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.

Sleeping Dogs (PC)

Super Adventures' run of spectacular semi-recent story-driven sandbox games starting with 'S' concludes at last with Sleeping Dogs! Here, you can listen to the theme while you read: youtube link.

The game didn't used to start with an 'S', that only happened relatively late in development. It actually began life as a new IP with title Black Lotus (no relation to the Lotus Turbo Challenge games), but publisher Activision decided they'd like to revive their True Crime franchise and relabelled it 'True Crime: Hong Kong' instead. Then three and a half years into development they decided that they'd rather cancel the whole thing altogether, and that was the end of it... until Square Enix stepped in like a big damn hero and saved the day, in a similar way to how Deep Silver saved Saints Row IV. They then retitled it to Sleeping Dogs, which is a decent enough name I guess, though personally I think they should've gone with 'Final Fantasy XV' just to see the reaction they got.

(Click the pictures to view them in an epic screen-filling 1280x720 resolution... well, screen-filling if you've got a tiny little monitor like I do.)

Mafia (PC)

Today's 'M' game is 30s gangster simulator Mafia, though weirdly every other site on the internet seems to be part of a conspiracy to convince the world that it's called Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven. I don't know why they're all so keen to disseminate such obvious MISINFORMATION (probably because it makes it easier to actually find the game in a search engine), but if you check any of the game boxes, the official website, or the game itself, all you'll see is 'Mafia'.

I've played this one before, but I don't remember getting very far in it. In fact it's been so long that I don't even remember what happened to my game box, so I had to get a second copy of it just to play it for you folks. Good ol' 2002: late enough for the average game to be a gig or two big, but just too early for DVDs to be standard for PC. Three CDs this comes on, all stacked up on the same spindle to maximise the chances that at least one of them's getting scratched.

Anyway, like always I plan to play this just long enough to get a handle on what kind of game it's trying to be and judge if it's any good at it, then once I'm satisfied I'll kick the door open and bail.

(Click the screenshots to view them in an utterly mindblowing 1280x960 resolution).

Driver: San Francisco (PC)

Today I'm having a look at Driver: San Francisco by Reflections, makers of Shadow of the Beast, Destruction Derby, Stuntman and a whole lot of Driver games.

To be honest I've never been much of a fan of the Driver series; I found the first game to be pretty painful to play, Driver 2: Are You Sure You Want to Restart is astoundingly unforgiving, the third game seems like it's a broken mess and Parallel Lines... I can't even remember why I don't like that, but I'm sure there must be a good reason. Still it introduced me to the track 'Suffragette City' by David Bowie, so it's not all bad.

There's actually two versions of Driver: San Francisco: the Xbox 360/PlayStation 3/PC game I'm playing and the Wii version which has an entirely different story despite the fact it has the same name and cover art. In fact the Wii game is a prequel to the first Driver, so basically they were straight up trying to mislead people with it. Hey Ubisoft, here's an idea: if you're releasing a different product DON'T SELL IT IN THE SAME BOX.

(Click the pictures to expand them into a glorious 1280x720 resolution).

007 Games Part 8: Tomorrow Never Dies, 007 Racing

Super AiG's Guide to Every (old) James Bond Game Ever, Volume 8

Two more Bond games today, each released only for the Sony PlayStation, which probably annoyed a lot of N64 owning GoldenEye 007 fans. Poor Nintendo was left out this time for whatever reason. Though they did end up getting GoldenEye's spiritual sequel, Perfect Dark, so I guess they had the last laugh.

Game 18 - Tomorrow Never Dies (1999)
Formats: PlayStation.

So much black.

Despite being made to tie-in with the 1997 film, this game actually came out two years later. Around time that the next movie, The World is Not Enough, hit cinemas in fact.