The Lion King (Genesis/Mega Drive)

Developer:

Westwood Studios

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Release Date:

1994

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Systems:

Genesis/Mega Drive, SNES, MS-DOS, Amiga

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm voluntarily playing a movie tie-in game from the 16-bit era! Maybe this is one of the good ones though. I mean, there have to be some good ones, right?

I've actually played The Lion King before, so I already know what I'm getting into here... and I know I won't be getting very far in it. Games were generally more challenging in the 80s and 90s, so when you load up one that was notorious even back in its day for its extreme difficulty, you know that you're in for a bad time.

The game was re-released for modern platforms a few years back by Digital Eclipse, so I'm sure it has all kinds of new quality-of-life features now (or at least a gallery to look through when you're stuck). I'm not going to be playing that one though. I'm going back to the original games with all the original frustrations.

Disney's Aladdin famously got two different platformers, a Sega version by Virgin Games and a Nintendo version by Capcom, though it also had a third version for 8-bit systems. For The Lion King, all the 16-bit systems got the same game, by Command & Conquer devs Westwood Studios, and that's what I'll be playing. Though I'll also take a look at the 8-bit games as well, because I'm curious.

Alright, I'm going to see if I can finally get past the graveyard stage for the first time in my life.

The Lawnmower Man (SNES) - Guest Post

This week on Super Adventures, virtual game reviewer mecha-neko has returned with a quick look at perhaps the best video game to ever have the word 'lawnmower' in the title. It's probably better than a lot of games with 'man' in the title as well, like Superman 64, the DOS version of Mega Man, that Amazing Spider-Man game from 1989, and The Running Man. Though this and The Running Man would both make it onto anyone's "Top 10 Video Games Based on a Stephen King Story" list, because as far as I know there's only ever been five of them.

By the turn of the millennium a technology known as VIRTUAL REALITY will be in widespread use. It will allow you to enter computer generated artificial worlds as unlimited as the imagination itself. Its creators foresee millions of positive uses - while others fear it as a new form of mind control...

Developer:

The Sales Curve

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Release Date:

8th November 1993

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Systems:

SNES, Mega Drive, Game Boy

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Hello, everyone! I'm going to take it easy and play a 16-bit movie license today. This game was recommended to me because it has flashy graphics and fancy effects. The person recommending it to me hadn't actually played it themselves, but what can you do?

I'm not going to go in-depth talking about the original film. In fact I played the game before having seen it! But I'll warn you about potential spoilers for it anyway now if you'd rather not read anything like that.

Constantine (PS2)

Developer:

Bits

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Release Date:

2005

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Systems:

PS2, Xbox, Windows

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This week on Super Adventures, it's the final game of Keanu Reeves week: Constantine, based on the 2005 movie of the same name, based on the comic Hellblazer.

I always forget how to pronounce the name 'Constantine', and it doesn't help that it's always changing. The star of the comics, a blonde anti-hero warlock Scouser from Liverpool, England, would pronounce his name to rhyme with 'wine', but the dark-haired American Keanu Reeves version has a name that rhymes with 'keen', and so does this game. (The TV series DC's Legends of Tomorrow splits the difference, making him blonde Liverpudlian who pronounces his name the American way).

Funnily enough, the game's developer, Bits Studios, was English, so a British studio made a game based on an American reimagining of a British character. Bits worked on a lot of licenced games actually, like Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Terminator 2, Last Action Hero, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Alien³, and Die Hard: Vendetta. Unfortunately Constantine was their last, as they only got to make one more game before their assets were sold off and that was Payout Poker & Casino on the PSP.

Anyway, I'm only going to be playing the PlayStation 2 version of the game, but I've given the Xbox and PC versions a quick glance and they seem to be more or less the same thing. It really was just a glance though, so I could be way wrong there. The game's also going to have similarities to the movie, so be warned about SPOILERS.

Bram Stoker's Dracula (Amiga)

Developer:

Psygnosis

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Release Date:

1994

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Systems:

Amiga + eight other systems

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Today on Super Adventures, Keanu Reeves week continues with Bram Stoker's Dracula on the Amiga! I said I was only going to play three Keanu Reeves games, and this would be the second of them, but things get a little complicated with this one.

Bram Stoker's Dracula was a multiplatform title released to tie in with the 1992 Gary Oldman movie, but not all platforms got the same game. In fact it seems like there's actually five different games here, split across nine different systems. It came out on Amiga, SNES, Mega Drive/Genesis, Game Gear, Master System, NES, Game Boy, Sega CD and DOS PCs, so poor C64 owners were left out this time.

