Electronic Popple (MS-DOS)

Developer:

Byteshock

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Release Date:

1997

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Systems:

PC

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing Electronic Popple, a DOS game by Byteshock released in 1997.

I went searching the internet looking for any kind of information about the game to write up here, and it seems like Byteshock were a bunch of Korean college students who disbanded soon afterwards. Plus it seems like 'popple' might be a mistranslation of 'purple'? Also the game apparently has multiple endings. That's all I could find out about it though I'm afraid! I'm all out of trivia now.

Man, that's a pretty pitiful amount of text for an intro, I need to think of some more words. Uh, it seems to have a two player mode, that's probably worth mentioning. Plus there's lots of anthropomorphic computer people exploding on the title screen. Poor guys.

Amulets & Armor (MS-DOS) - Guest Post

This week on Super Adventures, guest poster mecha-neko is playing a DOS RPG from 1997! He rarely ever writes about RPGs, so this one must be something... special.

For a change, instead of playing something weird that I've never played before, I'm going to play something I'm very familiar with from my childhood.

Developer:

United Software Artists

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Release Date:

January 1997 (re-released 26th April 2013)

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Systems:

MS-DOS, Windows

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This is Amulets & Armor. It's an RPG! Except it's not. It's an FPS! Except it's not. And it's multiplayer, except it's not. It's a little of everything.

I've been meaning to play and write about this game for years, but I've never felt like I'd be able to do it justice. When I was but a lad and loved playing shareware demos on the family PC (alright, I still do), I would play the one level demo of this a lot. I liked the ambience and the cartoons in Interpose, but Amulets & Armor is the game I actually played.

I only had the demo back then, but it was re-released in 2013 as a free full game for both MS-DOS and Windows, with the source code available for boffins as well. If you'd like to hear a little bit about why you've never heard of the game, click here, but I'll be focusing on just playing the full DOS version today.

Ace Combat 2 (PSX)

Developer:

Namco

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Release Date:

1997

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Systems:

PlayStation

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing Ace Combat 2: the classic PlayStation dogfight 'em up by the people who've watched Top Gun.

It was made by the legendary developer/publisher Namco, who started creating their own video games in 1978 and didn't stop until 2005, when some mad businessmen fused them with Bandai Games to create a hybrid creature called Bandai Namco. Though the interesting thing about Namco, is that they were responsible for games like Pac-Man, Galaga, Time Crisis, Ridge Racer, Splatterhouse, Soulcalibur, Tekken, Klonoa and Katamari Damacy, and I somehow haven't covered a single one of them yet. I wrote about Tales of Symphonia by Namco Tales Studio (formerly known as Wolf Team), but I think this is actually the first proper Namco-developed game on Super Adventures!

Here's another fact for you: for some reason the first game was renamed Air Combat when it was released in the West, even though the Japanese game's title was in English to begin with. This is doubly weird and confusing because the Ace Combat series is the successor to Namco's arcade flight sim series... called Air Combat. I could understand why they'd want to use that brand if it already had some value in the West, but it doesn't seem like the arcade games ever made it outside of Japan. Anyway by Ace Combat 2 everyone was using the same name and the confusion was over (until the sequels).

You might be curious why I'm starting with the second game. I've got a few reasons, but I think the main one is that I actually finished it, many years ago, and I'm really curious how the hell that happened. Is it really that good, or just really really short?

Suikoden (PSX)

Developer:

Konami

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Release Date:

1997 (1995 in Japan)

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Systems:

PlayStation, Saturn, Windows

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm finally getting around to Suikoden, a game that's been sitting on my shelf for ages. I borrowed it from a friend a while ago and he moved away before I could give it back, so it's just been lying there ever since, unplayed. Until today!

I knew the game was an JRPG when I borrowed it (one of the earliest RPGs on the PlayStation in fact), but I had no idea what the title was about. Typically Japanese games will get an English title when they're released in the West (except for games like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest which had an English title from the start), but for some reason this has remained Suikoden.

