Diablo IV (PC) - Part 1

Developer:

Blizzard

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Release Date:

2023

|

Systems:

Win, Xbone, Series X|S, PS4, PS5

---

This week on Super Adventures, I'm taking a look at a game I said I would never buy due to its unnecessary always-online DRM: it's Blizzard's action RPG sequel Diablo IV!

So what made me change my mind in the end? Nothing, I didn't buy it, it was included with Xbox Game Pass so I thought I'd give it a try. Oh, I should mention that I played it way back in January, so this is going to be hilariously out of date. These regularly updated modern games are a bad match for my 'Eh, I'll finish the final draft later' work ethic. They're not a great fit for my 'Hey, here are some screenshots of retro games!' site ethic either, but I've found procrastination can actually solve that problem as long as I keep my articles on the back burner for a decade or so.

I had somehow managed to avoid learning anything about Diablo 4 before playing it, so if I seem entirely clueless, that's because I was. I'm still clueless actually. I'm assuming that there's something people don't like about it, some kind of controversy (because: Blizzard), but I haven't looked into what it is. Plus I did my best to ignore all the multiplayer stuff, all the microtransactions, and all the... whatever else it has. I don't even know what it has, I ignored it.

Though I did pay attention to the story, so there'll be SPOILERS for the first few hours of the game. Or at least what the game was like a few months ago.

Palworld (PC) - Part 2

This week on Super Adventures, I'm writing a bit more about the Game Preview of Palworld.

In part 1 I managed to sort out my food, clothing and shelter so now I'm ready to head out into the world and discover what it is you actually do in this game. Aside from catching Pokémon I mean. I'm aware of that bit.

It didn't take long for Nintendo to became aware of the Pokémon as well, and I'm not surprised that they sent their lawyers after the game. I get the impression the actual Pokémon games haven't had to work too hard to sell copies lately because there's been nothing to challenge them. The last thing they need is serious competition from something ambitious that hits all the modern trends and gives Pikachu a Gatling gun.

Alright, like I said last time, I played the game back in January so this is a slightly ancient build and for all I know they've reworked game mechanics and redesigned the interface since then. I played it for about 9 hours in total and it apparently takes 39 hours to beat, but don't expect to see a whole lot of progress here.

Palworld (PC) - Part 1

Developer:

Pocketpair

|

Release Date:

Preview 2024

|

Systems:

Win, Xbone, Series X|S, PS5, macOS

---

This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing quirky Pokémon-inspired survival sim Palworld!

Actually there's no point in me pretending that this is something I've been playing this week, as you can see the version number on the title screen and I'm sure it's had a few updates since then. I wrote the "first draft" of this article back in January and I'm putting quotes around that because what I really mean is 'I wrote notes underneath screenshots and then left my future self to sort it out later'. Because that always works out great!

In my defence, it says "Game Preview" down on the other side of the screenshot, so technically the game isn't even out yet. I'm giving you an early sneak preview of a game in development... that everyone has already seen. Last I checked it was something like the second-highest played game on Steam.

A lot of people were a bit wary of this when it was announced, with its trailer full of Pokémon and assault rifles, and I can understand why they'd suspect it was going to be a bit of a janky mess. But I've actually played a bit of Pocketpair's previous game, Craftopia, so I went into this knowing that it was going to be a janky mess. I really liked Craftopia though; it was full of so much stuff and so many ideas, and it was weirdly endearing how none of it quite worked right.

Oh, before I start I need to mention that the desktop icon just says 'Pal' and that's adorable. Though I assume the original Japanese version would be labelled 'NTSC'.

The Crew Motorfest (PC)

Developer:

Ivory Tower

|

Release Date:

2023

|

Systems:

PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X

---

This week on Super Adventures, I'm finally back after a five month break and I'm writing about a racing game! The fifth racing game in a row! This wasn't my original plan, but a free trial came along and to be honest I didn't really have an original plan so I figured I might as well put some words underneath the screenshots I was taking.

Everyone calls this The Crew Motorfest, not The Crew: Motorfest, so I'll be skipping the colon too. In fact, I'll probably just call it Motorfest. Or MOTORFEST  if I feel like adding a bit more style to it.

The game was originally going to be called Motorcamp. In fact, it wasn't originally going to be its own game at all, it was going to be DLC for The Crew 2, but the ideas they had were incompatible with the game's capabilities so they just made it its own thing. With an upgraded engine and shinier graphics.

Okay, I usually play through the first hour or so of a game and write down what's happening as I experiencing it, but for racing games I give them more of a regular review, so this is going to be something a little different. Except I just reviewed four other racing games, so this is actually extremely normal now, I guess.

