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!)

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~ JANUARY ~

I didn't love SNES Secret of Mana 'em up Secret of Evermore, but I do love those graphics. You wouldn't think that 3D rendered fans, painted boxes and pink pixelled poodles would work together but I think they actually kind of do. That poor dog though.

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~ FEBRUARY ~

Seems to me you can either go with giant snarling faces on your title screen or cute frogs, not both. But whoever did the title screen to the DOS version of Populous thinks I'm a fool to be limited by such tiny ambitions.

Also the SNES version of the game has tiny Nintendo consoles as the villages! I mean sometimes. It doesn't always look like this.

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~ MARCH ~

I wasn't the one who played Super Panda Adventures, but I had to throw in a shot of Fu's massive grin. He's such a cheerful panda!

I like his mad wizard friend as well.

Meanwhile this is the first thing you see when you start a new game in SiN Episodes: Emergence. It's like how Half-Life 2 starts with the G-Man's face right up against the screen, except this is showcasing another... aspect of the Source engine's rendering capabilities.

There's a button in IK+ that makes the fighters' trousers fall down when you press it. How this feature never made it to later fighting games I've no idea. We tend to assume that technology always moves forward, that things always build upon what came before, but some of humanity's greatest innovations are lost to history along the way.

Oriental Games shows that sometimes pushing the limits and going the extra mile with your visuals can actually take you somewhere you don't want to be. The artist went up against the Atari ST's technical limitations with this scene and I think the technical limitations won this round sadly.

Speaking of limitations, here's Pit-Fighter on the Amiga. The poor game lost a bit in translation from the arcade original.

Sure it's still a groundbreaking use of real actors as sprites, but getting there first doesn't always mean that you win. When it came to digitised people punching blood out of each other, it was ultimately Mortal Kombat that got to stand on that victory forklift, showing off its studly fight purse.

This looks great though. It's the game over screen from Amiga fighter Capital Punishment.

I've got a lot of fighting game screenshots here because I did a whole article on them, but they turned out to be some of my favourite shots from this year.

Like this one from Fightin' Spirit of a buff tiger beating up an alligator while the US Air Force cheers them on. This shot's got something for everything: an AH-64A Apache gunship, a tiger, uh.. a crate, it's awesome!

Plus I like the guys cheering them on from the background, because of how far in the background they are. They could've pulled that box up and sat closer to the action, but they didn't, because they're not idiots.

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~ JUNE ~

I went looking through my Deadly Premonition post hoping to find a good image of Detective York saying something daft about coffee, but no luck. There's no way I was going to leave the game out though, so I've gone with this image of the posters I found in the hospital instead. Because they're special.

It's not every day you come across a giant Star Trek model kit in the background of your scrolling brawler. To be fair to Judge Dredd, the game was never finished or released, so these might not have been intended to be the final graphics.

One thing I do know is that the developers were thinking of replacing that comic-perfect digitised Judge Dredd sprite with an equally digitised Sylvester Stallone, even though that would've been an actual crime and they would've ended up doing time in the iso-cubes for it.

There were three clips from mecha-neko's Outcast: Second Contact guest post I was thinking of using, all from the same cutscene.

Trouble is I couldn't decide which one to go with because they all cracked me up. Plus they're kind of inseparable.

In the end I decided to include all three of them. So you get to fully enjoy hero Cutter Slade wobbling around like a penguin in front of the sinister Professor Xue.

Also have some anime:

This is Rami from Keio Flying Squadron. She dresses like a bunny girl because if he she doesn't, her grandfather will.

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~ JULY ~

Don't worry, it's not her costume he's wearing here, he's got his own. I guess it's basically their family's idea of a superhero outfit, except instead of heroics they mostly just chase treasure and smack raccoons.

I was so happy when I first came across Keio Flying Squadron 2, because the moment I saw it I realised that I had my Screenshots of the Year post sorted.

Not that the other games I've played haven't delivered, but in a worst case scenario I could've just reposted my Keio 2 article with the writing changed and called it done.

