Double Dragon (Arcade)

It's Super Adventures' 14th anniversary today, which means I really should've made a new logo for you. I've been too busy though, too busy to do it properly at least. But I've come up with a new logo every previous year since the site began, including the year that I quit and didn't write anything, so enjoy that one up there while it lasts because I don't expect it'll last much longer.

Also, enjoy this article I wrote about an old arcade game where you walk down the street and punch people.

Developer:

Technōs Japan

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Release Date:

1987

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Systems:

Arcade, NES, Master System + everything else

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm checking out another classic game for the very first time. Well, alright, I've probably played a bit of one of the ports, and I got Battletoads & Double Dragon - The Ultimate Team with my second-hand NES. But I assure you, when it comes to classic coin-op brawler Double Dragon, I am getting all my facts from Wikipedia and not my brain.

The game was released for arcades in 1987 and started appearing on home systems a year later (or three years if you were a NES owner in Europe). At first the Wikipedia infobox had me thinking that it was only ported to the NES and Master System and I wouldn't have 10,000 other versions to investigate, but nope the site was hiding the rest of the list in an attempt to protect me from the truth.

It even got released on TV, with a 1993 cartoon that influenced a 1994 movie that was adapted into a 1995 video game. Oh, and the cartoon got a game too. And then developer Technōs went bankrupt in 1996, so I'm assuming they weren't huge hits.

Though to call the original game a huge hit would be an understatement. It was the highest grossing arcade machine in the US for three years running, until Final Fight and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles took its spot by basically doing the same thing. And when the console and computer ports came out they went and topped charts as well. People really loved Double Dragon.

Alright, I admit this isn't really my genre but I'm giving it an hour to win me over. It's an arcade game, so you could probably make it to the end in that time, but it's from the '80s, so I probably won't.

Alien Syndrome (Arcade)

Developer:

Sega

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Release Date:

1987

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Systems:

Arcade first, then almost everything else

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing Alien Syndrome! Because I've already played Alien Breed and Alien Storm this year, so I figured I might as well.

I did play this a little bit earlier this year when I was getting a screenshot for my Alien Breed article, but until then all I knew about the game is that it was a side scrolling beat 'em up where you zap aliens... or maybe an overhead view run and gun set on a space ship. The problem I had is that I always got it mixed up with Alien Storm, because they're both arcade games by Sega with gross-looking aliens in them.

The game runs on the Sega System 16B arcade board, which is kind of like the Genesis/Mega Drive's dad. That makes it a bit weird that it never actually got a Mega Drive port, especially as other games made for the board like Altered Beast and Golden Axe did. It didn't make it to the TurboGrafx-16 or SNES either and I'm not sure what happened there, as it was ported to basically everything else at the time. Seriously, this Sega game got a NES port.

But whatever system it's on, it's still an arcade game... which means it'll be really simple and extremely difficult. I'll probably play it for 10 minutes, get hopelessly stuck, and then struggle to think of anything to say about it. I should get some good screenshots out of it though.

Alien Storm (Arcade)

Developer:

Sega

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Release Date:

1990

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Systems:

Arcade, Mega Drive, Master System, Atari ST, Amiga, C64, CPC, ZX Spectrum

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing one of Sega's classic arcade titles: Alien Storm! Man, I don't like it when title screens peer back at me like this. The creature that eye belongs to seem to have problems of their own though, seeing as they're floating around space in a chunk of debris. Somehow I get the feeling they deserved it.

I remember seeing magazine ads for Alien Storm and thinking "Damn that looks crazy." Or maybe they were Alien Syndrome ads; I always get the two games mixed up. In my defence they're both Sega arcade games with gross looking aliens that ran on a System 16 board (or close enough) and were ported to everything. Anyway, I didn't really get around to playing either of them in the end, so I'm curious to see if this is going to be anything like the image I've got in my head.

One thing I'm pretty certain of is that this isn't going to be a long game. I usually try to show off the first hour or so of gameplay in these articles, but I have a feeling I'll run out of game before then so don't be surprised if I spoil the ending. Also don't be surprised if I can't actually reach the ending due to being terrible at it.

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:

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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

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Release Date:

1996

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Systems:

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

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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.
 

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!

Rod-Land (Arcade)

Developer:

Jaleco

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Release Date:

1990

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Systems:

Arcade, Amiga, Atari ST, CPC, C64, ZX Spectrum, NES, Game Boy, iOS

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This week on Super Adventures I'm taking a quick look at arcade action game Rod·Land! I'm tempted now to look up if there's some CSS trick I can use to display the title in color-cycling rainbow text. Though I'm not even sure if I've written it right, as sometimes it's called Rod Land and other times it's Rodland.