Super Adventures in Delisted Racing Games Part 3: Forza Horizon 3

This week on Super Adventures, I'm reviewing one last racing game you can't buy digitally anymore. First I played The Crew, then I played Need for Speed: Undercover, and now this one's a Forza game. Most of the Forza games are gone now, but I'm checking out Forza Horizon 3 specifically because I grabbed it just before it was delisted and then never quite got around to trying it.

The logo looks like it's saying "FIII" for Forza Horizon 3, but it's actually "FM" for Forza Motorsport, the main Forza series. It would've been such an easy edit to change it to "FH" but I guess it makes sense to have one logo for the whole franchise. (The E in The Crew isn't a 3 either).

Super Adventures in Delisted Racing Games Part 2: Need for Speed: Undercover

This week on Super Adventures, I'm still writing about racing games you can't buy digitally anymore. I was inspired by The Crew being shut down earlier this year, as it got me thinking about all the other racing games that have just disappeared over the years. Well okay, most of them are still in someone's game library, they still work (unlike The Crew), but you won't find them on the PlayStation store or on Steam.

It's a problem that affects this genre more than most because of all the licenced cars and music. Those licences have a time limit and when that's up the game can't be sold anymore. As far as I can tell, the first 18 Need for Speed games are all either gone now or never were, unless you can find them on disc, with only 2010's Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit getting a remastered rerelease. And playing PC games off a disc has only become more of a pain in the ass over time.

Fortunately, I was able to buy a few of them before they vanished. In fact, I've already written about the first 10 years of Need for Speed games, going from Need for Speed to Underground, so now would be a good time for me to cover the absolute highlight of the sixth gen console era: the original Need for Speed: Most Wanted from 2005!

I can't be bothered going through the hassle of installing it though, so instead I'm downloading one of the most hated games in the series: 2008's Need for Speed: Undercover!

Super Adventures in Delisted Racing Games Part 1: The Crew

This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing racing games you can't buy anymore, not online anyway. In fact, you can't even play The Crew anymore as Ubisoft shut the servers down last March! They just took a game people bought with money and made it entirely non-functional.

I struggle to write about racing games as basically all you do in them is get in a car and turn left or right. Sure the process of winning races is a little more complicated than that, plus I can talk about the types of races they have and their various features, but if I go down that route I'll pretty much end up writing an instruction manual and no one reads manuals anymore.

But screw it, this is my last chance to write about The Crew while it's fresh in my memory, so I'm doing it. Plus I'm throwing in Need for Speed: Undercover and Forza Horizon 3, because it's easier to see what makes something distinct when you put it next to the things that it's similar to.

The Lion King (Genesis/Mega Drive)

Developer:

Westwood Studios

|

Release Date:

1994

|

Systems:

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

---

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.

Sonic 3 & Knuckles (Genesis/Mega Drive)

Developer:

Sega Technical Institute

|

Release Date:

1994

|

Systems:

Mega Drive/Genesis, Saturn, PC

---

This week on Super Adventures, I'm wondering why Sonic 3 & Knuckles has you selecting menu options with a shoe. That's not normal.

You might be wondering why this beautiful looping GIF is missing the horrifying slowdown when the 3D Sonic swoops in. The answer is: it bothered me and I wanted it gone. I did my best to make it true to what the designers intended it to look like though. The game's later releases on more powerful consoles tend to come with authentic emulated slowdown, but the Saturn version included with with Sonic Jam is a proper port, so I used that as a reference to fix the timing. Now the only thing wrong with my GIF is that it's not a video, so I can't hear it say "SEGA!"

Anyway, I'm playing Sonic 3 & Knuckles, the fourth (and fifth) of the 16-bit Mega Drive/Genesis Sonic platformers! I already covered the first Sonic the Hedgehog back in 2011, but I decided to skip Sonic 2 because it's too similar, and Sonic CD frightens and confuses me. Also, it's Sonic 3's 30th birthday today... in the EU (it came out a few weeks earlier in the US).

Sonic 3 & Knuckles came in two parts released 8 months apart, with Sonic the Hedgehog 3 featuring the first set of levels and the save RAM, and Sonic & Knuckles featuring the second half of the levels and a connector to (optionally) join the two cartridges together. It's like plugging in a Game Genie, except instead of getting cheats you get an expansion pack. It's not the first time two standalone games could be combined like this, DOS game Might and Magic: World of Xeen got there first, but this did it with hardware. And then basically nothing copied it. It remains pretty much unique as far as I'm aware.