Nine systems in one article is a bit much, so I'm going to focus on the Amiga game mostly and try not to get too carried away with writing about the other versions, but I have to at least take a look at them. Yeah okay, I didn't show off all the different Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure games yesterday, I only played the home computer versions, but in my defence I was busy finishing the entire game three times over.

I'll also try not to spoil too much about the movie, but I get the feeling that's not going to be an issue here.

Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (C64)

Developer:

Off the Wall

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Release Date:

1989

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Systems:

C64, Amiga, DOS

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Today on Super Adventures, to celebrate Cyberpunk 2077 eventually coming out at some point hopefully, I'm kicking off Keanu Reeves week! I'll be playing three games this week, each of which is based on a movie starring Keanu Reeves, starting with the computer version of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. Which works out pretty well I reckon, seeing as the third Bill & Ted film just came out.

I've already played a Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure game, on the Lynx, but I'm pretty sure this one's something completely different. Maybe even something better! This version came out on three systems, Amiga, MS-DOS and Commodore 64, and I'll be playing all three of them, because I'm hardcore like that. But I'm mostly focusing on the C64 game, because the poor system doesn't get much love here and it'll be a change.

There may be SPOILERS below for the first Bill & Ted movie... but I doubt it somehow.

Demolition Man (Mega Drive/SNES)

Developer:

Alexandria

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Release Date:

1995

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Systems:

Mega Drive/Genesis, Mega CD, SNES

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This week on Super Adventures I'm taking a quick look at another movie tie-in! I hope it's better than that Stargate platformer I played a while ago. Though it will be a platformer, there's no doubt of that.

Demolition Man is a apparently one of just three games developed by Alexandria before they vanished in late 1995, with the others being Sylvester and Tweety in Cagey Capers... and Izzy's Quest for the Olympic Rings, which I wrote about way back in the days when I didn't write much. In fact I kind of sucked and so did that game.

Speaking of 1995, that's also the year that the game was released, which is pretty late for a 16-bit console game, especially one that's based on a 1993 movie. They weren't exactly striking when the iron was hot there. In fact if it'd come out any later then the dystopian future levels would actually be set in the past.

By the way I'm playing the Mega Drive/SNES Demolition Man not the 3DO game, which is one of those variety pack licensed film tie-ins that keep switching genre and are invariably terrible. Though it does have the genuine movie soundtrack and includes FMV clips of Sylvester Stallone, Wesley Snipes and Jesse Ventura filmed exclusively for the game! The Mega Drive and SNES versions, on the other hand, don't. But what they do have is a title that literally explodes onto the screen letter by letter in little bursts of flame before a synthy guitar riff plays, and that's cool too.

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.

Stargate (SNES/Mega Drive)

Developer:

Probe/Tantalus

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Release Date:

1995

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Systems:

SNES, Mega Drive/Genesis

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This week on Super Adventures I'm still celebrating Star Trek's 50th anniversary by playing games that have some vague connection to the series. This one's got 'Star' in the title, it's set on another planet, and it's based on a long running movie/TV franchise, so it's ticking lots of boxes. In fact the 'Stargate' TV spin-offs were often the closest you can get to proper 'Star Trek' without getting sued by both CBS and Paramount.

But Stargate the game is an adaptation of the original 1994 movie that kicked the franchise off, released a year after the film for Super Nintendo and Genesis/Mega Drive consoles. That's the SNES title screen you're looking at up there, with its narrow resolution and extra colours, but I'll be getting around to the the Sega version as well eventually.

'Stargate' isn't a particularly great film, but it cheats by having an iconic theme by Bond composer David Arnold powerful enough to make scenes of extras walking across a desert outside of Yuma, Arizona feel like the most epic sci-fi adventure since 'Return of the Jedi'... which used the place for Tatooine now that I think about it. Anyway, if there's one thing that absolutely works about that movie it's the music, so of course the game drops it entirely, replacing it with a title theme that sounds like it's been borrowed from an Amiga game. It's not all that bad though really, here have a YouTube link if you're curious.

There'll be movie SPOILERS below this point, so stop reading here unless you've seen it or don't care.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (MS-DOS)

Developer:

Lucasfilm Games

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Release Date:

1989

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Systems:

Amiga, Atari ST, CDTV, DOS, FM Towns, Macintosh, Windows

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm having a quick look at another one of those Lucasfilm/LucasArts adventures. It wasn't really part of my masterplan to play a pair of Sam & Max games in July then follow them up with a pair of Monkey Islands in September, but seeing as that happened I might as well finish the trilogy with a duology of Indiana Joneses. Uh, bit of a spoiler for the next game there, sorry.

