StarFighter 3000 (MS-DOS) - Guest Post

This week on Super Adventures, heroic space reviewer mecha-neko has returned with a quick look at another classic game. It's Star Fighter 3000, by the people who made Stunt Racer 2000 (no relation to Stunt Racer 64). It came out on a few systems and on most it's kind of obscure, but on the Acorn Archimedes it was an actual big deal. I was browsing an Acorn owner forum called StarDot and it's in basically everyone's top 10 lists for the A3000... possibly because there aren't too many original games on the system to choose from.

Hey everyone! While rooting through all my old DOS stuff like Fade to Black and Halloween Harry, I've found another game I'm familiar with but haven't played in a really long time.

Developer:

FedNet

|

Release Date: Acorn Archimedes: 19th September 1994 MS-DOS: 8th October 1996 Iyonix: April 2008

|

Systems:

Acorn, 3DO, DOS, PS1, Saturn, Iyonix

---

It may sound like a boxing game about robots in the future, but it's actually about spaceships and lasers! Wanna see?

Metal Slug: Super Vehicle-001 (Neo-Geo)

It's Super Adventures' 10th Anniversary today, which means it's time for a shiny new logo and a shiny new gimmick for 2021. I figured I should celebrate ten years of my site by giving year eleven a theme, and that theme is 'Top Ten'. Super Adventures is mature and respectable now, so I'm going to play only the very finest games... well, games that have made into the top ten of somebody's rankings anyway. Most of the time I'll be getting them from some 'Top 10 Objectively Greatest Video Games Ever Made' list I've found, but maybe I'll throw in something from a list like 'Top 10 Most Embarrassing Movie Tie-Ins' or 'Top 10 Shovelware Releases on the Wii' every now and then to keep things interesting.

It's not a flawless plan, as it means I'll be writing about games that everyone already knows about. Plus I've already played a lot of the games that tend to show up in these lists, especially the console games, so they're out of the running. So to help limit your expectations, here's some links to a few of the legendary titles I've already covered during the last decade:

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•  

To be honest, I only put this row of boxes here because I felt like seeing if I could figure out how to do it. Plus the site needs more game covers on it. More title screens as well, especially the ones that look like this:

Developer:

Nazca

|

Release Date:

1996

|

Systems:

Arcade, Neo-Geo, Neo-Geo CD, Saturn, PSX, PC

---

This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing the legendary Metal Slug, as seen in arcades and on the Neo·Geo home console. I should warn you that this article will contain flashing GIFs, so if that's an issue for you, then you probably don't want to scroll down much further.

This game almost ruined my 'top ten list' gimmick right at the start, because I struggled to find it anywhere. I did the research, searching through dozens of top 100 lists from magazines and websites, and none of them had the game ranked high enough! Fortunately Shacknews' Top 10 Run n' Gun Arcade Shooters video bailed me out (spoiler, it was #1).

I was a bit surprised when I saw that the game was released in 1996, as it's a bit later than I expected. That's the same year that Super Mario 64 and Tomb Raider came out, and 2D had already started going out of fashion a couple of years earlier, with Virtua Fighter and Daytona USA hitting arcades in 1993 and Donkey Kong Country faking 3D in 1994. The Neo·Geo MVS arcade cabinet and AES console both predate the Super Nintendo by a few months, so this could've potentially come out as early as 1990 and still looked just as good. I guess the original Neo·Geo was tough to kill, as they were still making 2D Metal Slug sequels for the same hardware as late as 2003, long after the N64 and PlayStation had been replaced.

Uh, I should apologise to you for mentioning so many years in one paragraph, it was a bit excessive. In my defence, this is the first time I've ever covered a Neo·Geo game and I want to talk about the system! I suppose it's also technically the first time I've covered a Neo·Geo CD game as well, which is a newer version of the console which came out a few years later in 1994... sorry, sorry.
 

Star Trek: Borg (PC)

Developer:

Simon & Schuster

|

Release Date:

1996

|

Systems:

Win, Mac

---

This week on Super Adventures, I'm giving you a choice!