The reason it was released in such a weird way is because they had a Happy Meal promotion and TV ad campaign deadline and they were only going to get half the game finished in time. They still charged full price for it though! Personally, I think the lock-on feature was a genius move, as it gave the game some novelty, especially when people learned that it could be combined with Sonic the Hedgehog 2 as well! Plus it turned out to be a crucial part of any serious collector's Tower of Power, along with the 32X... another piece of add-on hardware that didn't catch on.

Right, I'm going to give the game an hour or so and write about it. I have played it before, but honestly I think an hour is going to take me well further than anything I've seen before.

Donkey Kong Country (SNES)

Hello, welcome back! It's Super Adventures' 13th birthday today and I've got some good news for you. Four years ago I replaced around 14,000 screenshots across 1000 articles to improve their quality, and everything was great... until I started getting complaints that images weren't loading. It didn't happen to everyone, just some people some of the time. Eventually all the images stopped working for me entirely, which was a good thing because it meant I could see what needed fixing and sort it out.

Long story short, I've replaced all those screenshots across all those articles again, so everything should be fine now and you can go browse the archives. Even the really old posts where you'd be lucky to get one sentence under each picture. In fact, if you're nostalgic for the classic Super Adventures style, I've retconned in a mysterious never-before-seen authentic guest post from 2013 that originally didn't get published for whatever reason. Go look for frogs, that's your clue.

Developer:

Rare

|

Release Date:

1994

|

Systems:

SNES, GBC, GBA

---

This week on Super Adventures, I'm writing about something else that's celebrating an anniversary this year: the legendary Donkey Kong Country!

It's known as Super Donkey Kong in Japan, because putting the word 'Super' in front of names is awesome, especially if the name of a game for the Super Nintendo... a console I have really neglected these past few years. I don't even know how that happened, it's not like I want to avoid showing off 16-bit game art.

I'm really trying to make up for it here, as Donkey Kong Country was one of the biggest releases of the 16-bit era. In fact, it was the best-selling game of 1994, almost doubling the sales of its nearest rival Street Fighter II and selling over seven times as well as Super Metroid. Though in Japan it got utterly thrashed by Final Fantasy VI and Americans spent more money on NBA Jam. Actually, I'm not sure that second fact is true. Sure NBA Jam sold more copies in the US in '94, but DKC was an unusually pricey game if I recall. Around £60 in the UK (£120 today, or $150 USD).

The game was able to get away with its exorbitant price tag due to the sheer force of hype around it. Not because it was the first Donkey Kong game in like a decade (aside from the Game Boy game that came out a few months earlier), but because of its incredible visuals. It featured fully ray-traced graphics that players could enjoy without buying a CD drive, or a 32X add-on, or a shiny new 3DO console. The cartridge didn't even include a Super FX chip!

Alright, my plan is to play the game for about an hour and hope that I can think of something to write. I mean, it's been like 3 years since I've covered a SNES platformer, so I've probably forgotten all the things I used to whine about.

Model Builder (PC)

Developer:

Moonlit

|

Release Date:

2022

|

Systems:

Win

---

This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing Model Builder! Well I'll be building stuff in it at least, I don't know if it really counts as gameplay. This is another simulator along the lines of Car Mechanic Simulator or PC Building Simulator, except with a bit more room for creativity... with any luck.

Most of the games I cover on Super Adventures are about shooting things or punching things or crushing creatures underneath the hero's mighty boots, so this is unfamiliar territory for me. Wait a second, no it's not. I've never actually raced a Lotus Esprit, or travelled across the universe to defeat an alien despot, but I have put a model kit or two together, so I can compare this to my actual real-life experience! I hope I get to build a Spitfire, I liked making them.

I'm going to be spoiling a lot of the models you can make in the game, so if you want to be surprised when you play it yourself I suggest not reading too much. I mean, it's possible that you could play this right now and don't realise it. The game was given away on Epic a while back, so if you've gotten into the habit of claiming the free gift each week it may be sitting in your game library, forgotten.

Marvel's Avengers: The Definitive Edition (PC)

Developer:

Crystal Dynamics

|

Release Date:

2020

|

Systems:

Win, XBOne, Series S/X, PS4, PS5, Stadia

---

This week on Super Adventures, I'm writing about Marvel's Avengers, because it's about to be delisted on Steam and is super cheap right now. Honestly, this fell off my radar the moment I learned they were going the games as a service route with it, so I was very surprised to find myself handing over actual money for it and now I own it I guess!

My curiosity got the better of me when I learned that they'd given players the entire shop's worth of content and freed it from its microtransactions. Plus I had to buy it now or I'd never get another chance, as they've gone and delisted it from online shops. I hate it when they do that.