Turns out that it's loosely based on a novel of the same name. Well, that's the name it has in Japan anyway. It's actually a Chinese novel called Shui Hu Zhuan, one of the four great classic novels of Chinese literature (along with Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West and Dream of the Red Chamber), and in English the title translates to... Water Margin. Probably for the best they left it as Suikoden.

Super Mario 64 (N64)

Hey, welcome back, it's Super Adventures 9th birthday etc. But never mind that, I've got TERRIBLE NEWS for you. Some quirk of Blogger has retroactively screwed up all my damn 256 colour images, removing shades and leaving them more dithered than they should be.

It only ruined little bits of them, only a few of the colours, but ideally you want your screenshots to be 0% ruined.

So I've got GOOD NEWS for you: mecha-neko wrote a thing and I did a thing and over Christmas we replaced something like 14,000 images over 1000 posts. So now the site is entirely fixed... or mostly broken, or somewhere in between. Why not click a few old posts and find out! I mean after reading this one.

Developer:

Nintendo

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Release Date:

1997 (1996 in Japan + US)

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Systems:

N64, DS, iQue Player

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This week on Super Adventures, it's Super Mario 64!

It's a game that needs no introduction, so instead I'll start off by talking about how much I hate 3D platformers. Actually I don't hate them, as long as they keep their distance and don't bother me, but they've never been my genre. I like 2D platformers, I like games where you wander around in 3D, but somehow when you combine the two I lose interest. Maybe it's because I don't like slipping off narrow platforms and misjudging depth.

Actually I will give the game a bit of an introduction, because I like trivia. Super Mario 64 was designed by pioneering Nintendo game genius Shigeru Miyamoto, who's been making Marios since the first Donkey Kong arcade cabinet. He'd already set the template for the 2D platformer genre with Super Mario Bros. so they were hoping he could pull off the same trick in 3D. And he did... though he took a few months longer than planned. Unfortunately Mario 64 was meant to be the big launch title that got people buying the Nintendo 64, so they had to delay the console for months as well. They probably made the right choice though, as the PlayStation and Saturn were well established even before the delay and the N64 needed to show off some actual magic to lure people over to a cartridge-based machine without videos, voices or CD music.

Personally I love the N64 and I've got a lot of nostalgia for it, but Mario 64 not so much. I've maybe played the game twice and the furthest I've gotten is the stone slab boss that falls on you. But some people seem to like it, and it's "acclaimed as one of the greatest video games of all time", so I'm going to give it another few hours to win me over.

Broken Sword: The Smoking Mirror - Remastered (PC)

Developer:

Revolution

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Release Date:

1997

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Systems:

Win, OS X, iOS, Android

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Looking back over the games I've played for my site over the last seven years, I've noticed a pattern forming: I've played a horror game for Halloween on every odd-numbered year, while even-numbered years have gotten games like Snake's Revenge and Saints Row IV at the end of October instead. Seems to me that I've got a bit of a tradition forming here... but I despise pointless traditions, so this year on Super Adventures I'm breaking the pattern by playing Broken Sword: The Smoking Mirror - Remastered! I don't think I'll be seeing any ghosts or zombies in this one.

I'm torn here, because I really want to call it Broken Sword II, but there's clearly no 'II' in that logo up there. There was in the original game's logo, but they've taken it away for the Remastered version, because I guess knowing what order things go in only confuses modern audiences. Personally, I'm more confused by the subtitle. Is it referring to a mirror that's recently been used as a murder weapon? A mirror people that go out to when they fancy a quick smoke?

Wait, I forgot to mention that I'm playing the game on Halloween because it was released on October 31st, 1997, the same day as Curse of Monkey Island and the Blade Runner adventure game, so all three are twenty years old today! Well okay, technically this is only seven years old because I'm playing the Remastered version on Steam. I would've played my original CD version but I've lost it. I’ve checked shelves, I've checked boxes, I’ve checked other boxes buried underneath boxes, and it seems like the bloody game’s just vanished.