It's got slick pixel art, beautiful anime cutscenes, a super-intelligent tanuki lobbing nukes down from his airship, and if that isn't enough it also likes to get a bit... weird.

Like when a boss's head 'hatches' to reveal this guy hiding inside. Or the bit where... actually I should probably move on to the next game already.

Here have a GIF from NES block-hopping Zelda 'em up StarTropics:

I'm giving myself an A+ for reflexes but an F- for decision making under pressure.

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~ AUGUST ~

These pirates also get an F-, because Escape from Monkey Island came out in 2000 and honestly I think they could've done better. Especially seeing as this is a pre-rendered cutscene!

The art in this game had some real problems (in my opinion), which is a shame considering how pretty the first three were for their time, and how pretty LucasArts games were in general.

Ion Fury, on the the other hand, looks fantastic, despite running on an engine from 1996. Well it does to me anyway. It plays pretty well too I thought.

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~ OCTOBER ~

To give this screenshot some context, the man in the purple suit at the front door has just come by to the see the other guy on the left. I get the feeling he didn't expect to see quite so much of him though.

I'm not sure what I was expecting from N64 turn-based sci-fi wrestling RPG Hybrid Heaven, but it probably wasn't turn-based sci-fi wrestling. It's definitely interesting though; one of the few games I've played that feels really unique.

Pinkie is a bit unique as well, as the gameplay's generally about driving around on a motorunicycle collecting eggs, but they didn't really pull it off quite so well. Guest poster mecha-neko was the one who played it, but from what I've seen the game's one long series of frustrations.

And you can shut up.

Jackie Chan's Stuntmaster's pre-rendered characters look even worse than Escape from Monkey Island's at times, but they also look awesome and are good!

I mean look at Jackie Chan. He's so... expressive!

But if you want beautiful looking visuals, Indivisible's not a bad place to look. This screenshot's not really showing the game off at its best, but I had to pick one with Razmi in it, because I always pick Razmi. She's my raspy gross tiger ghost pyromancer sidekick.

You know what sucks? Apples, just falling on your head from the sky. You're hanging out in the Castle of Illusion, catching your breath before heading down a hill, when suddenly APPLE. No warning, no mercy.

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~ NOVEMBER ~

Apples are a threat that demand constant diligence, even in the Castle of Illusion remake.

The best thing about this screenshot is Mickey's expression, as he's clearly utterly terrified of this fruit that's coming at him. As he should be.

The original Need for Speed on the 3DO has a feature that none of the sequels have, which is this dude turning up after the race in a tiny fuzzy video clip to mock you with his actual voiced words. This new multimedia CD technology was pretty impressive.

It's less impressive in a screenshot I admit, but I couldn't just leave the X-Man off the list! You might not be able to appreciate his wit and enthusiasm here, but you can at least admire that stylish background that's taking up the rest of the screen.

Here, have some T-Rex racing in Need for Speed II. If you look very closely you might be able to see that the dust they're kicking up is made of cows. I rarely ever use cheats, but when I do I try to go for the really good ones.

Golden Axe is such a part of my childhood that it took me a while to realise that a giant blue skeleton spinning the heroes around in his hand is actually kind of a weird image.

I wanted to include a shot of gameplay as well, but I wasn't sure which port to show off. Then I realised that I'd played the ZX Spectrum version!

It's so beautiful!

I'm pretty sure the guys in yellow are fully clothed by the way. Pretty sure.

Normality is another one of those games that was made for this list. A team of experts in Sheffield, England spent the mid-90s specifically engineering a game that would dominate a 'best screenshots' article of a site focused on retro games in 2019, and they succeeded.

These were actually cutting edge graphics at the time... kind of.

This motion captured animation was state of the art, and the games real-time 3D engine rivals the Build Engine used for Duke Nukem 3D, released just a few months earlier!

Of course Quake came out the same month and Tomb Raider arrived a few months later, so it started to look dated almost immediately. Didn't look any less weird though.

You won't find many 2.5D first person point and click adventure games like Normality out there. Well I haven't anyway. I'll keep looking though!

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~ DECEMBER ~

The trouble with Opus Magnum, is that once I've solved a puzzle I just want to watch the machine I've built run for a while. Even this simple early contraption is hypnotic in motion.

