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.

Fade to Black (MS-DOS) - Guest Post

This week on Super Adventures, habitual guest poster mecha-neko has returned with another game for you. It's Fade to Black, the sequel to classic cinematic platformer Flashback from three years earlier (F2B... FB2, I see what they did there).

This year I've been playing games that have showed up in someone's top ten rankings and Fade to Black fits nicely with that as it was one of PC Zone's top ten PC action games in their August 1997 issue. In fact it was listed along with games like TIE Fighter, Quake and Tomb Raider, so it seems like it's going to be something really special!

Developer:

Delphine Studios International

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Release Date:

31st August 1995

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Systems:

MS-DOS, PlayStation, Dreamcast

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Hello there! This is Fade to Black, the sequel to Flashback: The Quest For Identity, following the continuing adventures of 90s rotoscoped polygon space hero Conrad B. Hart.

This has been on my agenda for a million years, but when I got out the DOS computer for Halloween Harry, I knew it was time for some space adventuring.

Be warned that this game continues on from the ending of Flashback so there will be SPOILERS for the ending of Flashback. Also, if you find the violent deaths of 3D prerendered men disturbing, this is not the post for you.

Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss (MS-DOS)

Developer:

Blue Sky

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Release Date:

1992

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Systems:

DOS, FM Towns, PC-98, PlayStation

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This year on Super Adventures, I'm celebrating 10 years of the site by playing games that have earned their place on a 'top 10' list at some point. Maybe I found a game on a 'Top 10 Best Game Over Themes' list, or perhaps a 'Top 10 Most Underwhelming Sequels' list, it doesn't matter as long as they made it there.

In this case I'm playing Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss which I found at #5 on PC Gamer's 1994 'Top 100', and at #3 on PC Zone's October 2000 'all-time classics' list. You could probably find it all over the place though as it's a bit legendary. It's part of the foundations that some of the biggest franchises are built on, as series like Deus Ex and Elder Scrolls can trace their lineage right back here. Tomb Raider and Minecraft too actually. Though there's a more direct link with Looking Glass's System Shock series, seeing as this is the first game by Blue Sky Productions... later known as Looking Glass Studios.

I haven't played this myself yet though, even though it seemed like an obvious choice for Super Adventures, and the main reason for that is that it looks like an absolute bastard to write about, and I'd want to do it right. Plus I haven't really played the other Ultima games and I know nothing about the series!

I checked Wikipedia however, and it turns out that Underworld was released just before Ultima VII, in 1992, and the Ultima series was 11 years old at the time. So this was a bit of a Resident Evil 4 situation I suppose, as it's an inventive and influential successor released about a decade after the original. Except here it's a spin-off, not a change in direction for the franchise, so fans of the classic gameplay weren't faced with their series making a genre shift. In fact it wasn't even originally an Ultima game at all, and they had to rewrite it during development to fit the lore and really turn up the 'ye olde English' dial.

I should mention that I'm playing the GOG version, which is presumably the CD release, and I should also mention it may include cartoony low-res spiders.

The History(s) of Video Games

This decade on Super Adventures, the site has covered around 1300 games, and I don't think I've spent enough time thinking about all the ways I could make lists with those games. Just imagine, instead of spending hours playing games, choosing screenshots, writing what happened in them etc. I could just put a bunch of game titles in a column and call it an article!

I need to put the games in some kind of order though, so I've decided for this article I'm going to sort them chronologically. This is going to be a big long list of years. Though they're not going to be the years the games were released in, they're going to be the years the games take place in.

This article is basically going to treat the games like they all take place in the same shared timeline where all the events happened, especially the ones that contradict each other. Because judging by how the number of characters added to each new Smash Bros. sequel keeps increasing, in a few decades all these games will all take place in the same universe. Unfortunately I can't mention events without mentioning events, so there may be a few minor SPOILERS here. But I'm not going to go ruining the plot of games or anything like that... hopefully.