I was only intending to put the game on for a few minutes and see how it plays, I wasn't expecting to use my screenshots/video to write about it for the internet. In fact, I wasn't even expecting it to run. So the graphics have been left at their absolute lowest to squeeze the maximum FPS out of it. This is as bad as the game can possibly look, at least without some extra effort messing with INI files or whatever. I know people work horrifying miracles sometimes.

SPOILER WARNING: I'm going to be playing the first few hours, so you may learn a lot of stuff here you might not want to know about the story.

Crysis 2 (PC)

Developer:

Crytek

|

Release Date:

2011

|

Systems:

Windows, PS3, Xbox 360

---

This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing Crysis 2, the second game in the Crysis trilogy. (Warhead's a stand-alone expansion so it doesn't count.)

I also played the original Crysis this week so you might be wondering 'Why the rush?' Well, the game starts on the 23rd of August 2023, so it actually takes place today. So I should really get on with writing about the game and stop wasting time with this intro.

Actually, there are a couple of things I should mention here. First, the game's story was written by Richard K. Morgan, author of the novel Altered Carbon. He also wrote the Syndicate shooter that came out the following year. Second, I want to mention how the game's theme is kind of one note. Well, two notes I suppose. It's like an alarm. It's one of a handful of songs on the soundtrack by Hollywood composers Hans Zimmer and Lorne Balfe, and honestly I prefer Lorne Balfe's theme to that new Dungeons & Dragons movie, Honor Among Thieves.

Alright, I'm not going to be able to get away with just playing an hour or two of this like I usually do, so expect SPOILERS for the entire first half of the game.

Crysis (PC)

Developer:

Crytek

|

Release Date:

2007

|

Systems:

PC, PS3, Xbox 360

---

This week on Super Adventures, I'm finally getting around to the notorious Crysis!

I thought about buying the game a while back, but I was put off by its pain-in-the-ass DRM and I just didn't think about it again until now. These days though it's a non-issue, with the DRM-free GOG release and the Steam version getting patched. Also, there's that Remastered edition... that I won't be playing. I want to play the legit original experience! Though just getting it to run at all would be nice.

Crysis is infamous for two reasons and the main one is its system requirements. Back in 2007 it was supposed to be the prettiest game ever made, and I can believe that. The catch was that people had to wait until PC hardware had caught up to it before they could put the graphics settings up.

There will be SPOILERS here for a significant amount of the game's story and they start right now. That's because the second thing that the game's infamous for is the twist that the gameplay takes in the second half. I'm usually happy to show off the first hour or so of a game and then quit, but it doesn't seem right for me to write about Crisis and not bitch about the alien levels.

Lotus Turbo Challenge Games

This week on Super Adventures, I'm taking a trip back to the past... back to the early days of Super Adventures, when I thought it was acceptable to cover a bunch of old-school arcade-style sprite-based racing games in one article. I'd give them each three screenshots and write things like "Dodging cars is hard!" and "Hey, I got first place!" underneath.

I eventually learned my lesson and realised that these kinds of games weren't going to give me much to work with. You have a sprite of a car and you slide it left and right to get around the other cars and obstacles, while also trying to avoid flying off the track on the turns. There, I just described all of them.

But I could never resist showing off screenshots full of art, and it occurs to me that I never got around to covering the biggest stars in the genre. No Out Run, no Road Rash, not even Lotus 1-2-3. Uh, I mean Magnetic Fields' legendary racing trilogy, not the legendary spreadsheet software. Speaking of spreadsheets, did you know Lotus made a car called the Excel?

Anyway, I'm going to play some Lotus games and I'm going to show off all the artwork, and if I can find anything to write about them, well that's a bonus. Screenshots will be from the Amiga 500 versions unless specified otherwise, though I will have a look at some of the ports as well. These games made their way onto all kinds of systems, like the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, C64, PC... though not the NES or SNES for some reason. I've no idea why Nintendo got left out.

There was another game called Lotus Challenge released on the PS2 in 2001, but that's entirely unrelated so I won't be playing that one.

Jade Empire (Xbox) - Part 2

Today on Super Adventures, I'm getting back to Jade Empire for the second and final time. If you want to read part 1 CLICK HERE.

I'm still looking for a town with sidequests and a big problem I can solve, so I can get a good impression of what the game's actually like before I turn it off. Something like Knights of the Old Republic's Taris, or Mass Effect's Citadel... except smaller hopefully.

This means there will be some SPOILERS here for the first few hours of the game, but nothing too serious I expect.