You can either keep reading this perfectly normal regular article on Star Trek: Borg, or you can jump over my other website, Sci-Fi Adventures, and get an enhanced review with additional Star Trek trivia and observations! Stay here if you don't give a damn about the series and just want to read about a video game, go over there if you want too many words.

> CLICK HERE FOR THE EXTENDED SCI-FI ADVENTURES STAR TREK: BORG REVIEW <

I really wouldn't recommend reading both articles. Well, unless you're into sitting through lots of the same content all over again, in which case I might have found the right game for you!

Star Trek: Borg apparently came out in late 1996, just a few weeks before the movie Star Trek: First Contact. That film's all about the Borg so they had their synergy figured out there. That means that in grand scheme of Star Trek games, Borg comes after 25th Anniversary and A Final Unity, but before Starfleet Academy and Elite Force. It was released right at the start of the Trek game explosion that lasted until 2001, where every year would have three or more games, some of them not entirely terrible! In fact this wasn't even the only Trek game by Simon & Schuster that year, as they also released Star Trek: Klingon, which appears to be more of the same kind of thing.

The game will apparently run on modern systems if you download this ancient installer from the Internet Archive: Borgptch, but I don't really know how well it gets along with Windows 10 because I decided to run it in Windows 95 using the PCem PC emulator instead.

I usually only play for an hour or two, but this isn't the longest of games so I'm going to be playing all of it this time. So there's going to be HUGE SPOILERS for this game and maybe a few smaller spoilers for Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes like The Best of Both Worlds.

The Speris Legacy (Amiga CD32) - Part 4 - Guest Post

Previously on the Amiga CD32 Zelda-'em-up The Speris Legacy, I permanently ruined my only save file, and so I decided this time to investigate The Speris Legacy and write some Cool Stuff instead.

The Speris Legacy (Amiga CD32) - Part 3 - Guest Post

Previously on the Amiga CD32 Zelda-'em-up The Speris Legacy, our hero Cho tried to inspect a sinister looking plant and instantly died. What could happen next?

The Speris Legacy (Amiga CD32) - Part 2 - Guest Post

Previously on the Amiga CD32 Zelda-'em-up The Speris Legacy, our hero Cho left Sharma City in search of revenge. What will he find in the farming town of Gilliards Rhine?

The Speris Legacy (Amiga CD32) - Part 1 - Guest Post

This week on Super Adventures, recurring guest poster mecha-neko is back already with a detailed four-part report on what appears to be 'Zelda, but on the Amiga'. It might be good, you never know.

By 1995, the Amiga was done. The CD32 was a year in its grave. All the magazines save for the very nerdiest were shrivelling up into nothing as the games quickly vanished. Darth Vader, Sam and Max and a certain green-clad space marine made sure that there was no place in the computer world for slow moving, ugly games that couldn't talk back to you. Europe was falling in love with the Japanese consoles, every British kid was getting a Mega Drive II for Christmas to replace their Master System II, and Sonic the Hedgehog was appearing in two cartoons at once.

Only the brave, the mad and the heavily invested remained to try to magic up some glory from the abandoned hardware and win the hearts of the Amiga's vast and loyal European install base.

Developer:

Binary Emotions

|

Release Date:

February 1996

|

Systems:

Amiga 1200, CD32

---

Say hello to light-hearted fantasy epic The Speris Legacy, featuring this rather nifty digitised painting of one hopeful adventurer who could easily be Neal McDonough in a blonde mullet.

Amiga Computing magazine described The Speris Legacy as 'pure genius', with its coverdisk demo asking 'The best game of the year?' in bold red letters. Amiga Power dedicated an entire cover to it with a brand new lovely illustration.

The Amiga could still have its hero!

The Speris Legacy (Amiga CD32) - Guest PostPart 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4

Breath of Fire II (SNES)

Developer:

Capcom

|

Release Date:

JP: 1994, NA: 1995, EU: 1996

|

Systems:

SNES, GBA

---

This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing Brerth of Fireo! Uh, Breath of Fire II!

