Super AiG Screenshots of the Year: 2021

There are two Super Adventures traditions that I give a damn about: the site always begins a new year on January 30th and it always ends a year with screenshots. And sometimes GIFs. Maybe even graphs if I'm feeling statistical. This is the last article of 2021 so that means it's time for another Super Adventures clip show!

I'm a little worried about the screenshots this time though to be honest. It's been months since I played most of these games, I can't remember what screens I took, but I do know that I played a lot of mainstream critically-acclaimed mega hits this year and it's possible that the images are going to be a bit... I dunno, normal. Mundane. Humdrum. There has got to be a few good ones in there though, surely. I guess I'll see what I can dig up.

If you want to go read a game's original article you can click on the highlighted game title, and clicking the images will sometimes open a slightly bigger version to look at/collect/post on Discord to give me free advertising etc.

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~ JANUARY ~

Okay, I honestly forgot that I played Metal Slug: Super Vehicle-001 this year and now I just want to fill this article with nothing but Metal Slug GIFs. The game has some absurdly pretty pixel art and it's even better in motion. This is such an insanely beautiful game. And it's violent too!

These particular GIFs are special, as each of them gives you an exclusive glimpse at just how bad I am at the game.

Okay maybe I didn't do so badly in this section.

Man, look at the reflection of the background in the water; there's so much attention to detail here.

Sorry, I was going to go look through the rest of the year's posts and find some screenshots from other games for you, but I'm stuck watching this on a loop now. It's hypnotic.

What else did I play this year anyway?

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~ FEBRUARY ~

 

I couldn't leave out this creepy death animation from Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss.

Skeletons, man. They just love hanging around in RPGs, harassing heroes and laughing at their misfortune. But I guess there's a skeleton inside all of us.

There's definitely a skeleton inside Conrad B. Hart, hero of legendary adventure platformer Flashback. Though this death animation came from its considerably less legendary sequel Fade to Black. Well, legendarily terrible maybe.

To be fair the game predates third person action pioneers like Tomb Raider and Resident Evil, and they were figuring out the basics of the genre as they went.

Micro Machines can be a real dick sometimes.

In fact now that I think about it, Micro Machines is a dick all of the time.

Even the two player mode is designed to troll you! Still, at least it's not as harsh as its sequel.

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~ MARCH ~

Drakengard has some weird cubes in it. There are other things going on, it's a weird game in general, but those cubes really stayed with me. Who even knows what their deal is?

This shot isn't entirely representative of the Handkerchief. experience, as it's missing all the little dudes that follow you around, but I had to choose a picture with the goldfish artillery in it.

The game starts with this thing rolling up to your house and leaving it in ruins, so it deserves everything coming to it.

This only happened because I accidentally clicked on the thing I was actually trying to stay well away from, but hey I got a cutscene out of it so I'm not complaining. The game didn't even kill my dude off or insult me afterwards, which was cool. That's how you know you're playing a nice friendly Lucasfilm adventure like Loom instead of one of its meaner competitors.

Oh, changing the subject, if you've ever wondered 'Who is the absolute worst at playing video game pinball tables?" I've actually got an answer for you. It's me, I'm the worst.

I mean I didn't just get the ball stuck on a bumper in Pinball Illusions, I somehow managed it without even hitting anything on the way there. I have 0 score, how is that even possible?

This is from my Super Adventures in Pinball article by the way. I played a lot of pinball games and showed off a lot of stitched-together images of full tables.

Here, have a picture of the extremely 90s 'Ace of Space' table, from the game Slam Tilt.

I was tempted to show off some of the other tables, because some of that art was really... distinctive, but then it occurred to me that you can just click the link to the article and find them all there.

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~ JUNE ~

Katamari Damacy REROLL is one of those games that accelerates from 0 to 'mad' quicker than the speediest of supercars. I mean this is a shot from the very beginning of the intro! The game was practically begging me to screenshot all of it... so I did. I already posted all those shots though, so I don't need to dwell on it here any longer.

