Keio Flying Squadron (Sega Mega CD)

Developer:

Victor

|

Release Date:

1994 (1993 in Japan)

|

Systems:

Sega Mega CD

---

This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing a shoot 'em up on the Mega CD!

I haven't really written about a Mega CD game since Popful Mail six years ago, and it's been a while since I've played a shoot 'em up as well. The trouble with shoot 'em ups, is they're either really hard, in which case all I end up writing about is the various ways I got my dude exploded, or they're really easy, in which case all I write is "I'm still shooting at things," and "I'm kind of bored now."

But I figured I should give you at least one proper old-school side-scrolling shooter this year, so I went with the game where you play as a girl wearing a 1960s Playboy bunny suit in 1860s Japan. I checked a list of games I've written about so far, and it's an under-represented sub-genre.

Oh here's some trivia for you, straight from Wikipedia: the December 1994 issue of Sega Pro CD magazine included a demo disc for the game that ended after the first level. But you can use a level select cheat to skip past the part that sends you back to the title screen and keep playing it to the end, because they secretly included the entire full game on the disc.

Outcast: Second Contact (PC) - Guest Post

Today on Super Adventures, I've managed to drag guest poster mecha-neko back again so I get to take the week off! This also means that he's the one who'll be checking out the first few hours of that semi-recent Outcast remake, which makes sense seeing as he's the one who wrote about the original game way back in 2014. It's possible he's even remembered enough about it to make comparisons.

Hello there!

Five years ago, I wasn't as kind as I could've been to a game called Outcast, a PC action-adventure game about a man with a shiny visor and the orangest shirt in the multiverse travelling to another dimension to stop the Earth blowing up.

Developer:

Appeal

|

Release Date:

November 14th, 2017

|

Systems:

Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One

---

Now, for PC, PS4 and Xbox One, Commander Cutter Slade is back! Why? I honestly have no idea.

Fancy a look?

Judge Dredd (Arcade)

Developer:

Midway

|

Release Date:

Never

|

Systems:

Arcade

---

This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing an arcade game that never made it to arcades. They came really close though, had four prototype cabinets built and everything. Unfortunately the responses from people who played it weren't great and the game was scrapped instead of reworked because the developers didn't have much faith in it either.

I bet the guy who made that Judge Dredd head was happy with his work though, as it's impressing the hell out of me. First I assumed it must have been a sculpture, as you can imagine what a 3D rendered Dredd face would've looked like in 1992, but it's apparently an actor wearing prosthetics. You can see a better photo of the makeup (and the other side of his face) on the artist's DeviantArt page if you're curious.

I thought about playing this one ages ago when I was trying out all those other Judge Dredd games, like Judge Dredd, Judge Dredd and Judge Dredd, but I wasn't really keen on writing about an unfinished prototype back then so I skipped over it. I figured I had enough on my plate trying to play every video game that exists without also worrying about the ones that don't. But the game didn't go away, it got into the back of my mind and made itself comfortable, so here I am doing my past self's job for him to finally cross it off the list.

Sorry the screenshots aren't very sharp this time, they were too tiny at the original resolution and too big doubled. Not that they're supposed to be sharp, you're supposed to be viewing them on a fuzzy CRT. In fact this is the most authentic my site's ever looked!

Deadly Premonition: The Director's Cut (PC)

Developer:

Access Games

|

Release Date:

2013  (original 2010)

|

Systems:

Windows, PS3, Xbox 360

---

Good news! Super Adventures has finally returned to give you a new game post every week for the next two months. Unless you're reading this two months after it was posted, in which case I'm sorry but you just missed it. Go read Sci-Fi Adventures for a bit instead.

This week I'm playing Deadly Premonition, which is a game I bought for money just so I could write about it for you! Then I forgot all about it and left it sitting there in my Steam library unplayed for four years, but that just means it's even more retro now. It's also fairly notorious and I've heard a lot about it. Well, I've seen it mentioned a lot anyway; I've tried to avoid exposure to any actual info on the story or how it plays.

Though I did read on Wikipedia that it currently holds the Guinness World Record for the most critically polarising survival horror game, which is a really specific world record. Plus it also spoils that the game's a survival horror! I'd gotten the impression it was some kind of adventure game, a bit like Shenmue maybe. I checked Metacritic and the review scores do go all the way from 20 to 100, so now I'm curious what I'm going to think of it. I don't typically enjoy survival horror much, partly because I don't give a damn about horror or survival mechanics, but if survival horror fans dislike the game then maybe it's more my kind of thing? I am the world's biggest and only Resident Evil 5 fan after all.

I already like the rainy title screen, despite the annoyingly short guitar loop. I'm less keen on crashes though, so I've installed the DPFix patch by game fixing legend Durante in the hopes that it solves more problems than it causes. It does at least give me some graphics options to play with, but I've decided not to push the visuals too far above vanilla.

The game is pretty story driven and features a mystery, so I should warn you there'll be SPOILERS below as I go through the first few hours of the gameplay writing text under screenshots. Though I won't give away anything major, because explaining a detective's deductions in my own words seems like effort.