Funny thing is, when I bought the game the discs were already damaged and some of the video files wouldn’t copy when I installed it. Fortunately, when ScummVM came out there was a compatibility problem with the video codec so Revolution put revised cutscene files up for free and I could finally play this game I'd owned for years! I actually still have that install on my hard drive ready to go, but I lost half the files in a hard drive failure and now ScummVM won’t even recognise it.

It’s like fate doesn’t want me to play this game, and it doesn't care how much physical storage media it has to break to keep me from it.

Ganpuru: Gunman's Proof (SNES)

Developer:

Lenar

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Release Date:

1997

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Systems:

SNES

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This week on Super Adventures I'm playing a game definitely absolutely did not ever get ported to the Commodore Amiga, for a change. In fact this one wasn't even released in English, though it did eventually get a fan translation.

I like fan translations, I think they're a fantastic idea and that everyone who's put their time and effort into making games accessible to more people for absolute zero financial reward is awesome. But I don't play fan translations on my site (it's one of the rules written in the box on the right), so I'm going to be struggling through the original Japanese version of the game for an hour or two. Well, unless it's got a lot of dialogue in it, then I'll be struggling a lot longer than that.

The katakana in the title says Ganpuru, so some people call it Gunple and others say it's probably a compound word formed from 'gunman' and 'proof' (like how Pokémon comes from the words 'pocket' and 'monsters'). Man, if the very first word in the game's giving me this much trouble then that's not a good sign. Google Translate tells me that my two choices beneath it are “From the beginning” and “From the rest”, so at least I don't have an options screen to interpret.

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (PSX)

Developer:

Konami

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Release Date:

1997

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Systems:

PSX, PSP, PSN, Saturn, Xbox 360

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Today on Super Adventures I'm celebrating the 20th anniversary of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night! It was the 20th anniversary of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series a few days back and it'll be the movie Blade's 20th birthday next year too, so in retrospect the late 90s was a terrible time to be a vampire.

Speaking of things that happened in ages past, man it's been while since my epic marathon of all the traditional Castlevania platformers. "This is going to be the final Castlevania game I'll be playing for a long long time," I wrote at the end of my Castlevania Legends article, but I had no idea it'd take me 6 years to get around to the next one! You could make a third of a Duke Nukem game in that time.  Though in my defence I used to avoid writing about games I'd played before and I've actually beaten this one on the Xbox 360.

If playing all those classic Castlevanias taught me anything, it's that Konami were determined to get those Belmonts onto every system they could, and that each console had to get its own exclusive game. Seriously, to play the whole series up to this point you would've needed access to a NES, an MSX2, a Game Boy, a PC Engine with a CD drive, an X68000, a Mega Drive, a SNES and an arcade with the Haunted Castle cabinet. In this case though they skipped the Sega 32X due to it being dead and put their new 2D Castlevania on two consoles, the PlayStation and Saturn (with the Game Boy getting Legends instead and the N64 getting both Castlevania 64 and Legacy of Darkness two years later).

It was a bit strange though that Konami released this for the PlayStation, at least in the West, partly because Sony of America had a real hate on for 2D and partly because it's the direct sequel to a game that didn't get an English release until a decade later! In Japan the game’s called Akumajō Dracula X: Gekka no Yasōkyoku (Nocturne in the Moonlight), because it follows on from PC Engine game Akumajō Dracula X: Chi no Rondo (Rondo of Blood). This 'music term of the vampire-related thing' theme carried on through a couple of the GBA games until they started throwing in words like 'Dawn' and 'Portrait' and ruined the pattern.

Anyway I've waited long enough to give this a replay so I should get on with it. I hope I don't hate it now!

