Lotus Turbo Challenge Games

This week on Super Adventures, I'm taking a trip back to the past... back to the early days of Super Adventures, when I thought it was acceptable to cover a bunch of old-school arcade-style sprite-based racing games in one article. I'd give them each three screenshots and write things like "Dodging cars is hard!" and "Hey, I got first place!" underneath.

I eventually learned my lesson and realised that these kinds of games weren't going to give me much to work with. You have a sprite of a car and you slide it left and right to get around the other cars and obstacles, while also trying to avoid flying off the track on the turns. There, I just described all of them.

But I could never resist showing off screenshots full of art, and it occurs to me that I never got around to covering the biggest stars in the genre. No Out Run, no Road Rash, not even Lotus 1-2-3. Uh, I mean Magnetic Fields' legendary racing trilogy, not the legendary spreadsheet software. Speaking of spreadsheets, did you know Lotus made a car called the Excel?

Anyway, I'm going to play some Lotus games and I'm going to show off all the artwork, and if I can find anything to write about them, well that's a bonus. Screenshots will be from the Amiga 500 versions unless specified otherwise, though I will have a look at some of the ports as well. These games made their way onto all kinds of systems, like the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, C64, PC... though not the NES or SNES for some reason. I've no idea why Nintendo got left out.

There was another game called Lotus Challenge released on the PS2 in 2001, but that's entirely unrelated so I won't be playing that one.

Alone in the Dark (MS-DOS) - Part 2

Today on Super Adventures, I'm going to try to beat the original Alone in the Dark!

This is the second and final part of my two-part article, so you'll probably want to check out PART ONE first. I wrote all about all kinds of stuff, even mentioned Resident Evil a couple of times.

One thing I didn't talk about though, and it's fairly important, is that the game came out in late 1992... so this is its 30th anniversary! It's getting a remake soon to celebrate and from what I can tell it's the kind of reimagining where they take all the stuff from the original game and put it to one side so they can make up a bunch of other stuff instead. I feel like it'll probably have better combat though.

Okay this is the last part of my Alone in the Dark playthrough and I'm playing this with the intent to finally finish it, so beyond this point the SPOILERS will be extensive. With any luck. I mean I can't make any promises here, you can count the number of true survival horror games I've completed on one hand, with all the fingers severed, but maybe this will be the first!

Alone in the Dark (MS-DOS) - Part 1

Developer:

Infogrames

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Release Date:

1992 (CD version 1993)

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Systems:

DOS, PC-98, FM Towns, 3DO, Mac, Archimedes

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing the Guinness World Record holder for "First 3D survival-horror videogame": Alone in the Dark! I mean the original one, obviously. A sequel tried to steal its name in 2008, but the original proved too powerful and the PS3 release renamed it to Alone in the Dark: Inferno, so as far as I'm concerned this is the only true Alone in the Dark.

Well, except for the classic Uwe Boll movie I mean.

I know everyone that talks about Alone in the Dark also has to mention Resident Evil, but I think it's funny how the series both started off as critically-acclaimed genre pioneers and then suffered very different fates. Resident Evil has had seven million sequels and remakes, many of them pretty great, while the Alone in the Dark games have been racing to catch up to their own movie series down at the bottom of Metacritic. There's a bit of a disparity in how the two franchises are regarded these days, and it'd take a lot more than a terrible Netflix series to change that.

But I still remember how blown away I was when I saw the first Alone in the Dark previewed on the TV series Bad Influence! back when I was a tiny baby. It looked so much more advanced than anything I'd played on the Amiga, SNES or Mega Drive. I didn't know much about PC's at that point, but I was sold, I wanted one.

Then a few years later my family actually got a PC! I loaded up Alone in the Dark on it, pushed some furniture around, got killed by a monster, and turned it off to play Theme Hospital or Sam and Max or something instead. (I'm not a big fan of horror games to be honest). So I have played through first few rooms before, I'm very familiar with them, but otherwise I'm going into the game blind. I don't know what happens next or anything about the story.

Okay, I'm going to be playing the version I just bought off GOG (which I believe is just the 1993 DOS CD version), and I'm going to be writing about it in two parts. This first part is going to be a regular Super Adventures article where I stick with it for an hour and whine about how hard it is, but in the second part I am going to try to finish it. I want to see what this game actually is! So there will be moderate SPOILERS in the first part and hopefully some extreme spoilers in the second.

