Super AiG Screenshots of the Year: 2022

It's that time of year where people look back over what they've been up to over the last year and post about it on the internet. Even Steam's doing it now with their new Steam Replay feature. But I've been revisiting the last 12 months of screenshots at the end of the year since 2011, so you're probably not surprised to be reading yet another Super Adventures Screenshots of the Year!

I've gone through every post this year, skimmed through 700 images and picked out the shiny ones that caught my eye. There'll be nothing new here if you've been keeping up, but the screenshots are the best part of my site and this time there'll be fewer words underneath to distract from them. Though if you do want to go back and read the full write up, you can click the game's name to be teleported over there.

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~ JANUARY ~

Last year I started with a bunch of Metal Slug GIFs, and I can't really compete with that, but this clip from Flight of the Amazon Queen is pretty great too I reckon.

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~ FEBRUARY ~

 

Ever wanted to see the inner workings of a starship engine? Exodus: 3010 has you covered. Also as an added bonus for me, whenever I look at screenshots of the game I get the music playing in my head.

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~ MARCH ~

I learned a lot about rabbits from hole-simulator Donut County.

There isn't a lot I can say about Menos: Psi-Shatter, because I wasn't the one who played it, it was mecha-neko. But from what I can tell from this 30 second video clip, you use telekinesis to defenestrate your enemies and then maybe shoot them a bit if they get back up.

Amiga shoot 'em up Awesome has some great looking computer screens to look at once you reach a planet. This was almost worth all the crap I had to go through to get here. Almost.

Fighting this giant snake dragon creature wasn't even the worst of it. Not by a long shot.

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~ APRIL ~

Have an iconic shot of a big-ass chess piece blocking the corridor in Superliminal. If you're into chess pieces but don't really want to use them to play chess, this is definitely the game for you.

I love video game computer screens, especially super advanced ones from the distant future. This particular shot is of the Intex Network system found in Alien Breed Special Edition 92, which takes place in an era where screen burn-in has been turned into an art form.  

This title screen's pretty iconic as well I reckon. You can tell he uses whitening toothpaste.

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~ JUNE ~

Sometimes I take a screenshot so beautiful I just want to show it off to everyone. And then sometimes I take a shot like this.

Okay, this is an actual screenshot of what Wing Commander II actually looks like, but there's a good reason why it looks so glitchy. What happened here is that they 3D rendered a bunch of backgrounds for the game and then instead of giving them each their own palette of 200 colours, they used the same palette for the whole game. So the art program did its best attempt at reducing the colour depth using the limited shades available to it, and this was the result. They did better with the next game.

The moment I saw this intro I knew I was going to be writing about Alien Storm for my site. It wasn't even optional.

Also look at this jump! I thought this guy was just a regular human who works in a hot dog van and shoots aliens as a hobby, but then he suddenly took off down the street like the Flash!

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~ JULY ~

Uh, mecha-neko was the one who played Crusader: No Remorse, so you'll have to ask him what this is about.

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~ AUGUST ~

Sometimes I just feel like showing off a spaceship. Wing Commander III's 3D engine is a bit dated now, but it has just enough polygons to show off that beautiful Excalibur fighter.

I don't think this is how you're supposed to manoeuvre your balls to the exit on this level of Mega Motion, but I made a bit of a mess out of the blocks and had to improvise. The sad thing is, I actually stuck with this dumb plan until it worked and I got them out.

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~ SEPTEMBER ~

The title screen for the C64 version of Alien Syndrome makes it look like they're fighting an evil train.

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~ OCTOBER ~

I didn't know what screenshot to choose from mecha-neko's Small Saga article, so I went with these dancing rats...

... this awe-inspiring shelf full of beans peas...

... and a sinister cat with glowing eyes and a creepy font. Just don't stare at the picture too long or you might start wondering why the shadows don't match.

Here's a giant space wizard ordering a biplane to attack a caveman in Mega Lo Mania's intro. Probably doesn't look this dramatic in game.

Does Edward Carnby have the most iconic moustache in video game history? The answer is 'no', as he shaved it off after the first Alone in the Dark.

The game's graphics look a bit dated these days, but I think it's pretty impressive what they pulled off here considering it came out in 1992. That's four years before Resident Evil. If you want to see something properly horrifying you should check out the game over screen:

I don't know what I'm looking at here exactly, but it seems bad.

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~ NOVEMBER ~

Everyone loves looping corridor GIFs, like this one from the demo of the unfinished and unreleased Operation GII.

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~ DECEMBER ~

And I'll finish with the game over screen from Oni, just so you don't have that animated GIF distracting you while you read the last bit of the article.

SUPER ADVENTURES 2022 REVIEW

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My gimmick for 2022 was 'I'm just playing whatever I feel like, I'm not even putting any thought into it', and yet somehow I ended up playing a bunch of games with titles starting with 'Alien'. Alien Breed, Alien Storm, Alien Syndrome. In fact now that I think about it, a third of the 15 games I covered this year began with an 'A', which is downright unusual. I think I've solved the mystery of this statistical irregularity though: I just didn't cover many games this year. Definitely not as many as I'd hoped to.

There are a few reasons for this, but I can sum them up with: I was busy. Sometimes I was busy with work, sometimes with Sci-Fi Adventures, sometimes I was busy investing 90 hours into Disgaea 4: A Promise Unforgotten (PS4), but overall I was busy with things that didn't involve writing for this site. And that's... okay. It means you've had more time to do other things with your life as well, so we all win.

Here, have some stats to look at while you're here:

Two thirds of the games I played this year got a 'Not Crap' star, which isn't bad. Not as good as last time, but I was playing games I'd found on top 10 lists last year so you'd expect a bit of a drop.		Only 20% of the games I played this year got a prize, which is a step down from 30% last year. If the percentage continues to fall at this rate I'll be down to 0% in 2024!

SYSTEMS:

Windows: 27%   MS-DOS: 27% Amiga: 27% Arcade: 13% Xbox: 1%

Windows, DOS and Amiga each share the top spot in 2022, with over half the games I played being on PC. I got a comment calling me an Xbox/Microsoft shill and the stats back that up, as the Xbox is the only console I covered all year! This is the second year in a row without a single NES or SNES game and probably the first year without a Sega game. Well, except for all those Sega arcade titles.

GENRES:

I played a big mess of everything this year, though I guess puzzle games is technically my most played genre. It was also my favourite genre, as Superliminal and Donut County both won a trophy. Usually it's RPGs or platformers that dominate, so I don't know what happened here.

ERAS:

1990s: 60% 2010s: 20% 2000s: 13% 1980s:   7%

Yeah, that seems like a pretty standard set of percentages for my site. Time crawls inexorably onwards but I'm still stuck in the 90s. Well, 60% of the time anyway. It's where all the good pixel art is!

And finally I have to give out an award to the reader who did the best job of identifying the games in my tiny little 'next game' clue images at the end of each article. Well okay I don't have to, but I think skill like that deserves to be rewarded. This time thekelvingreen and El despertando were the two most powerful game identifiers, but the overall winner is...

...thekelvingreen for the third year in a row! He spoiled the next game for everyone 10 times last year. Hopefully someone else is going to step up and defeat him in 2023 as this is getting ridiculous now.
 
Oh I should probably mention that Super Adventures will return in 2023! Unless I'm busy. Happy New Year!