Carmageddon (MS-DOS)

Developer:

Stainless Games

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Release Date:

1997

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Systems:

PC, Mac, Android, iOS

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This week on Super Adventures you can look forward to several words on the subject of PlayStation-era vehicular carnage racing game Carmageddon! Or is that supposed to be CarmaGeddoN? The oversized letters are throwing me off.

It feels like it's been ages since I've had a racing game on the site. In fact looking back through the archives it seems like the last one was Super Mario Kart all the way back in 2013. I don't remember much about this besides what I can pull from my fuzzy memories of old magazines, but I expect it to be dissimilar.

I'm also expecting to be driving a red car with spikes running down the middle. Plus I'm sure this is the one with a picture of a bloke in the top left of the screen that makes faces when you run people over. Or run zombies over if you're playing the censored version with the green blood, which I'm hopefully not. I've had enough zombies lately thanks, no more zombies.

I'll be playing the Carmageddon Max Pack from GOG, all packaged up to run on modern PCs with nGlide pretending I've got a 3dfx card. So the graphics may potentially be a little prettier than they were back in the day, but I wouldn't bother clicking the screenshots for a better view because they'll all be 640x480 resolution or less.

Spy Fox in "Dry Cereal" (PC)

Developer:

Humongous Entertainment

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Release Date:

1997

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Systems:

Windows, Mac OS, Wii, iOS, Android, Linux

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm taking a look at a Junior Adventure about a fox who does intelligence work, designed for 5-10 year olds! Because it appeared as a gift in my Steam library one day, and I want to know if I should be grateful.

Spy Fox in "Dry Cereal" is apparently the first of three Spy Fox adventure games, and I've never played any of them at any age, so I have zero nostalgia for the series. I've managed to go my entire life so far in blissful ignorance of what any of Humongous Entertainment's games are like, but I am very slightly optimistic because I know that it's where Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert disappeared to for a while after Monkey Island 2.

The Steam download comes with ScummVM so that it runs on modern systems, but I don't know if they've given me the US or the UK version. I've read that there's a few small differences between the versions, the main one being that the game was redubbed with British accents! Spy Fox sounds like a suave English agent in the UK dub, but in the original game he's more like Don Adams from Get Smart. I've no idea why they did this, half the cartoons on British TV come from America and we'd been listening to Don Adams' voice come out of Inspector Gadget's mouth for years, but I guess they were concerned some references would fly over young kids' heads. They'd have never heard of Get Smart for one thing.

Hexen II (PC)

Developer:

Raven

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Release Date:

1997

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Systems:

Windows, Mac

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This week on Super Adventures I've finally gotten around to replaying some of Hexen's slightly more three dimensional successor, Hexen II! It's been ages since I've played this one so I should be coming into it reasonably clueless. Plus it's a Hexen game so I likely didn't get anywhere in it the first time around anyway.

Hexen II is the last of the 'Serpent Riders' trilogy, following on from Heretic and Hexen, so there's apparently a story here to resolve and this game finishes it off. But just to make things confusing, Heretic actually branches off to another sequel, Heretic II, which tells the tale of the original game's protagonist returning home and fighting a plague. Plus there's the expansion packs like Deathkings of the Dark Citadel and Portal of Praevus which slot in somewhere.

But this is definitely absolutely the final Hexen... until Raven Software gets bored of making multiplayer modes for Call of Duty games and decides it's time for Hex3n: Beyond Heretic II.

Chasm: The Rift (MS-DOS)

Developer:

Action Forms

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Release Date:

1997

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Systems:

PC

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Today on Super Adventures, I'm putting a few hours into Chasm: The Rift, a game in which you don't play as a zombie lizard jester with a circular power-saw hand. This isn't even the title screen, the game has no time for crap like that. It just dumps you straight to a typical 90s first person shooter menu screen floating above a typical 90s first person shooter gameplay demo.

Oh, I should mention that this is a typical 90s first person shooter. It's kind of an obscure one too, which is exactly what my site's been missing lately. I haven't had a DOS FPS on Super Adventures since Wolfenstein 3D back in March, and that's just terrible. The game I mean, not my FPS negligence (thought that's pretty bad too).