I played the original Breath of Fire just over a year ago, so it's not really fresh in my memory, but I think I thought it was 'okay'. Not all that interesting, but okay. Nice graphics though.

I've already spotted one massive improvement that Breath of Fire II has over the first game, which is that is was actually made it to Europe fast enough to get released for the system it was created for. We didn't get to play first game over here until the Game Boy Advance port, which came out five and a half years after its own sequel. And it does seem to be a proper sequel this time, unlike the other games in the series, as Wikipedia tells me it takes place 500 years after the events of the original game.

I'm planning to at least go through the first few hours of the game, so there will be SPOILERS below this point, but not many. I just felt like I should give you fair warning, seeing as JRPGs have a lot of story in them. Here's my first spoiler: if you leave the title screen on for a while all you get is gameplay demos. I thought it might give me an secret intro, like the first game, but it did not.

Right, I'm going to press SJARJ and see what this is like.

Normality (MS-DOS)

Developer:

Gremlin

|

Release Date:

1996

|

Systems:

DOS

---

This week on Super Adventures, I've reached my last proper game post of the year. I mean it's not the last thing I'll be writing for the site, there's another article coming next week, but this is the last time I'll be going through the first hour or so of one game, showing off screenshots along the way. Until next year anyway.

Oh, I'm playing Normality by the way, in case the title stamped up there didn't give it away. The logo jitters around in game and I was tempted to make my image animated to show it off, but then I realised I didn't need another ugly distracting GIF on my front page for weeks. I learned that lesson back when I did that Amiga Fighting Games article.

My GOG orders history page claims that I bought Normality two years ago and I'm sure it's probably right, though what it doesn't know is that I only got the game so that I could write about it here... and then I forgot. Until now! I've only got a vague idea of what the game even is, but the love I've seen it get online put it on my radar and I have a feeling that even if it pisses me off I'm going to get some good screenshots out of it.

The game has a story and puzzles, and if you keep reading you're going to find SPOILERS for the first couple of hours of both. Just so you know.

Keio Flying Squadron 2 (Saturn)

Developer:

Victor

|

Release Date:

1996

|

Systems:

Saturn

---

This week on Super Adventures, I'm writing about more Keio Flying Squadron! The alien bunny girl adventures continue.

The first Keio Flying Squadron is a shoot 'em up on the Sega Mega CD that by some miracle got a release in Europe and America. I already showed that one off last week. Then Keio Flying Squadron 2 came out three years later on the Sega Saturn and somehow also got translated to English, though I'm not sure it ever made it to the US. Finally there was a side-story party game on the PlayStation called 蘭未ちゃんの大江戸すごろく慶応遊撃隊外伝. That one never made it out of Japan.

Out of curiosity I checked the Japanese version of Keio 2 and it turns out that the title text completely obscures the background in the original game as well. Someone spent ages drawing that!

Here's some more exciting trivia for you: Victor Entertainment got out of game development in 1996 so this is one of the last games they ever made. I'd tell you about their other games, but I've never heard of most of them. Banana, ROM² Karaoke, UltraBox 5-gō... oh Legendary Axe, that sounds familiar. I have no idea what it is, but I recognise the name.

Legends (Amiga)

If my calculations are correct it should be Super Adventures' 6th birthday right about... now. I've been watching it creep up on me for a while, struggling to come up with an idea of what to do about it when it got here.

One idea I had was that I could turn the site around and start going back the way I came, revisiting all the games I've played, starting with Carmageddon, then Spy Fox, and so on all the way back to Deathbringer. Then I had a slightly less terrible idea: I could work through a huge chunk of my game requests all at once! 50 games in one article, each getting a screenshot and a couple of lines of text. It'll be just like the olden days when I'd put up a few dozen half-assed posts a day because I didn't know what the hell I was doing.

