Awesome (Amiga)

Developer:

Reflections

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Release Date:

1990

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Systems:

Amiga, Atari ST, FM Towns

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm looking at classic 90s shoot 'em up Awesome, which was suggested by the folks on my Discord. They realised I'd gotten caught in a bit of a rut last year, playing so many great games, and felt I should bring Super Adventures back to its roots. Its roots of me trying to figure out what the hell I'm doing in some obscure old Amiga game.

You can tell that the game came out before the internet was a thing as Awesome is not a Google friendly title. It says on the box that it has an awesome t-shirt included, but search for 'awesome t-shirt' on image search and you'll be scrolling for a long while before you find it. That's a bit of a difference from Reflections' earlier game Shadow of the Beast, which has a very Googlable name. One thing the two games have in common is the box art, which was a painting by frequent Psygnosis collaborator Roger Dean. You could tell Psygnosis games right away at this point because they were the ones that looked like Yes albums. Edit: none of that is true, the cover is actually a painting from John Harris called MASS: The Building of FTL1, painted about 10 years earlier in 1979.

Alright I'm going to play this for an hour or so and I hope you like GIFs because I'm in the mood for some moving pixels.

Super Adventures in the itch.io Bundle for Ukraine

We interrupt your regularly scheduled Super Adventures with a look at just a few of the billion games included in a new charity bundle hosted by itch.io. Here, have a link to the bundle so you know what I'm talking about:

Bundle for Ukraine

The description on the site claims that there's almost 600 video games here and it seems that about half of them have never appeared in any previous itch.io charity bundles. I had a scroll through to see if there were any names I recognised and I saw things like SkateBIRD, Baba is You, Backbone, GNOG, Wandersong, A Short Hike, CrossCode, Celeste, Superhot, Minit, Glittermitten Grove, Super Hexagon, Sundered: Eldritch Edition, 2064: Read Only Memories, and GoNNER. Here, you can check for yourself with this handy website that someone smart made: randombundlegame.com.

Fortunately guest poster mecha-neko has volunteered to do half of the writing here, so the article will be covering more games than I actually have time to check out! I mean seriously, the bundle ends in just a couple of days and I need to get this published while there's still time for anyone to buy it.

Donut County (PC)

Developer:

Ben Esposito

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Release Date:

2018

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Systems:

Win, MacOS, iOS, PS4, XBOne, Switch, Android

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm writing about indie puzzle game Donut County, from 2018. Because who doesn't love doughnuts? Donuts. Whatever.

The game was inspired by a tweet from Peter Molydeux (the twitter parody, not the notorious Bullfrog/Lionhead/22cans game designer and NFT fan), who suggested the idea "You play the role of a hole, you must move around an environment making certain elements fall into correct targets at the right time." He didn't mention anything about raccoons or doughnuts though, so that's all from the mind of creator Ben Esposito.

Oh no, I've looked at the title screen a little too long and now I need to go get a cup of tea and something to dunk in it. Then I'm going to play the first few levels and see what kind of game it is.