Anyway I had Chasm on a demo disc back in the olden days and remember thinking it had a surprisingly decent looking homemade 3D engine, but not much else. I pretty much forgot the demo entirely for a decade or two after the game disappeared off the face of the Earth. Or I assumed it'd disappeared anyway; turns out the game had actually been released the year after Quake and Duke Nukem 3D and I just hadn't heard about it. It wasn't exactly the next big thing, but it's the next thing on my site so I'm going to go into it with my best attempt at enthusiasm and see if I can get some fun out of it.

You Don't Know Jack: Movies (PC)

Developer:

Berkeley & Jellyfish

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Release Date:

1996

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Systems:

Windows and Mac

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Today on Super Adventures, I'm going to find out what you get when an award-winning children's multimedia edutainment developer teams up with the people who brought the world the 'flying toasters' screensaver, as I take a look at You Don't Know Jack: Movies.

I've actually played a few of the You Don't Know Jack games before (I can't remember which, there's a million of the things), but I'm certain I've never seen this one before, and all the questions will be entirely new to me. The game itself is pretty old though, one of the oldest in the series in fact, released just two years after the original. Unfortunately it wasn't really designed for newfangled resolutions like '1920x1080' or '800x600', so if you're reading this on a computer then you're likely seeing it the exact same way I am: as a tiny box in the middle of the screen. To be honest I'm just glad (and a little surprised) that it's running at all in Windows 8.

The thing about the You Don't Know Jack games though is they don't have any computer opponents, and there's no online play in this one, so to get a proper game out of this I had to bring a volunteer in to man the player 2 buzzer...

Star Wars: Yoda Stories (PC)

Developer:

LucasArts

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Release Date:

1997

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Systems:

Windows, GBC

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1997 was a pretty big year for Star Wars, perhaps the biggest since Return of the Jedi hit cinemas 14 years earlier. The original trilogy of films were remastered and rereleased on cinema screens with Greedo now officially shooting first, the mighty engines of Lucasfilm had geared up to produce a new movie with two more promised to follow, Timothy Zahn released another Thrawn novel, Dark Forces got a sequel with lightsabers, TIE Fighter got a sequel with multiplayer… and then there was the other game.

But Masters of Teräs Käsi is going to have to wait, because today on Super Adventures I’m taking a quick look at a ‘desktop toy’ called Star Wars: Yoda Stories. It’s basically meant to sit alongside games like Minesweeper and FreeCell and give you something to do for half an hour while you’re taking a break from work. There is one subtle difference between Yoda Stories and the games bundled with Windows though: this retailed for £20 in Britain back in the day. That was enough to buy you a third of a Donkey Kong Country game!

Realms of the Haunting (MS-DOS) - Part 1

Today on Super Adventures I'm switching over to 'R' games, starting with a look at classic DOS adventure/shooter game Realms of the Haunting. Because someone asked me nicely (and paid for it).

Often when I play a game blind I'm coming into it with some foreknowledge; maybe I've seen someone else play a bit of it, maybe I've read a review, maybe my friend won't stop sending me gifs from it etc. But this time around I have absolutely no clue what I'm getting out of this beyond the flash of spoilers I got downloaded into my brain when I made the dumb mistake of glancing at the wikipedia page for half a second (I just wanted to know when it came out, damn you wikipedia!) I've definitely heard the title before but beyond that this is all new to me.

I'm guessing it's closer to Myst than it is to Quake, but then I haven't played Myst either so I should just shut up and put the game on.

Realms of the Haunting (MS-DOS) - Part 2

Click to journey back to part one.

Postal (PC)

Not the prettiest title screen, but at least it's more cheerful than the music collection of sounds playing in the background when it comes up. I figured the game would be leaning more towards dumb comedy than grim psychological horror, but that shows what I know.

