Super AiG Screenshots of the Year: 2024

This year on Super Adventures, I got a little busy with stuff and wasn't able to cover as many games as I would've liked. It's a bit frustrating actually, as I'd put a hundred hours into a epic RPG trilogy (DLC and all) and I was about to get to work on an article about the third one when my focus was pulled elsewhere... for 6 months. I'm sure I'll be able to remember some of it though.

Anyway, you might be thinking that there's no point in me writing an article showing off my favourite screenshots of the last year when I only played 11 games, and I can definitely follow your line of thinking. In fact, you're starting to talk me out of it. But it's what I do at the end of every year and I'm fast running out of December, so I'm just going to get on with it.

Besides, some of those games are absolute classics. And one of the other ones is Loadstar: The Legend of Tully Bodine, so expect to see an exploding skeleton at some point. The GIF's a bit graphic.

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~ JANUARY ~

I'm starting with this shot of me placing decals in model kit simulator Model Builder. Mostly because that's blatantly Kaneda's iconic bike from Akira!

I love how brazenly the game reproduces things like Han's pistol from Star Wars and the Enterprise from the 2009 Star Trek movie... and not just because it gives me an excuse to segue into promoting my other site, Ray Hardgrit's Sci-Fi Adventures, where I write about Star Wars and Star Trek and stuff. Though I've actually been too busy to update that in months as well, so there's nothing much new there either.

Here's a horrifying glimpse at what the pioneering Donkey Kong Country looks like if you take away the CRT television magic and RF cable fuzziness.

Actually, I think it still looks pretty great for a SNES game from 1995, though maybe I'm just saying that because I know what CGI from back then often looked like.

Oh no I'm thinking about Mecha-Neko's Star Crusader article again!

To be clear, I'm not blaming the artists for how this turned out. Not everyone had Pixar's tools and experience. In fact, 3D was so new that barely anyone had any experience with it.

Here, have a GIF with a bit more tension. Will I ever press the jump button to fire Donkey Kong from the barrel cannon and what will happen if I do?

Anyway, Model Builder and DKC were the only two games I played in January, though I did sneakily publish a guest post from Ocean dated from November 2013 that had somehow sat in the 'Drafts' folder all this time:

Frogatto & Friends! Those are some nice spiky leaves in my opinion. They're harder to get right than you might think. Save toilets aren't too tricky to pixel though.

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~ FEBRUARY ~

 

Loadstar: The Legend of Tully Bodine featured a mix of expensive cutting-edge CGI and pricey live-action footage, so they had to cut a few corners when it came to the gameplay and narrative. Basically it doesn't have much of either.

It looks kind of amazing for 1994 though. Try telling people that Loadstar: The Legend of Tully Bodine was the Cyberpunk 2077 of its day and you'll get blank stares, but you can't say it doesn't have some nice pre-rendered ray tracing for something old enough to debut on the Sega CD.

Though the Sega CD version looks more like this. Still, they built actual real sets for the actors to act on. Perhaps as many as three of them!

And yeah, they didn't have enough disc space or money to film... a story. But the game does set up the possibility that a story might have emerged in its sequels if anyone had actually bought a copy.

Speaking of beautiful CGI, here's the title screen animation for Sonic 3 & Knuckles... with a little less slowdown than it would have on a Mega Drive. I usually try to make my shots as authentic as possible, but I couldn't resist using the Saturn port as a reference to fix the timing.

The good thing about going back to classic 16-bit games is that I get to really cut loose with the GIFs. People stopped being impressed by moving pictures on websites when YouTube and Twitch became a thing and you could see someone play a entire game from start to finish. But I still like a good GIF.

There's something very satisfying about getting these clips to loop like this, even if it's not entirely seamless (the rings all turning back into blue spheres is a bit of a giveaway).

I'm especially happy about how this one turned out.

Man, Sonic 3 had some great classic 16-bit pixel art, and an absurd number of animations for the hedgehog himself. Most platformers don't have a separate set of frames just for the times the hero ends up in a blender.

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~ MARCH ~

In March I wrote about the original TimeSplitters for the PlayStation 2... and that was all I did that month.

Any rumours that I also wrote articles about the sequels and then decided to hold onto them for a bit so I didn't end up talking about three early 2000s first-person shooters in a row should be ignored. At least until I find time to get the final drafts polished and ready.

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~ APRIL ~

In April I played Disney movie tie-in The Lion King, on every system I could (this GIF's from the SNES version).

Look at that beautiful animation on Simba's idle animation, it's crazy! They were working with the same tiny pixels as everyone else making these 16-bit games, the same colour and memory limitations, but they somehow managed to get this out of them.

Even the Game Gear version looked good... on the game over screen.

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~ JULY ~

I wasn't expecting to enjoy racing game The Crew all that much, so when it turned out to be good I was left even more frustrated that it got erased from existence when its servers shut down. Erased from my Ubisoft library at least.

How cruel of them to make me a game with a Photo Mode and then take it away forever.

I didn't even have time to finish the story before the servers shut down. Though I was at least able to drive across the entire US, posing with my Dodge Challenger next to wildlife.

Man that's a stunning view... I love the Challenger.

I liked Need for Speed: Undercover more than I was expecting to as well, and thankfully I can still play this one even after its delisting. That means I get to enjoy all the goofy police takedown cutscenes all over again.

Forza Horizon 3 is the kind of game where you don't have to try too hard to get beautiful looking screenshots out of it. It's also not hard to find hot air balloons, which will be handy when I finally get around to writing my article about how they keep appearing in racing games all the time.

See, there they are in Forza Horizon 4 too!

