Suikoden (PSX)

Developer:

Konami

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Release Date:

1997 (1995 in Japan)

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Systems:

PlayStation, Saturn, Windows

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm finally getting around to Suikoden, a game that's been sitting on my shelf for ages. I borrowed it from a friend a while ago and he moved away before I could give it back, so it's just been lying there ever since, unplayed. Until today!

I knew the game was an JRPG when I borrowed it (one of the earliest RPGs on the PlayStation in fact), but I had no idea what the title was about. Typically Japanese games will get an English title when they're released in the West (except for games like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest which had an English title from the start), but for some reason this has remained Suikoden.

Turns out that it's loosely based on a novel of the same name. Well, that's the name it has in Japan anyway. It's actually a Chinese novel called Shui Hu Zhuan, one of the four great classic novels of Chinese literature (along with Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West and Dream of the Red Chamber), and in English the title translates to... Water Margin. Probably for the best they left it as Suikoden.

VectorMan (Genesis/Mega Drive) - Guest Post

This week on Super Adventures, mecha-neko's back with another guest post for you! He's found a game all about robots, purple flags and twinkly stars, and some people reckon it's pretty good. You'll have to keep reading if you want to know what mecha-neko thinks of it though.

Hey everybody, guess what! It's time to play the Mega Drive exclusive VectorMan!

Developer:

BlueSky Software

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Release Date:

October 24th, 1995

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Systems:

Mega Drive/Genesis

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If you think this little fragment of the title screen is busy, believe me I'm letting you off easy. If you're really gutsy, take a look at the full animation. Be warned, it contains flashing images. (And boy howdy does it ever.) That warning goes for the rest of this post as well. Are you ready?

Riot Zone (TurboGrafx-CD)

Developer:

Westone

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Release Date:

1993 (1992 in Japan)

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Systems:

TurboGrafx-CD, Arcade (kind of)

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This week on Super Adventures we're going to the Riot Zone, on the TurboGrafx-CD / PC Engine CD-ROM².

Though it's also known by another name, as it started life as an coin-op called Riot City. The licensing agreement that developer Westone had with original publisher Sega said they owned the rights to the game, but not the characters, bosses or names, so when they ported it to Hudson Soft's console they had to give it a makeover and a new title. It's a bit weird they didn't just port it to Sega's Mega Drive / Genesis instead and save themselves the work, but I suppose they must have had their reasons.

The game never got a European release in either form, but the console version did reach America, so there'll be nice English cutscenes for me to completely understand. Well I'll be able to read the text at least.

Super Mario 64 (N64)

Hey, welcome back, it's Super Adventures 9th birthday etc. But never mind that, I've got TERRIBLE NEWS for you. Some quirk of Blogger has retroactively screwed up all my damn 256 colour images, removing shades and leaving them more dithered than they should be.

It only ruined little bits of them, only a few of the colours, but ideally you want your screenshots to be 0% ruined.

So I've got GOOD NEWS for you: mecha-neko wrote a thing and I did a thing and over Christmas we replaced something like 14,000 images over 1000 posts. So now the site is entirely fixed... or mostly broken, or somewhere in between. Why not click a few old posts and find out! I mean after reading this one.

Developer:

Nintendo

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Release Date:

1997 (1996 in Japan + US)

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Systems:

N64, DS, iQue Player

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This week on Super Adventures, it's Super Mario 64!

It's a game that needs no introduction, so instead I'll start off by talking about how much I hate 3D platformers. Actually I don't hate them, as long as they keep their distance and don't bother me, but they've never been my genre. I like 2D platformers, I like games where you wander around in 3D, but somehow when you combine the two I lose interest. Maybe it's because I don't like slipping off narrow platforms and misjudging depth.