Plus it's just a nice looking game in general.

I really have to respect the amount of work that went into this intro video at the start of The Bard's Tale IV. They were so determined to precisely match the cover art to the first Bard's Tale that they constructed a forced perspective set, painted it to look identical and then painted everyone's clothes to match. I assumed it was composited using green screen, but no they really went all out on it and put the work in.

So I feel a bit guilty for thinking it looks hilarious. The guy isn't even playing along with the music properly! Not that you can tell that from a still image.

Here, have a guy who's head is a moon, from The Outer Worlds. I imagine that if you could take that mask off him, he'd have the exact same pained expression on his actual face, but sadly it seems that the mask must never come off.

You can get a hat like his for yourself though! In fact you can dress your whole party as a bunch of dapper moons... I think. Can't say I ever tried it myself.


SUPER ADVENTURES 2019 REVIEW

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The last time I did a Screenshots of the Year post was back in 2017 and it got a bit depressing by the end, seeing as it was the end. I was saying goodbye and walking away from the site. My enthusiasm had finally ran dry, and I'd realised that I was writing new posts more out of obligation than because I really wanted to.

But I'm back now and it turns out that taking regular breaks is a great way to ensure you give an appropriate amount of fucks about what you're doing! So I'm eager to get started on my two months one and half months off so I can get back to writing about games at the end of January.

I felt like I should bring back the end of year stats that I used to do in the olden days, but I've complicated things for myself this time by writing things like my Amiga Fighting Games article and my four-part Need for Speed epic. Some games have been given the full Super Adventure treatment and others have only gotten a few paragraphs. I wrote full posts for 23 games, which is about what you'd expect for weekly updates over half a year, but if you add all the others in (plus the four that mecha-neko kindly contributed) it's more like 70 I think. That's not bad I reckon! I've done much better in the past, but younger me was a lunatic with more free time.

But I've decided that for my stats I'm only going to count the games I gave full posts to, because the other games were all grouped together by a theme and they'd throw the numbers off.

This year 61% of games got a 'Not Crap' star, which is pretty typical. Turns out that I still like a little over half of what I play.		Only two games got my trophy this year, SiN Episodes and Ion Fury. It's beginning to seem that I like first person shooters, but I'll need to do more testing before I'm sure. Much more testing.

SYSTEMS:

PC: 39% Mega Drive: 17% N64: 9% SNES: 9%

Some shocking stats here, with PC only getting 39% of my attention and Sega's Mega Drive/Genesis coming second. Though I wrote so few posts this year that the numbers really just mean that the Mega Drive got four games, and the N64 and SNES got two each. PC, Amiga and Xbox One would be dominating if I'd included all the games I wrote about, but however you look at it I really let the PC Engine down this year. Again. I've nothing personal against the system, that's just how it worked out!

GENRES:

Platformer: 22% Brawler: 17% FPS: 13% RPG: 13%

No surprise to see platformers, first person shooters and RPGS dominate, but scrolling brawlers? I guess I was in the mood to walk to the right and punch things this year. Also I've gone through and counted all the games in my 'Fighting Games' and 'Need for Speed' posts and it turns out that if I'd included them fighting games and racing games would've gotten a much higher percentage.

ERAS:

1990s: 48% 2010s: 26% 2000s: 17% 1980s: 9%

If my data is correct it would appear that I'm most comfortable in the 90s and the present day. Either that or that's where all the most interesting games are. The results become dramatically pretty much the same if I include the other games.

My plan for 2020 is to continue to not stress out over what I play and go wherever my enthusiasm takes me in the moment. Maybe I'll have an urge to do an eight-part feature on the first 20 years of the FIFA games, or perhaps I'll suddenly get fixated on the Philips CD-i... probably not.

Though I do hope to do more articles that aren't focused on a single game, as they'll make a change from all the single games I intend to focus on next year. All I know for sure is that most games will be on PC, the PC Engine will continue to get unfairly shafted, and I'll give all my trophies to third person sandbox games and first person shooters.