You can kind of spot them at the start of Forza Horizon 5 as well, though I didn't write a review for this one. The game's basically identical to Forza Horizon 4 from what I can tell, so there's probably not much new I could say about it.

You can have prosthetic limbs and a hearing aid, so that's different. Oh plus your character actually talks back to other people now, so conversations are less one-sided. Mostly though you get a change of location and some prettier visuals. There you go, you've gotten a surprise mini bonus review inside of a screenshot showcase!

July turned out to be a pretty productive month for me, as my delisted racing game saga dragged on for three parts. But then other things demanded more of my time and Super Adventures went quiet for a while.

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~ NOVEMBER ~

17 weeks later I finally returned to Super Adventures to post this single screenshot from Far Cry 5! Because that's a long time for a site to go without updates and it's a good picture I reckon.

The game has a Photo Mode, so I went a bit nuts trying to find the most dramatic angles to capture moments from. Not that you have to try too hard to add drama when you just sniped a fighter pilot coming down on a strafing run and knocked him right out of his cockpit.

Here's another angle, so you can really admire those Medium Quality graphics, or whatever I had it set to back then. It's a shame I didn't think to take screenshots of all the stuff I did on actual missions as well, then I could've maybe written about it, but I guess I wanted to just enjoy playing a game at the time.

It was 29th December 2020, I'd just finished my epic Screenshots of the Decade post, and I probably needed the break.

Here's my belated review of Far Cry 5: you can dogfight a WWII fighter using a wingsuit, 10/10. It's a bit of a one-sided dogfight to be fair, and not very historically accurate, but you can also get an actual dog as a sidekick so I'm sticking to my score.

Seriously, I know it's cool to hate on the Far Cry games these days, but I absolutely love them, especially in co-op. Sure they get a bit repetitive due to all that stuff you repeat in each game... drive to the outpost, mark all the enemies, take down the first few enemies with stealth then get spotted and break out the mortar instead... but when I ran out of missions I didn't turn it off, call it done, and uninstall, I went straight into playing the custom maps.

I even liked Far Cry 6, despite Ubisoft's efforts to spoil it with spongy enemies.

Sure Far Cry 6 wasn't always as solid as previous titles, sometimes even the ground let me down, but... wow I have gotten really off track here. I'm supposed to be picking my favourite screenshots from 2024. Sorry.

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~ DECEMBER ~

Finally, here's a shot from The Crew Motorfest, which also has balloons everywhere! They're just the wrong type.

It also has cars, and some beautifully lit events to drive them through. Sometimes you can even catch a glimpse of the road behind the stunning lens flares.

Here, this is what I'm talking about.

I could just keep showing screenshots from Motorfest (as I haven't hit my normal picture count yet), but it's past Christmas so I'm already late enough wrapping this up.

SUPER ADVENTURES 2024 REVIEW

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Every year I end my Screenshots of the Year post with a block of text like this that talks about how I've published fewer articles than last year, and that's still sadly true for 2024. I keep installing games, booting them up, and starting new articles... but who has time to actually finish writing them? Distractions are always going to derail whatever I've been working on, as when I'm pulled away I find myself racing against fading memories. I do keep notes to work from, but those pages of scrawled text have a habit of becoming more cryptic and daunting every day, so if I leave something for too long it's just not getting finished.

But it's not like I'm trying to hit a quota, so who even cares! I'm going for quality over quantity here. Procrastination over productivity. Screenshots over substance. And when I feel like I've been slacking there is one statistic that makes me feel better: this is Super Adventures article #1373.

Anyway, this is the part where I come up with some numbers for the year, so I guess I'll put those 11 games I covered into a spreadsheet and calculate some results... or I could just do the maths in my head this time.

I gave 82% of games a star this year, which means only Loadstar and TimeSplitters were left out. This means almost everything I tried was entertaining enough for me to play again sometime. Even Need for Speed: Undercover.		36% of the games I played this year got a prize, most of them racing games. Either it's secretly my favourite genre, or I just played a lot of them. (It's the second one).

SYSTEMS:

PC: 73%   Xbox: 45% PlayStation: 36% Sega: 27% Nintendo: 27% Amiga: 9%

This year my percentages don't add up to 100% as I'm counting all of a game's ports, not just the version I played. This way it doesn't look like I'm neglecting Nintendo so much! After three years without a SNES game and two without a Sega game I had take action, so I played Donkey Kong Country and Sonic 3! And also The Lion King, that counts too. Poor Amiga though, it's dropped from second place all the way down to last.

GENRES:

Racing: 45%   Platformer: 27% Rail Shooter: 9% FPS: 9% Simulator: 9%

First-person shooters dominated last year, but this time all I wrote about was TimeSpitters. Adventure games, action-adventure games, and RPGs have vanished entirely. Racing games were the first to cross the finish line this time, with platformers making a huge comeback to finish second.

ERAS:

1990s: 36% 2000s: 18% 2010s: 27% 2020s: 18%

The '90s come first, with the 2010s in second place, pushing the 2000s down into third. But the real winner is 1994, with 4 games coming out that year. Also one came out in 2014. Is it coincidence or fate that so many games from years ending in '4' appeared on my site in 2024? Nope, fate was when my racing games all started getting delisted and I had to write about them fast. My original plan was to focus on games with an anniversary this year, so it should've been all 4s.

A huge genuine thanks to every actual human person who read my words, scrolled through my pictures or at least took a guess at what the next game would be during the past year. Super Adventures will return for 2025 and I promise you now that I will try to remember to play another Nintendo game.

Happy New Year!