Exodus: 3010 - The First Chapter (Amiga) - Guest Post

This week on Super Adventures, guest reviewer mecha-neko has returned to pass judgement upon an old Amiga game from the early 90s that's presumably set 988 years in the future. Unless the title's lying to us.

Happy new year, everyone! Can you believe it's been over ten years since I started playing games as mecha-neko for Super Adventures in Gaming?

Today I'm going to revisit a game from my childhood. It's also one of the first games I wrote about as mecha-neko, but it's not one that's appeared on this site as a Super Adventure.

Developer:

Temet

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Release Date:

January 1992

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Systems:

Amiga 500

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To celebrate its thirtieth anniversary, I present space survival management/flight sim Exodus: '3010: The First Chapter'!

Splatterhouse 2 (Genesis/Mega Drive)

Developer:

Now Production

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Release Date:

1992

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Systems:

Mega Drive

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm checking out Mega Drive brawler Splatterhouse 2! I figured I should play something with a bit of a horror theme for Halloween... for a change. I generally only remember to play a Halloween game 40% of the time, so you got lucky this year. Or unlucky, if you came here hoping to get away from it.

Horror's never really been my favourite genre to be honest, plus I get bored of side-scrolling beat 'em ups very quickly, but I found Splatterhouse 2 at #1 on Horror Geek Life's Top 10 Spookiest Horror Games on the Sega Genesis so it has to be something special. Unless it's just not a very spooky console. Splatterhouse 3 also made the list, but not the first Splatterhouse... which makes sense as it was never released for the system. Splatterhouse 1 started out on arcade and was ported to TurboGrafix-16, FM Towns, PC, but not the Mega Drive. The two sequels, on the other hand, were Mega Drive exclusives. So that must have sucked for all the TG-16-owning Splatterhouse fans who wanted a sequel, and the Sega-owning completists who wanted them all.

The original arcade Splatterhouse was by Namco, but this sequel was outsourced to Now Production, the folks who'd made the Splatterhouse spoof spin-off Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti on the NES. They've got 70 games listed on MobyGames and they're still going strong to this day, releasing Switch titles like, uh, Spaceship Curse, Seal Electric Railway, and Shark Copter vs. Zombie Dancers.

Bloody hell, I've written Splatterhouse 9 times and it's only the intro. 10 times now. Alright I usually stop after the first hour, but that would probably be enough to beat Splatt... this game twice over, so this time I'm only going to cover the first ten minutes. Fortunately I can probably drag those ten minutes out all night, as I'm crap at these kinds of games.

Content warning: this is a horror game so it's going to be a bit horrible at times. Lots of 16-bit gore and nastiness. There'll also be spoilers for the first game.

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.

StarTropics (NES)

Developer:

Locomotive, Nintendo R&D3

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Release Date:

1992 (1990 in NA)

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Systems:

NES

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm thinking about how much StarTropics' title screen reminds me of the title screen of Metroid. They've got the same 'text floating in front of a twinkling starfield' look. Though Metroid has fewer palm trees.

StarTropics is fairly well known among people who aren't me, but I never played it myself. In fact I thought it was a SNES game until I looked it up. I'm still not sure how it plays, but if I had to guess I'd say it was probably going to be a little like that Secret of Evermore game I wrote about in January. The two games definitely share one thing in common: their titles both start with the letter 'S'. Also they were both developed with a Western audience in mind and never got a release in Japan. They even left it off the Nintendo Classic Mini Family Computer (aka the Famicom Mini) despite it being one of the 30 games that came with the NES Classic in other regions.

It was produced and written by a Japanese game designer though, Genyo Takeda, who was apparently also responsible for a: putting battery backed-up save RAM in the cartridge version of The Legend of Zelda and making that a thing, b: sticking an analogue thumbstick on the N64 controller and inspiring Sega and Sony to do it too, and c: holding the Wii back so that it was a generation behind the Xbox 360 and PS3. He became the manager of Nintendo's hardware development division in 1980 and didn't retire until 2017, so he was a fairly influential guy during the entire history of video games. Plus he produced Punch-Out.