Rod·Land is one of the games I used to play as a kid on my Amiga, so I'm not exactly going into this blind. Though I used to cheat the hell out of it back then by pressing the 'Help' key five times and getting infinite lives; one of the few times that 'Help' button was ever helpful.

This is my first time playing through the arcade version though and I can already tell it's not quite the same. For one thing this title screen fanfare sounds terrible; it's all synth brass and clock chimes. Amiga wins this round.

In the Hunt (Arcade)

Developer:

Irem

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Release Date:

1993

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Systems:

Arcade, PlayStation, Saturn, PC

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This week on Super Adventures I'm playing an arcade game, because I feel like showing off some pixels and I figured this'd be a good place to find them. Plus I haven't played a single arcade game for the site all year and I'm running out of time to make up for that.

My first criticism is that it needs more space between the words in the title. It looks like it says "INTHEHUNT", and that's not what it's called!

In  the  Hunt came out in arcades first in 1993 and was ported to PlayStation, Saturn and Windows 95 a couple of years later. It almost made it to Super Nintendo as well, but it was getting a bit close to the system's end by that point, and Irem's game development department departed soon after. The team that made this were apparently already gone by then though, as they formed Nazca in '94. I've already played one game they made as Irem, scrolling beat 'em up Undercover Cops, but they're more famous for what they made afterwards... Metal Slug! Which I'm totally going to play one of these days, maybe.

D.D. Crew (Arcade)

Developer:

Sega

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Release Date:

1991

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Systems:

Arcade

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Today on Super Adventures I'm hoping that D.D. Crew doesn't turn out to be another game about shooting guns on a spaceship, or else I'm going to have to rename the site to 'Sci-Fi Adventures in Gaming'. Which I don't want to do, because... uh... hmm...

Oh right, I bought a bundle of fantasy RPGs a while back that I still need to get to. Can't change the title until I've played all of them, and they're all 18,000 hours long each so you're safe for a while.

I'm not entire sure what D.D. Crew is about yet, it's another name I picked from the request list, but it's an arcade game from the early 90s and that pretty dramatically narrows down what genre it's likely to be. It's not going to be a 18,000 hour long fantasy RPG for instance. Could it be Sega's attempt at an all-female fighting game perhaps? Wouldn't shock me, but arcade titles can be devious and misleading, so I wouldn't bet on it either.

Mario Bros. (Arcade)

Super Adventures is four years old today, and yet somehow in all that time I never did play a proper Super Mario Bros. platformer for the site. I looked at the Game Boy version of Donkey Kong a while back and that had a bit of jumping in it if I recall, but otherwise I've stayed well clear of the classics. I figured that I'd have nothing to say about the games that hadn't been analysed and argued about a thousand times by now, making my trivia trite and all my observations entirely pointless. But that excuse is four years old now as well and I've grown bored of it, so I decided to kick off Super Adventures Year Five with a month-long MARIO MARATHON, showing off the top titles from the iconic plumber's first 10 years in the hero business! I'll also throw a few non-Nintendo requested games in there as well, because too much undiluted Mario could drive anyone crazy.

Also, if you scroll up you'll see that I've made the site a brand new, slightly more dynamic hand-pixelled logo for its birthday! Kinda starting to wish now that I'd baked a cake instead though.

Developer:

Nintendo

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Release Date:

1983

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Systems:

Arcade, plus a couple of others.

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Wario Bros? Ohhhhh...

Today on Super Adventures I'm having a quick go of the original Mario Bros. This was Mario's third role I believe, after Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr, but the first to feature his name in the title. Nintendo were still exclusively an arcade developer at the time this was released (if Wikipedia is to be believed, and I trust them implicitly), but this only lasted about... say a day or two longer before the Famicom was launched on 15 July 1983. Only a lunatic would decide to launch their début console right in the middle of the great American video game crash of '83 though, and that's why Sega launched their first console on the same day!

Mario Bros. didn't quite make it onto the new console as a launch title in Japan, but I suppose they had to get some money out of the arcade machines before letting people play it at home. Two months later Mario Bros. though was able to join the rest of the Mario Trilogy as the sixth ever Famicom game.

Yie Ar Kung-Fu (Arcade)

Developer:

Konami

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Release Date:

1985

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Systems:

It's all over the place

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Today's 'Y' game on Super Adventures is arcade classic Yie Ar KUNG-FU!