The difference this time though is that I've never played this and I've got no idea what it's like. I don't even know if it's considered to be any good. But one thing I do know is that its full title is Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure, as Lucasfilm also developed a multi-platform Last Crusade platformer in the same year called The Action Game and they didn't want gamers to get them confused. That's good responsible labelling, I applaud them.

Weirdly another developer called Software Creations went and made a third Last Crusade game a couple of years later, exclusive to the NES. Which means the console got two entirely different Last Crusade action games. Later Indiana Jones' Greatest Adventures and LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures would revisit the movie as well. Not a whole lot of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull games out there though, you'll be shocked to learn.

Super Back to the Future, Part II (SNES)

Developer:

Daft

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Release Date:

1993

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Systems:

Super Nintendo

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This week on Super Adventures, I've got a 'Back to the Future' game loaded up and it's playing the actual theme from the movie! It's funny how few of them do that.

It's Back to the Future Day today! We've finally reached Wednesday October 21th 2015, the day that Doc Brown and Marty McFly visit in the second movie, and that makes this the perfect time for me to take a look at Super Back to the Future, Part II for the SNES. Other good dates would’ve been November 12th 1955 and October 27th 1985, but I’ve already missed them, so I'm basically on my last chance here.

Weirdly there was never a Super Back to the Future or Super Back to the Future, Part III, despite the fact that SBTTF,PII came out long after the movie trilogy concluded in 1990. There were plenty of other 'Back to the Future' games released for other systems, but this is all the Super Nintendo ever got, and it got it 3 years late. Sorry I mean the Super Famicom, as the game was only ever released in Japan (presumably because it's not very good).

Oh right, I should put a warning here that the game's based on the film, so I'll be spoiling part of the movie's storyline along with the game's. Assuming that the game even has a storyline.

The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (PC) - Part 2

The chronicle of my epic prison break concludes!

Click this link to return to Riddick's cell: Part one.

The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (PC) - Part 1

Developer:

Starbreeze

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Release Date:

2004

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Systems:

Xbox, Windows

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Today on Super Adventures I'll be taking a brief look at the first few hours of sci-fi movie spin-off The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay - Developer's Cut. I've played through the game before and I remember liking it well enough back then, but then I remember liking a lot of things and my fuzzy memories don't always match up to the truth.

The game was originally released for the Xbox (and later PC) back in 2004, but it received one of those HD makeover type of things three years later to port it across to the shiny new Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. They enhanced the visuals, tweaked the AI, added multiplayer, included a sequel campaign, and called it Assault on Dark Athena. But I'm not playing that one.  

The Dark Athena version may have the big advantage of having way more content and actually being sold online, but it seems to be built on the Xbox original, skipping the PC port's improvements like quicksaves and developer's commentary. Which is a bit of a deal breaker for me as I happen to like quicksaves and developer's commentary!

The original version does have one problem though and that's that it flat out refuses to start up on my PC. Well, it didn't until PC Gaming Wiki saved me yet again. It turns out that Nvidia owners can fix the game by "downloading Nvidia Inspector and setting the Extension Limit to 0x00001B58". This also reactivates Shader Mode 2.0++, so I can pretend I've got a GeForce 6800 Ultra in my case and push the graphics to max.

(Click the screenshots to view them at their original 1280x720 resolution.)

Aliens: Colonial Marines (PC) - Part 2

Click the highlighted text to return to the horror of part one.

Aliens: Colonial Marines (PC) - Part 1

Developer:

Gearbox, TimeGate, Nerve

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Release Date:

2013

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Systems:

Windows, PS3, Xbox 360

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Last year on Super Adventures I decided that April 1st would be the perfect day to give a critically mauled Duke Nukem Forever a fighting chance to win me over. Because if I ended up liking it I could always pass my opinions off as being a joke and escape with my reputation intact. So today I’m going to pull the same trick with the hated Aliens: Colonial Marines and see if I can find the good in it too.

Like DNF, this is a first person shooter famous for taking ages to make and impressing absolutely no one by the time it finally came out, though it wasn't in the oven for quite as long before it got rushed out and served undercooked. It started late 2006 and finished early 2013, with folks saying that it spent 4 years at Gearbox, then around 18 months outsourced to TimeGate, and then 9 more months at Gearbox. Apparently huge chunks were reworked each time it swapped over, which left Sega agreeing to pay out $1.25 million to settle a class-action suit when people discovered to their dismay that the demos they'd been shown were demonstrating content and visuals that hadn't survived to the final product.