Hi, welcome to Super Adventures. I'm Ray Hardgrit and I know absolutely nothing about the first Postal game. I've played a lot of Postal 2 and I've heard that Postal 3 is so bad that developer Running With Scissors basically disowned it (in fact it's so bad that they added the game box into Postal 2 and you get an achievement for pissing on it), but the original Postal remains a mystery to me. I'll soon fix that though.

(Fair warning: there's a good chance I'm going to end up calling the game 'Portal' instead of 'Postal', and it likely won't just be once, so try not to be confused if you catch me screwing up.)

Little Big Adventure 2 / Twinsen's Odyssey (MS-DOS)

Today's 'L' game is classic DOS action-adventure sequel Little Big Adventure 2. Though it'd be a 'T' game in North America and Brazil, as the game was retitled Twinsen's Odyssey. I've no idea why the people in charge of the America release had such a hate on for the original name, but at least they picked something that fits better this time around. The first game was about a friendly magician who lived in a cartoony world of rabbit people and elephant folk, and they renamed it Relentless! That's the video game title equivalent of drawing frowny eyebrows on Kirby game covers.

I don't think I've ever played this before, but it's hard to know for for sure. I definitely gave the first Little Big Adventure a go early last year though, and I wasn't impressed. The game came out in 1994 and they hadn't figured out yet that it's not a good idea for the hero to lose health by walking into walls. I hope three whole years was enough time for them to think hard about what they did and come up with some improvements for the sequel.

Star Wars: Jedi Knight - Dark Forces II (PC)

Today's 'J' game is Star Wars: Dark Forces II - Jedi Knight, or whatever order those names go in. Either way there's definitely a title beginning with 'J' in there somewhere and that's what's important. As usual I'm going to play it for an hour or so, take some screenshots, talk about how it plays and so on. It'll be cool

Jedi Knight is the second game in the Jedi Knight series (not to be confused with the Gabriel Knight series), coming two years after 1995's Dark Forces. I'm not sure why they dropped the original title for the rest of the games, but I have a theory that it's got something to do with the fact that Star Wars fans are obsessed with lightsabers. In fact I believe it's universally acknowledged that the only objective flaw in the near-perfect TIE Fighter (the greatest of all Star Wars games) is the fact that you can't roll down a window and lean out of the cockpit with a sword, slicing up passing capital ships and space jousting with X-Wings.

Sure people liked being able to run around as more of a Han Solo type as he went across the galaxy blasting things with his blasters, but Han Solo with a lightsaber is what they really wanted. So from this point on LucasArts made certain to put the word 'Jedi' on the covers in big letters, making it absolutely clear to potential customers that yes, you will get to swing one of those glowy swords around in this one.

(Some of the following screenshots will expand if you click them, some won't. It's an exciting mystery!)

Grand Theft Auto (PC)

Today on Super Adventures I thought that this would be a great time to play the original Grand Theft Auto for an hour or two and type up any stray thoughts that might cross my mind. Not that there's anything special about today, it's just always a good time for a bit of GTA and it's been years since I played it last.

The game is by British developer Rockstar North, who are still producing the GTA games to this day. Though back then they were still known as DMA Design and were more famous for making the Lemmings games. Yeah I know that everyone on Earth knows that already, it just amuses me that both Lemmings and GTA are by the same developer.

The game came out in 1997 for MS-DOS, Windows 95 and PlayStation... and was ported to the Game Boy Color two years later, man I've gotta see how that turned out. I'll be playing the updated PC port given away free from Rockstar's site, which has been tweaked to run properly on modern systems... in theory.

Annoyingly though, this free GTA turned out to be a limited time offer so I can't give you a download link. Well I can link to the download page, that's still there, but at the time I'm writing this the game is "currently unavailable". GTA1 is also currently unavailable on GOG, GMG, GamersGate, GameFly and any other shop beginning with G I could think of. It's not on Steam either I'm afraid.