In Chinese the title means 'One Two Kung-Fu'... or perhaps '12 Kung-Fu' I suppose. I wouldn't really know, as my understanding of Chinese is even worse than my knowledge of Japanese. Though one thing I do know is that this is likely one of the most influential games ever made, as it basically kicked off the 1 vs. 1 fighting game genre when it hit arcades way back in 1985. That's two years before Street Fighter 1!

Okay there were a quite a few other games that introduced important elements of the genre, like Sega's 1976 version of Heavyweight Champ, Data East's Karate Champ and Nintendo's Urban Champion, but Yie Ar Kung-Fu has the proper health bars, the varied cast, the freedom of movement, the punch and kick buttons... nearly all of the basics in one place. I suppose its greatest gift to the fighting game genre though, was to prove that you don't have to have 'Champ' in the title to be successful, because otherwise today we'd be talking about games like Ultimate Marvel vs. Champcom 3, Champgirls, Guilty Champ Xrd, Melty Champ: Champtress Again Current Champ, and Street Fighter II' Champion Edition.

Yie Ar Kung-Fu came out for a million different systems, but I'd hit my arbitrary word count limit just listing them all so I'll be sticking exclusively to the arcade version this time around. My plan is to give it an hour or so, fail a few (dozen) times, then finish off by blaming the game for all my mistakes.

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.

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.)

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.

Mercs (Arcade)

Super Adventures in Gaming Replay 2014 - Game 2

This one might seem like a bit of a strange choice to replay as it's a pretty basic run and gun arcade shooter, not the kind of thing you need to play much of to get an impression of how it's going to carry on. Plus I got two levels into the Genesis/Mega Drive version the first time around, so it's not like I didn't give it a fair chance. But I'm reasonably sure I promised someone I'd take a look at the arcade version at some point, so here it is.

Here's something I didn't mention last time: Mercs is the second game in the Wolf of the Battlefield series and a sequel to 1985's Commando (which has absolutely nothing to do with 1985's Commando movie). It started off as an arcade game in 1990 and was ported to around seven home systems the following year (and there's no way I'm going to be comparing them all this time, sorry.)

Parodius (Arcade)

Today I'm taking a short look at Parodius, the second game in the Parodius series, confusingly. They call it パロディウスだ! －神話からお笑いへ－ in Japan, which translates to It's Parodius! From Myth to Laughter, a play on Gradius III's subtitle 'From Legend To Myth'. Because Parodius is a parody of Gradius you see! You'd think it'd be impossible to make a comedy spoof of a side scrolling shoot 'em up, but they went and did it anyway.

The game originally hit Japanese arcades in April 1990 and was happy enough to stay there for whatever reason, though most of its various console ports eventually made it over to the West. Well they were released in Europe anyway; poor America was left out entirely for whatever reason.

BlaZeon: The Bio-Cyborg Challenge (SNES)

Today as requested, I'm taking a quick look at BlaZeon: The Bio-Cyborg Challenge, a SNES arcade port with a shiny chrome logo and absolutely zero title screen music. Looks like it should be called Blaze-On, but isn't.

Shock Troopers (Arcade)

This one's another game request, and apparently it's an overhead run and gun a bit like Mercs, which I played early last year on the Megadrive/Genesis and didn't much like.

Looking back though, it's hard to tell what exactly I didn't like about the game. Mostly because I barely wrote anything about it. Okay it was a mindless shoot 'em up so I probably didn't have much to work with, but I'm sure I could have come up with something a bit more insightful than "Sup guys, I'm in a truck now! Truck beats goons. Oh damn. Tank beats truck." Guess I'm adding that one to the list of games I'm going to have to replay some day.

But anyway, here's Shock Troopers. It's a mindless shoot 'em up!

Cadash (TurboGrafx-16)

As requested, today I'm taking a look at Cadash, on the TurboGrafx-16 console. This is a port of a 1989 arcade game of the same name, and looking at those flames on the logo I'm guessing it's mostly going to be about walking to the right and hitting things with a sword.

Mr. Goemon (Arcade)

This is the very first Goemon/Mystical Ninja video game ever made, starring a real life Japanese folk hero who was executed for an attempted assassination attempt by being boiled alive along with his young son. Sounds like a fun story to make a game out of.

Atomic Runner Chelnov - Nuclear Man, the Fighter (Arcade)

Super Adventures in Gaming Replay - Game 3

Today I’m playing the original arcade version of Genesis/Mega Drive game Atomic Runner, which I wrote about exactly one year ago today.

That title screen is very different to the one on the Mega Drive port, which had the hero standing in a city firing lightning from his hands. I’m going to make a wild guess and say the game might possibly have something to do with the Cold War in some way.