Judge Dredd (Arcade)

Developer:

Midway

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Release Date:

Never

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Systems:

Arcade

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing an arcade game that never made it to arcades. They came really close though, had four prototype cabinets built and everything. Unfortunately the responses from people who played it weren't great and the game was scrapped instead of reworked because the developers didn't have much faith in it either.

I bet the guy who made that Judge Dredd head was happy with his work though, as it's impressing the hell out of me. First I assumed it must have been a sculpture, as you can imagine what a 3D rendered Dredd face would've looked like in 1992, but it's apparently an actor wearing prosthetics. You can see a better photo of the makeup (and the other side of his face) on the artist's DeviantArt page if you're curious.

I thought about playing this one ages ago when I was trying out all those other Judge Dredd games, like Judge Dredd, Judge Dredd and Judge Dredd, but I wasn't really keen on writing about an unfinished prototype back then so I skipped over it. I figured I had enough on my plate trying to play every video game that exists without also worrying about the ones that don't. But the game didn't go away, it got into the back of my mind and made itself comfortable, so here I am doing my past self's job for him to finally cross it off the list.

Sorry the screenshots aren't very sharp this time, they were too tiny at the original resolution and too big doubled. Not that they're supposed to be sharp, you're supposed to be viewing them on a fuzzy CRT. In fact this is the most authentic my site's ever looked!

Sensible Soccer (Amiga)

Developer:

Sensible Software

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Release Date:

1992

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Systems:

Amiga, Atari ST, DOS

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Hey I've got a terrible idea, how about I play Sensible Soccer?

I haven't written about a sports game on Super Adventures for about five years now because I realised early on that they weren't working out for all kinds of reasons. These reasons include: I'm terrible at them, I usually don't know the rules, they don't give me much to write about, I often end up with a lot of empty green screenshots with tiny people standing around, and I hate them.

But I'm making a special exception for Sensible Soccer, on account of it being perhaps the most beloved Amiga game ever. It seems to have a spot reserved in every top 100 list right up near the top (unless they've chosen its sequel Sensible World of Soccer instead). Plus the spiritual successor, Sociable Soccer, is coming out soon, so it seemed like a good time for it.

Okay, I'll try to get this over with quickly, with as little whining as possible. I'll show a few screenshots of bland looking menus, a few of me losing a match, then we can both get on with our day.

Bill's Tomato Game (Amiga)

Developer:

Bill

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Release Date:

1992

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Systems:

Amiga, Atari ST

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It's the 30th anniversary of the Commodore Amiga 500 home computer! I mean not today specifically, it seems like it hit the Netherlands in April 1987 and the rest of Europe shortly after. But it was released in the US at some point during October, and that's all the excuse I need to make this month on Super Adventures all about AMIGA GAMES!

For the next few weeks it's all Amiga titles, nothing else. Wall to wall Amiga. Though don't worry if you're not keen on that idea; at the rate I've been writing about games lately you're likely to only see two at best.

I started by checking top 100 lists to put together a set of classic titles that really define what the system is, the most Amigary of Amiga games... but then I realised that they'd have me playing things like Sensible Soccer. So I scrapped that plan and decided to play a few of the games that have stuck in my head for whatever reason. Like Bill's Tomato Game for instance! It's a game about tomatoes made by a guy called Bill Pullan. Though it definitely isn't named after him, at least according to the manual, which I definitely didn't check just now out of curiosity.

Wolfchild (Amiga)

Developer:

Core Design

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Release:

1992

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Systems:

Amiga, Atari ST, Mega Drive, Sega CD, SNES, Master System, Game Gear

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This week on Super Adventures I'm playing an Amiga platformer about a werewolf!

Wolfchild is one of those games Core Design came up in their pre-Tomb Raider era when the staff were still allowed to have ideas. I'm sure I must have played this before but it couldn't have been for long and it didn't leave much of an impression. I've been searching through the corner of my brain reserved for Amiga games and all I've dug up are some fuzzy screenshots of a wolf man on a boat... with jet engines.

One thing I know about it is that it's supposed to be a bit like Switchblade II (maybe because it was designed by Switchblade creator Simon Phipps), but that doesn't help me much as I don't remember playing that either. I do remember playing another Core Design title by Simon Phipps though... that bastard of a game Rick Dangerous. But Wolfchild was made in a more modern era, coming out halfway between Rick Dangerous and Tomb Raider, so I'm hopeful that he'd gotten bored of dart traps by then.

