasteland 2 is one of the big isometric RPG Kickstarter success stories that came out of nowhere these last couple of years, along with games like Divinity: Original Sin, Pillars of Eternity, Shadowrun Returns and Torment: Tides of Numenera. Maybe this is just a fad, or maybe we’re looking at the glorious rebirth of a subgenre unfairly killed off long before its time by developers chasing more mainstream audiences, I dunno. Personally I’m happy with what we’ve got so far, as five of these games combined must be like… 30,000 hours of gameplay, at least.

I’ve only been semi-looking forward to finally playing this though, as to be honest I’m not a huge fan of Wasteland or its spiritual successor Fallout, and seeing as this is a sequel to one and a successive spiritual successor to the other, there’s a fair chance I’ll come away from this disappointed. On the other hand it’s mostly their dated game design and interface that puts me off, so maybe a more modern take on the formula will win me over! It worked for Fallout 3 after all, but then that's not quite the same thing.

(As always when I played one of these new-fangled PC titles, you can click the screenshots to view them in their original resolution. Might give you a fighting chance to make out some of the text).

Fallout: New Vegas (PC)

New Vegas is the sixth game in the Fallout franchise, released between Fallout 3 and a theoretical Fallout 4 that may or may not definitely be in development right now.

Though Bethesda are the current custodians of the series after buying it from Interplay, this game was passed on to Obsidian to make instead... which is a company founded by ex-Interplay employees. Annoyingly they haven't used their years of PC RPG developing experience to fix the issue where I have to disable my Xbox 360 controller to use the mouse in the menu though.

This is awesome theme music though, it's like a slightly wild west-tinged version of the Fallout 3 theme (youtube links, don't hate me if there's ads). I know people liked that the first two games began with classic songs by The Ink Spots, but I think its cool that the series has an original theme of its own now. One of their tunes will show up in the intro though, they always do.

(Click the images to see them at the original resolution.)

Rage (PC)

Today I'm having a quick go at 2011 post apocalyptic FPS/racing hybrid Rage, aka. RAGE. I'm not entirely sure why they've used the circle-A anarchy symbol there in their logo, but I imagine it's for much the same reason that Neversoft used it for Apocalypse: because they could.

This came out on Xbox 360, PS3, PC and Mac, but I'll be playing the PC version on my beat up old rig. I've actually tried the game on my system once before when it first came out but I was kind of put off by the way it was a sluggish glitchy mess. But it's been a few years now so I'm hoping that all the patches and drivers updates since then have gotten it into shape. Shouldn't take long to find out.

(Click the pictures to view them at twice the resolution. That's FOUR TIMES the pixels!)

Fallout 3 (PC)

Today on Super Adventures I've decided to have a look at RPG heavyweight Fallout 3, take a few screenshots from it, maybe put a bit of text under them as well. If I can think of anything to say.

Interplay had a good run with the Fallout franchise, getting four games out of it in the end, but after a few bad decisions (like making Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel for instance) they found themselves suffering from a wee bit of bankruptcy and in 2007 Elder Scrolls developers Bethesda presented them $5.75 million to take the whole thing off their hands. So this is the first Fallout of the Bethesda era, with a new immersive first person real-time approach to gameplay and combat that seems precision engineered to piss off the existing fan base. It was also developed with consoles in mind this time, which was made blatantly obvious to me right away by the fact that I couldn't use my mouse on the menus until I'd disabled my Xbox 360 pad!

Oh, like the Elder Scrolls games, this has all kinds of user made mods available for it, which I won't be touching. I've got nothing against mods, much the opposite in fact, I just like to play games vanilla when I'm showing them off on this site.

(Click the screenshots to double their resolution.)

Fallout 2 (PC)

Hello, I'm Ray Hardgrit and you've somehow found yourself reading Super Adventures in Gaming, the site where I play a game from my backlog for a couple of hours while taking screenshots and whining that it's too hard.

Today I'm having a quick go of classic PC RPG Fallout 2 by Black Isle Studios, the sequel to Interplay's Fallout. Though Black Isle was actually just a division of Interplay (and still is actually, although it's really an entirely different Black Isle now as the original Black Isle died back in 2003 and was reborn as an entirely new company called Obsidian Entertainment... kind of. Not that Interplay or this new division known as Black Isle have anything to do with the Fallout franchise anymore as the rights were sold to Bethesda during 2007 who then released Fallout 3 and tasked Obsidian (the original Black Isle staff) with making a sequel called Fallout: New Vegas..

My copy of the original Fallout from GOG.com ran like a dream on Windows 7 with no messing around, but I got this one from Steam instead and my attempts to get it to run haven't been entirely plain sailing. Fortunately a quick ini file edit was enough to fix the screwed up colours and get the gameplay working fine... though that then ended up breaking all the videos. But with the fan base the game has I'm sure there's an amazing mod out there that fixes everything!

Fallout (PC)

Today I'll be having a quick go of Fallout, the first game in the long running post-apocalyptic RPG series and the spiritual successor to Wasteland (which I totally failed to get anywhere in earlier this year).

In fact the game probably would've ended up released as Wasteland 2 if Interplay had been able to get hold of the rights from EA. But I think it worked out better that they didn't, seeing as now we've got both the next Fallout game and the reborn Wasteland sequel to look forward to. It's like the franchise has undergone mitosis and split into two separate organisms that have mutated in their own vastly different ways. Well okay it's more like three organisms if you count Fountain of Dreams, but I don't foresee a sequel to that one being kickstarted any time soon.

There are unofficial mods for this to increase the resolution and fix issues, but I'll be playing the GOG.com version entirely unmodded in glorious 640x480 res, just as it was in ye olden days.

Wasteland (MS-DOS)

Wow, that's pretty bad. Maybe not the worst title screen on my site so far... or then again maybe it is. They probably should have switched to a different idea when it became obvious they didn't have the colours to pull off a mushroom cloud. Though for all I know they DID have the colours, and they did this deliberately.

Uh, I apologise to any Wasteland fans reading this, because I'm probably going to be saying crap like this about your game for the entire post. I mean I'm so bad at classic rpgs that there's a good chance I'll be whining about getting a game over on the character creation screen. Sorry.

Rogue Trip: Vacation 2012 (PSX)

Happy New Year, and welcome to the first Super Adventure in Gaming of 2012!

I decided that my New Year's resolution for the site this year should be to put more effort and care into my writing, and to make a more insightful and interesting analysis of the games I play. To be more thoughtful and balanced with my criticism, and to select only the most fascinating, unusual, and beautiful video games to share screenshots from.

But then I got sick with this bloody cold. So fuck it, I'm going to put in a crap playstation game for an hour, rant about how it pissed me off, and then I'm crawling back into bed.

It's clever because 'Rogue Trip' kind of sounds like 'Road Trip'. Also it's set in 2012, wow that's this year!

I feel like I should be guessing what other game logos they took the letters from though. Well the 'G' could be from Goldeneye 007...

Burntime (MS-DOS) - Guest Post

Burntime. A relaxing game about cultivating wheat.

Bad Blood (MS-DOS)

Post apocalyptic Mad Max style gang fighting is my first guess.