But in the end I realised that if I want to go back to Super Adventures' origins what I really need to do is find an old obscure Amiga game I haven't heard of and go into it blind.

Developer:

Krysalis

|

Release Date:

1996

|

Systems:

Amiga AGA, CD32, DOS

---

So this week on Super Adventures I'm playing Legends!

I know about all kinds of games, Amiga games especially; it's a side effect to suffering prolonged exposure to a shelf full of game magazines as a child. But I have never heard of this one in my life and that's kind of weird, because it's by Krysalis, the folks who created Soccer Kid and Arabian Nights.

I've got a theory about why it slipped under my radar though, and that's because my Amiga magazines only go up to 1995. By the time this came out everyone was moving away to SVGA PCs and next gen consoles and I doubt even the DOS port of this low-res Amiga game got much attention. So they left it a bit late there. But then I suppose a game like this takes a while to make... possibly. Depends on what kind of game it is really.

The title screen up there makes me think it's some kind of strategy game with empires clashing across the world, or an RPG with classes from across history, but that doesn't narrow it down much and it's just as likely to be another platformer. All I know for sure is that it's not that classic isometric RPG; that's Legend without the S.

Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars (PC)

Developer:

Revolution

|

Release Date:

1996

|

Systems:

Windows, Mac, GBA, PSX

---

This week on Super Adventures I'm playing Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars. Not to be confused with Shadow of the Beast, Shadow of the Colossus, Shadows of the Empire, Shadow of Memories/Destiny or the Christian Slater/John Travolta movie 'Broken Arrow'. Wow, I haven't seen that film in forever, I should give it a rewatch some time.

In America the game was originally given a different subtitle: Circle of Blood. I guess shadows and Templars just didn't seem as marketable back then in those pre DaVinci Code/Assassin's Creed days. In 2009 it got another subtitle: Director's Cut, as the game was remade with extra content for PCs, phones and the Nintendo systems of the time.

This is Revolution Software's third adventure game, after Lure of the Temptress and Beneath a Steel Sky, but I've also written about In Cold Blood as I'm getting to them all out of order. Plus it's the second graphic adventure I've played this year about the Knights Templar, as I took a look at Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade back in January. There, I think I've just broke the record for the amount of games I've mentioned in an intro! I'll say Monkey Island as well just to make sure, seeing as it's inevitably going to get brought up at some point anyway.

Alright, I'm going to give Broken Sword an hour or two and take lots of screenshots, while writing up what I've been doing and what I thought about it. Same deal as ever.

Toonstruck (MS-DOS)

Today on Super Adventures I'll be giving an hour or so to Toonstruck, a game that has surprisingly little to do with that clown up there. Sure he's in it, eventually, but I almost guarantee you won't be seeing him again here.

I feel like I should seen this game mentioned more often, considering it stars Christopher Lloyd, Homer Simpson and half the cast of half the cartoons from the 90s, but it seems almost forgotten these days. I've no idea how well known it actually is, but I do know that it didn't sell enough to get a sequel... which in this case would've actually been the second half of the game, seeing as it wasn't exactly finished when they put it out on shelves.

I'm sure I've reached the semi-cliffhanger ending before, or at least watched someone else complete it, but my only strong memory of this game is that clown up there yelling "BALLOOOOOOON?" I've got absolutely zero recollection of the story or any of the puzzles, so I get to work them all out again from scratch.

Tomb Raider (MS-DOS) - Part 1

Today I'm having a look at Core Design's original Tomb Raider. I have to call it that, because Crystal Dynamics decided to go and reuse the name in 2013 for a prequel, demonstrating a fundamental lack of understanding about what names are actually for (hint: they're an identifier to allow people to refer to specific things without ambiguity or confusion).

Here, you can load the surprisingly mellow Tomb Raider theme up in youtube and have it playing it in the background while I humorously note that the game is actually a sort of successor to Core Design's earlier Rick Dangerous series. In fact Core made a fair number of the games I've featured on the site, like Bubba 'n' Stix, Curse of Enchantia and, uh, Blam! Machine Head; but after Tomb Raider caught on they were doomed to crank out sequel after sequel, one a year until the series and developer finally lost everyone's respect entirely.