The Rocketeer (SNES)

Developer:

NovaLogic

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Release Date:

1992

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Systems:

SNES, DOS

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This week on Super Adventures I'm playing a licensed tie-in SNES game! Because I've got more curiosity than sense.

The Rocketeer is based on the 1991 comic book action movie... probably. He has the same logo, the suit looks right and it's got 'Disney' written on it so I'm assuming there's a connection. But I haven't really seen the movie, so I don't know the characters and I've only got the vaguest idea about the plot. I'm coming into this with a good amount of ignorance.

Though one thing I do know is that the SNES version is actually a port of a DOS game and those are the only two systems this particular Rocketeer game came out for. Sega owners missed out this time, though I doubt they were missing much. But hey I'll give it a fair chance to win me over, it might surprise me.

The Adventures of Star Saver (GB)

Developer:

A-Wave

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Release Date:

1992

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Systems:

Game Boy

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This week on Super Adventures, something a little less colourful.

The Adventures of Star Saver is a Game Boy game... and that's pretty much all I know about it. I just saw the name and realised it had to get played. My best guess is that it's a management sim based around running a discount supermarket chain, but I'm not going to completely rule out the possibility that it's a platformer.

Either way no one wants to stare at 300 black and white screenshots so I'll be keeping it short this time. This'll be a Regular Adventure rather than a Super Adventure.

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (MS-DOS)

Developer:

LucasArts

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Release Date:

1992

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Systems:

PC, Mac, Amiga, FM Towns, Wii

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This week on Super Adventures I'm looking at the second Indiana Jones point and click adventure game, Fate of Atlantis, and wondering why they've put a colour cycling effect on the logo. That didn't happen in the movies... did it? I don't own the films so I can't check.

I should make it clear that this is Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis: The Graphic Adventure I'm playing, as like Last Crusade this has a separate Action Game to go along with it. Though unlike Last Crusade this has its own original story, there never was a 'Fate of Atlantis' film, so the Action Game is actually a video game tie-in... to a video game. I'm pretty sure I had a 'Fate of Atlantis' comic book once as well, but it'd take an archaeologist to find the damn thing now.

The game came out after Lucasfilm Games were renamed to LucasArts, so I'm hoping I'll get to see an animation of the Gold Guy logo man doing something at the start.

Desert Strike: Return to the Gulf (Amiga)

Developer:

EA

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Release Date:

1993 (Amiga)

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Systems:

Genesis/Mega Drive, Amiga, DOS, Master System, Lynx, Game Gear, Game Boy, SNES, GBA, PSP

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Today on Super Adventures I'm having a look at Desert Strike: Return to the Gulf, the first of EA's legendary Strike series and at the time their biggest selling game ever, beating titles like Road Rage, John Madden Football and, uh, Skate or Die 2: The Search for Double Trouble.

The subtitle's always made it sound like a sequel to me, but the game came out just a year after coalition forces liberated Kuwait from Iraq during the Persian Gulf War and it's actually following on from that. The problems in the Middle East had gotten a lot of news coverage at the time (if you can imagine that), so it was inevitable that a few fictional Saddam Hussain lookalikes would pop up in video games and start threatening the world.

Desert Strike was originally released on the Sega Genesis AKA. the Mega Drive but I'll be playing through the first level of the Amiga port instead because of its improved sound and enhanced visuals. You can see right now how they've enhanced the title screen with a digitised photo featuring trees (but then tinted them brown so we wouldn't notice.)

I can't exactly show the sound but I suppose I could link to a YouTube video of the Amiga title theme. It's almost but not quite entirely different to the rock theme the game has in most other versions: YouTube link of the Mega Drive theme, but I think we win either way.

Wolfenstein 3D (MS-DOS)

Developer:

id

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Release Date:

1992

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Systems:

DOS, SNES, Mac, Jaguar, 3DO, GBA, Apple IIGS, PC-98, Archimedes, etc.

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Today on Super Adventures I have another requested game for you: Wolfenstein 3D, or (Wolfenstein 3-D according to the title screen). And it's got the Nazi Party's theme tune playing right now as its title song, that's just... great.