Actually I will give the game a bit of an introduction, because I like trivia. Super Mario 64 was designed by pioneering Nintendo game genius Shigeru Miyamoto, who's been making Marios since the first Donkey Kong arcade cabinet. He'd already set the template for the 2D platformer genre with Super Mario Bros. so they were hoping he could pull off the same trick in 3D. And he did... though he took a few months longer than planned. Unfortunately Mario 64 was meant to be the big launch title that got people buying the Nintendo 64, so they had to delay the console for months as well. They probably made the right choice though, as the PlayStation and Saturn were well established even before the delay and the N64 needed to show off some actual magic to lure people over to a cartridge-based machine without videos, voices or CD music.

Personally I love the N64 and I've got a lot of nostalgia for it, but Mario 64 not so much. I've maybe played the game twice and the furthest I've gotten is the stone slab boss that falls on you. But some people seem to like it, and it's "acclaimed as one of the greatest video games of all time", so I'm going to give it another few hours to win me over.

Super Adventures Games of the Decade: 2010-2019

This week on Super Adventures, one final article for 2019. It's the end of a decade, so I felt like I should probably write something about that.

I've done a 'top games' post once before, but I cheated by using page views to rank the games on my site instead of picking my own list. This time though it's the real deal, my favourite games from the last ten years, and not just for games I've written about on Super Adventures. I did think about doing a specifically 'Best of Super Adventures list', but then I realised that the site's 9 years old, so I'd be an idiot not to save it for next year. Actually a 'Best Screenshots of Super Adventures' post sounds easier, I should do that next year instead.

Anyway, the trouble with 'best of' lists is that they're all wrong. I mean they're all just someone's opinion, and that person likely hasn't played every game released on every system. Plus chances are they don't love all genres and gameplay gimmicks equally either. But I've come up with an ingenious and innovative solution to this problem! I'm going to give you three lists simultaneously: one with my favourite AAA game from a certain year, one with the my favourite indie game from a certain year, and one with the game I should've picked instead. That way I've got all my bases covered and everyone's happy.

Note: for the purposes of this list I'm roughly defining 'indie' as meaning 'doesn't look like the end credits would last for literally half an hour'. Also I couldn't quite capture all the screenshots I needed this time, so I'll warn you now that a tiny handful of the images will be... less than ideal. You'll see what I mean.

Super AiG Screenshots of the Year: 2019

This week on Super Adventures, I've got a page full of screenshots with writing under them for you. Sounds pretty typical for this site, but this time there's a twist: you've seen them all before! There's absolutely no new content here for you!

I usually do my Screenshots of the Year post on New Years Eve, but I didn't see the point in keeping you waiting a few weeks when I'm already done writing about games this year. I'm taking another break, no more games until the end of January I'm afraid.

Taking all these two months breaks has really helped me out though. For one thing it meant I only had half the amount of posts to look through when I was picking out my favourite screenshots. Plus it meant that my short list turned out to be a lot shorter than usual, so I didn't have to agonise over what screens and GIFs made it into the final post. The moral of the story, doing less work is... good?

(If you see a screenshot from a modern system you can probably click it to see the same image in glorious 720p!)

Super Adventures with the Xbox Game Pass

You might be aware that Microsoft has a fantastic Xbox Game Pass deal right now. New subscribers can join Xbox Game Pass for a single dollar or pound, and get three months access to over a hundred games on PC and Xbox One, plus free months of EA/Origin Access, Discord Nitro and Spotify!

But what you likely don't know, is that I joined it like a week or two too early to get the three months! I only got one month! It's an actual tragedy. (Also I'm not getting paid for all this advertising I'm giving them and that sucks too.)

So this week on Super Adventures I decided to get three months' worth of gameplay out of my one month by playing too many games for not long enough each! I can't do a full post on each of them so I'm going to skip past the part where I try to be funny underneath screenshots and jump straight to the bit at the end where I sum up my first impressions. It's a bit of a change of format, but don't worry it's not going to stick.

I was really rushed last month (and I still am) so a few of these 'reviews' are just going to be me pointing out something funny I saw in the first ten minutes, right before I got bored and quit. You don't have to finish a game to know that it's bad, but giving it a few hours definitely helps and I didn't always do that, so don't take my complaining too seriously. I'm just showing off some of the games I played, because it felt like it'd be wasted opportunity not to.