Actually, I do have to share the 'you screwed up' screen as well, because it's notorious.

I dunno why, but there's something kind of unnerving about this giant towering lunatic with a triangle for a nose who destroyed the entire universe on a drunken bender and then pressured his kid into destroying the Earth in order to fix it. I think it might be the beard that makes his chin look like a butt.

This GIF from Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow demonstrates how I'm even better at boss fights than I am at pinball games.

No seriously, I had 2 hit points for most of the fight and I still beat him. Of course I lost all those hit points by being profoundly terrible in the first half of the battle, but I pulled it back! Got him on my first try too.

Here, have a shot of Sonic the Hedgehog giving a thumbs up with one hand while holding his birthday chili dog in the other, from lightning-fast anniversary celebration Sonic Generations.

Every platformer hero has to have their favourite food. Donkey Kong has bananas, Quik the Thunder Rabbit has carrots, Zool has lollipops, Simon Belmont likes roast chicken straight out of a wall, and Sonic has chili dogs. I can't remember what Bubsy eats, but I think it's balls of wool.

I don't usually post shots of game installers and I definitely don't include them in my Screenshots of the Year articles, but Command & Conquer's installer is something special.

Here's a rare glimpse behind the scenes at Super Adventures: I had to run the installer over and over again to rehearse the mouse movement for the GIF, as I couldn't cheat the timing with that EVA logo spinning the whole time. I still didn't get it as smooth as I wanted though.

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~ JULY ~

 

I had to include a shot of the button-mashing boulder chase from Resident Evil 4, because I hate it. I hate it so much. The QTE sequence I mean, not the game. RE4's actually pretty decent when it's not pulling this crap.

Lawnmower Man was almost prophetic in its portrayal of the future and I'm not just talking about the adoption of VR headsets and the never-ending cyberwar.

See what I mean! It's like they knew.

System Shock guy doesn't look all that happy to become a cyborg, possibly because they've augmented his head by sticking it in a toilet bowl. Personally I think he should be more appreciative of the cutting-edge 1994 CGI they've used to depict his horrific fate.

I had to include a shot of Yangus from ultra-traditional PS2 JRPG Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King, as the dude's a true bro.

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~ SEPTEMBER ~

My Super Adventures in Face Editors III article was all about using character creators to make aliens, but I also ended up making a borzoi as well. I thought I was pushing the sliders beyond anything possible in nature, but then someone pointed out that there are dogs that actually look like this.

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~ OCTOBER ~

I cannot condone mecha-neko's decision to play YIIK but I can steal one of his screenshots. There aren't many games that let the protagonist run around inside a giant hollowed-out version of their own head like this, probably because it's weird and why would you ever do that?

There's nothing all that funny about this Splatterhouse 2 GIF, I just thought it had a nice flow to it.

Well okay maybe that enemy leaping backwards and drowning was kind of funny. And that fish-thing getting kicked in the face made me smile. Haha, dumb fish.

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~ NOVEMBER ~

Most people seem to agree that Mass Effect: Andromeda was a disappointing game, but it sure had a nice triangle. I can appreciate it when developers take the time to compose a shot like this.

Here, have the 'my face is tired' screenshot as well, while I still have the game's page open. There's plenty in this game that I'll defend, but when it comes to this line I've got nothing.

Wait, why am I not showing off the spaceship?

There you go. I wasn't sure they were going to be able to come up with anything as pretty as Commander Shepard's Normandy SR-2, but they went and did it. The Tempest is a work of art and for all the game's faults, it sure knows how to show the hero ship off.

In other news, the time monsters are absorbing more energy. They're going to explode ... and destroy the world.

There sure are a lot of shocked cats in the intro to unloved Xbox time 'em up Blinx: The Time Sweeper. If you're wondering why they all look just like Blinx himself, I haven't got an answer for you. Maybe they ran out of money?