This of course is the earliest first person shooter ever made, except for all those other ones that came before it. Even if you don't want to count things like 1974's Maze War, 1980's Battlezone, or even 1987's MIDI Maze, you've got id Software's own Hovertank 3D and Catacomb 3D released a year earlier. Granted they don't have assault rifles, but they're so similar in style and gameplay to Wolfenstein 3D that it's hard for me to look at them and say they're not the same genre.

Either way this is definitely the first of the Wolfenstein series; except it kinda isn’t as it was inspired by a 1981 stealthy action-adventure called Castle Wolfenstein and its sequel Beyond Castle Wolfenstein. When id Software realised the trademark had lapsed and was up for the taking, they took it and made their own series out of it. And I don't blame them, as it's a cool title.

Is it the first World War II themed first person shooter at least? I've no idea, but let's say yes. Medal of Honor, Call of Duty... they're all this game's fault. Anyway, I have played Wolfenstein 3D before, but not recently and not for long. In fact I've never even finished a single episode, so that's what I'm planning to do now.

Dark Seed (MS-DOS)

Developer:

Cyberdreams

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Release Date:

1992

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Systems:

PC, Amiga, PSX, Saturn, CD32

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Today on Super Adventures, I'm taking a quick look at the long awaited, repeatedly requested, HR Giger illustrated, horror adventure Darkseed!

This was released on more systems than you'd think, even making it across to the PlayStation and Saturn in Japan, but I'll be playing the original PC version released back in...

Actually no, I can't do this. There's a reason I put this off for so long, and that's because I really can't stand this game folks. I can't really remember why exactly, but my brain's telling me I want none of this and it's usually right about this kind of thing. Life's too short to play terrible adventure games, and you don't want to sit there sifting through 30 screenshots worth of complaints and whining anyway. So instead I'm skipping ahead to something else, something less dark...

Zool: Ninja of the Nth Dimension (Amiga)

Developer:

Gremlin

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Release Date:

1992

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Systems:

Amiga, plus everything else besides the NES

Today on Super Adventures, I have finally reached the 'Z' titles! This is the endgame for my year-long alphabetical order gimmick, well not literally the end game as I've still a couple of 'Z' games to go, but I'm in the final stretch now.

This time I'm playing Zool: Ninja of the "Nth" Dimension, which was originally developed for the Commodore Amiga in 1992, but soon spread out across the systems. The guy was actually kind of considered to be the machine's very own mascot platformer hero, a rival to Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog and Nintendo's Mario, and Zool or Zool 2 were often bundled in with new Amigas. Not bad really for a character who wasn't even slightly exclusive to the computer. Though he did end up going down the ship, failing to make the leap to the PlayStation or N64 when the 16-bit era ended and Commodore fell. Still, better that than going out the way Bubsy did I suppose.

You know I'm sure there's something else about the game that I should be mentioning here, but I can't quite remember...

Undercover Cops (Arcade)

I see a lot of shiny logos due to playing and writing about all these games, but that's the shiniest, most metallic logo I've seen since... well, Unreal a couple of days ago. But still, it's pretty damn metal. It's like two 80s action movie title logos were fused together, and both of them were from RoboCop.

Today on Super Adventures I'm playing an hour or so of Undercover Cops, a 1992 arcade game developed by Irem. You should probably just ignore the title though, as it's likely going to feature about as much actual police work as a Streets of Rage game. It's really about people in jeans and shoulder pads punching other people in jeans and shoulder pads, while walking over to the right for several stages in a row in order to eventually save the city from a mad doctor. At least that's what Wikipedia says.

Wikipedia also says that many of the folks who worked on this later split off from Irem to form the Nazca Corporation and create the legendary Metal Slug franchise, so I won't be entirely shocked if this turns out to look kind of amazing for its time. In fact I've gone and got my hopes up now.

Mortal Kombat (Arcade)

Today's 'M' game is the original MORTAL KOMBAT!

Yeah I realise that I'm crap at fighting games and only understand them at the most basic level, but the game was requested, so the game's getting played. I actually know a tiny bit more about this one than most though as I played the first few Mortal Kombat games a bit when I was younger. I bet I can even remember a couple of the special moves.