Anyway I'm playing the PC version here, which I've heard is the least crap of them. I usually only play games for an hour or two to get an impression of what kind of game they are, but this time I’m going to keep playing the single player campaign until either I start liking it or I really can’t take any more. I even watched both 'Alien' and 'Aliens' in preparation so I can nitpick about every tiny thing it gets wrong! I could end up spoiling elements of any of the films in the series though (plus a decent amount of this game, obviously), so if that's an issue you should get out now while you're still safe.

(Click screenshots to view them slightly bigger.)

RoboCop 2 (NES)

Okay, that's how you do a title screen. Shame they had to squash up the title a bit to fit it all in though; that poor letter 'B' has ended up overlapped and mangled.

Today I'm taking a look at RoboCop 2 on the NES, obviously, and I'm amazed that it's taken me this long to get a RoboCop game onto the site. Well okay my associate, mecha-neko, wrote a guest post a few years back about the 2003 PC game, but that thing's more of an eldritch abomination trapped in a crude video game form, and knowing too much more about it could drive you mad.

I've played a couple of the old RoboCop platformers in the past, but I've never seen this one before so it's all going to be new to me. If it's anything like the others I've seen though... we're not going to get on.

Blade Runner (PC)

I'm through with 'A' games now, so this week I'm moving up to games beginning with the letter 'B', starting with another game request: Westwood's 1997 adventure game Blade Runner.

Amazingly it took 15 years for a proper Blade Runner game to get made, though developers like Hideo Kojima had been... paying homage to it the best they could in the meantime. Well okay there is another game called Blade Runner released in 1985 for 8-bit computers, but it's actually based on the soundtrack to the movie. Seriously, it's stated to be a "video game interpretation of the film score".

I'm not sure if it's a coincidence that Westwood's game came out a few months after the Director's Cut DVD of the movie, but it certainly seems like good timing. Sadly I'm not going to be able to compare the game to the film, as I've somehow neglected to ever watch it. There's two theatrical cuts, a TV cut, a workprint cut, a Director's Cut and a Final Cut, and I haven't seen any of them. I know it stars a detective called Rick Deckard who definitely is/isn't a robot and I know where the Millennium Falcon is hidden amongst the skyscrapers, but other than that...

Actually you know what, I'm not going to half-ass this for once; I'm going to use this article as an excuse to finally watch the film for the very first time before I play the game, right now! Such is my commitment to excellence and my dedication to providing insightful commentary... or maybe I'm just trying to put off having to write about the game for a bit longer. Either way this article may now also include MOVIE SPOILERS.

(Click the pictures to... see them in exactly the same res as they are now. Sorry, but this one's stuck at 640x480.)

Lethal Weapon (Amiga)

Today I'm playing Lethal Weapon on the Amiga by Ocean Software, the former kings of licenced movie tie-in games. The game came out just after the third movie and has the poster as its box art, but pretty much just does its own thing storywise.

I actually played this a fair bit when I was younger so it's not entirely unfamiliar to me, but it seemed like a good time to give it another look. Mostly because the music has inexplicably crept back into my head somehow and has been spinning around my brain on a loop this last week, tormenting me (but in a good way). This title music is nothing mindblowingly incredible, but it's catchy enough to be worth a listen I reckon: youtube link.

The internet claims that this was also released on the NES, SNES, Game Boy, DOS, Atari ST and the C64, so I suppose I should investigate them as well. I'm sure you won't mind when this ends up dragging on twice as long as it needs to because of all the extra screenshots.

007 Games Part 10: The World is Not Enough (GBC)

Super AiG's Guide to Every (old) James Bond Game Ever, Volume 10 

Game 22 - The World is Not Enough (2001)

Formats: Game Boy Color.

Only one Bond game today, the Game Boy Color adaptation of The World is Not Enough, released a year after the PlayStation and N64 games. I can only hope that the rest of the game matches the... quality of its title screen.

The Terminator (MS-DOS) - Guest Post

Here's a pickle. Ray's gone to all that trouble playing those Judge Dredd games and I've already played the only Judge Dredd FPS, Judge Dredd: Dredd vs. Death, back in January!

Never fear, I've had a look around and I've found something completely unrelated to play instead!

Prepare yourself for a shock. Some might say a Future Shock...

Nightbreed: The Interactive Movie (Amiga) - Guest Post

I must have done something wrong in a previous life because I'm playing Clive Barker's Nightbreed: The Interactive Movie.

Ray played Nightbreed: The Action Game over a year ago and it definitely changed his life.

Nightbreed is one of the very first games I can remember and they're not happy memories. The film's alright-ish; it's tense, exciting, bizarre stuff. If you haven't seen it yet, be warned. This game contains spoilers for the film!