I can tell you what Blinx's favourite food is though. It's trash.

I'll end with a shot of my monk photobombing during an epic battle with the Wight Knight in Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies. Because it's the last game I played this year.

Here's another glimpse into the inner workings of my Super Adventures operation: I didn't plan to write about three Dragon Quest games this year, I was only going to cover the eighth game and that's it. But I figured I should do the bare minimum of research, so I put on each of the first nine mainline Dragon Quests and fought a few battles just so I'd have an idea of how the series has evolved. But then it took me 2h 35m to reach the first battle in Dragon Quest VII! I figured after that I might as well take the video I'd been recording and turn it into an article, get something back from my time investment. DQ9 takes a bit to get started as well.

SUPER ADVENTURES 2021 REVIEW

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My gimmick for 2021 was 'Games that are on someone's top 10 list', but I was kind of cheating there as you can find anything on a top 10 somewhere if you look for lists like '20 Most Disappointing Video Games of 2017' and 'The Best 12 Sonic Games Ranked'. It was more of an inspiration than a limitation. Still, I think this year's average Metacritic score must have been way above any other year of the site. I'm not going to bother going to the effort of working out if that's true though, because mecha-neko and I covered 26 games this year alone, and that's not even counting all the pinball games and the games I played for my face editors article.

Okay, now that I've played some good games for a change I can go back to playing obscure trash next year. Absolute garbage. Or better yet, I could play whatever kind of games I feel like! There are going to be no rules and no gimmicks for 2022, though I will try to lean towards playing things that anyone could possibly care about.

I may as well give you some stats for 2021 while we're all here:

90% of the games I played this year got a 'Not Crap' star, indicating that I'd be happy to play them again, which is kind of crazy. In fact the only two games that didn't get one were Micro Machines and Blinx: The Time Sweeper.		I also gave 30% of the games a shiny trophy, which means that they've won my heart. That's a whole third of them! Though one of them went to Mass Effect: Andromeda, so I clearly can't be trusted with these trophies.

SYSTEMS:

Windows: 30%   MS-DOS: 20% PS2: 15% (The rest: 35%)

It's not a big shock to see PC at the top of this list once again, seeing as it's the easiest system to get screenshots from, but I am a bit surprised to see the PlayStation 2 has made it to third place. That's definitely never happened before. It's also a bit weird that I didn't cover any SNES or NES titles this year, and even weirder that this is the first time I've ever covered a Nintendo DS game or an original Xbox exclusive.

GENRES:

30% of the games I played this year were RPGs, the rest were all over the place in genre. The RPGs were all over the place as well really, as I played Ultima Underworld, three Dragon Quest games, Mass Effect: Andromeda and Stonekeep.

ERAS:

2000s: 50% 1990s: 40% 2010s: 10%

I usually tend to live in the 90s, where it's comfortable and cosy and the games have lots of nice pixel art, but the numbers claim that I actually spent more time in the 2000s this year. I guess it makes sense though, that after 10 years of Super Adventures I'd inevitably move forward to the next decade.

One last thing: every year I give you impossible little clues to what the next game is going to be. This year there were 25 of those tiny cryptic images, and thanks to the efforts of Alex Romanov, DeuilAsh, El despertando, LoboGuara, thekelvingreen and, uh, Anonymous, you successfully identified 20 of them!

Additional congratulations to thekelvingreen, who has demonstrated his superior game identification skills for the second year running. That means he has two of these for his mantelpiece now:
Or maybe he gets to keep hold of the same one for another year? Who even knows how it works. I don't even know if he has a mantelpiece.

Super Adventures is going to vanish now until the end of next January, but with any luck I'll have plenty more words under an abundance of screenshots during 2022. Plus you can always drop by the Official Super Adventures Discord Server while you wait. I guarantee there'll be more new words over there than there will be here for the next two months. At least once I sort out all the spam bots leaving messages on the site.