Tomb Raider was actually released first on the Sega Saturn, with the PC version coming soon after (and the N-Gage version just 7 years after that), but most of my fuzzy semi-fond memories of the game come from when a friend and I rented the PlayStation version. We didn't get anywhere though and he did most of the playing, so I'm not really all that sure what to expect from the game. Very very dated controls mostly.

Tomb Raider (MS-DOS) - Part 2

Dare you revisit part one?

Osman (Arcade)

This week's game is... damn has it really been a entire week since my last article? Anyway this week's 'O' game is 1996 arcade platformer Osman (AKA. Cannon-Dancer in Japan).

It's a spiritual sequel to the legendary Strider created by the same director, Kouichi Yotsui, but without Capcom's involvement... and that's pretty much the sum total of what I know about the game, so I'm not entirely sure what to expect from it. I'm reasonably certain at least that I've never played it before (I've barely even played Strider), but this title screen is reminding me of Knuckles' Chaotix and I hate it when games do that.

(Warning, there's going to be a lot of animated gifs this time, and they're going to be massive. Well, they sure have a lot of frames anyway.)

Crash Bandicoot (PSX)

Today's 'C' game is Naughty Dog's PlayStation platformer pioneer Crash Bandicoot, or as I call it Banjo Kazooie. I dunno why I do that, the games aren't even all that similar as far as I know, I just continually end up saying the wrong name without fail and it's kind of annoying. So if you catch me slipping up, let me know in a comment and I'll get it sorted out. Seriously.

It should be noted that I haven't played a lot of early 3D platformers, so there's a giant black hole within my heart where my nostalgia should be. But that's fine! It means I can look at the game unbiased and unburdened by things like accumulated skills and experience, with no way to get sidetracked comparing it other games in the genre. If you're after 30 screenshots of a low polygon bandicoot falling down the first bottomless pit in the game, you're definitely reading the right article.

Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars (SNES)

Here's another requested game for y'all: Super Mario RPG, known in Japan as 'Super Mario RPG'. Good name that I reckon, let's you know exactly what you're in for. Plus it's always nice to get another game with 'Super' in the title onto the site.

Mario's been jumping around in video games since Donkey Kong back in 1981 so it's pretty amazing to me that it took him this long to get his own RPG. I mean by this point he'd already started his racing career in Super Mario Kart, played Yahtzee in Mario's Game Gallery, practised medicine in Dr. Mario and shown off his artistic side in Mario Paint; the guy's a real renaissance man.

He wouldn't get around to trying his hand at street fighting or, uh, partying until the N64 era though, which was actually just months away at the time this was released. As far as I know, this is the final Mario game on the Super Nintendo. It may well be Square's final game released on the console as well, in North America at least.

Lufia / Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals (SNES)

Ignore what the title screen says; today's game is actually Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals for the Super Nintendo. They dropped the number for the European version as the first game wasn't released over here and they didn't want consumers to have the unnecessary distraction. To be fair, the game's a prequel so it probably stands on its own just fine.

People have been asking me to take a look at this one forever; so of course I ignored them all and played the original Lufia instead. But today I'm finally playing the one that everyone's been recommending to me. This is the good Lufia (apparently).

Night Slave (PC-98)

I'm always eager to try games for systems I'm not familiar with, but it's surprisingly difficult to find out about good Japanese computer games that are both playable without understanding the language, and not filled with cartoon porn. So I decided to compromise this time around.

Wikipedia tells me that Night Slave on the PC-98 is an eroge game, warning that it's gonna have naked anime ladies in the cutscenes in place of an actual storyline. But it also comes with an option to turn the cutscenes off in the menu and play it as a pure action game about giant robots shooting things. No sex, just good clean violence.

So I'll assure you upfront that this post is going to be entirely safe for work, for so many obvious reasons.