Jade Empire (Xbox) - Part 1

Developer:

BioWare

|

Release Date:

2005

|

Systems:

Xbox, PC, Mac, Android, iOS

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm checking out a game that I'm absolutely sure I've probably played before. I just can't remember doing it, or even how it plays exactly. I feel like I must have gotten past the tutorial and then ran around the starting area for a bit before turning it off.

I have to wonder what Jade Empire did to lose my interest so quickly as I can usually sink hours into a BioWare RPG. This was their 7th game, by the way, coming between Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect. It's what they were working on while Obsidian was making the considerably higher-rated KOTOR 2. Wait, is that actually true or am I just making a huge assumption there?

Okay, I've done the research and according to Metacritic, Jade Empire actually scored just a little bit better than KOTOR 2, on Xbox anyway. Jade Empire falls a bit behind on PC for some reason. I'd check their scores on PlayStation 2 and GameCube but they appear to have neglected to port the games to either system. Possibly because it came out in 2005, near the end of that console generation... or possibly because it was published by Microsoft.

Anyway, I know what BioWare games are like, so my plan is to keep playing long enough to find the first proper quest hub town and sort out their big crisis. Assuming that it even has towns. I'll be playing the original Xbox version, but I'll be running it on an Xbox One through the magic of backwards compatibility because it'll be easier to get video out of it that way. Plus it might even boost the framerate and resolution a bit.

Dusk (PC)

Developer:

David Szymanski

|

Release Date:

2018

|

Systems:

Win, macOS, Linux, Switch

---

This week on Super Adventures, I'm taking a look at indie first-person boomer shooter Dusk! I've been meaning to get around to this for a while now. Partly because it's a critically acclaimed, highly recommended game in a genre I love, partly because it was a present and I should probably play the games I've been gifted!

I've been avoiding learning anything about the game so I'm going in fairly blind. I didn't even know it had a multiplayer mode called 'Duskworld'. Though it doesn't feature co-op or bots and I think I'm going to stick with the single-player mode. The regular one I mean, not 'Endless' mode, which seems like it'd take a while.

Not that I'm planning to finish the whole game. I'm just going to stick with it for an hour or so to see if I'm satisfied with its shooting.

Grand Theft Auto III (PS2)

Developer:

DMA Design

|

Release Date:

2001

|

Systems:

PS2, Xbox, PC, Mac, Android, iOS, Fire OS

---

This week on Super Adventures, I'm finally getting around to legendary sandbox crime simulator Grand Theft Auto III! I wrote about GTA 1 in 2014 and GTA 4 in 2016, but since then the site has suffered 7 long years of GTAlessness.

A few things have happened during that time, like GTA 3 getting reverse engineered by fans so they could enhance it for modern hardware! Take-Two weren't keen on this though and shut the RE3 project down. Then they delisted the game from online stores and replaced it with the Definitive Edition Unreal Engine remake, which was hilariously half-assed and broken. At this point you can't buy either version in Steam, as they're selling it for the Rockstar Games Launcher instead.

I've played GTA 3 before, but I've never actually finished the game and it wasn't for a lack of trying. I beat Vice City, San Andreas, GTA 4, The Saboteur, Sleeping Dogs and all the old Saints Rows, but this was just a little too tough for me. Back then anyway. Can I actually manage to reach the ending this time and finally get some closure on the GTA that got away? The answer is... no, because I'm only going to play it for an hour or two. Sorry!

Also, I'm going to be playing the classic PlayStation 2 version of the game, so if you were hoping to see some hilarious Definitive Edition screenshots I'm going to have to disappoint you. I ain't paying that much for a bad version of a game I already own. But is the PS2 game the good version? Is any version of the game still worth playing in 2023? I'm probably the wrong person to answer that last question as I'm obviously unstuck in time, but I'll see what it's like and share some screenshots as I go.

Perfect Dark (Xbox 360)

Developer:

Rare

|

Release Date:

2000

|

Systems:

N64, Xbox 360

---

This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing the spiritual successor to Rare's legendary N64 FPS GoldenEye 007: the slightly less legendary Perfect Darkﾞ!

It came out three years later for the same console, runs on the same engine, and was developed by a lot of the same people, so it's basically GoldenEye 2 (or GoldenEye 008?) There were proper sequels to GoldenEye, but Rare had been outbid by EA and decided they'd rather do their own thing anyway, so Black Ops gave us third person shooter Tomorrow Never Dies on the PlayStation and Eurocom got to make the next first person N64 Bond shooter, The World is Not Enough. Both considerably less legendary.

Perfect Dark was was released late in the N64's life and was so ambitious that it required the Expansion Pak installed in order to access 65% of its content. Though even with double the RAM under the hood, the game still suffers from framerate issues. Fortunately I'm mostly going to be playing the remastered Xbox 360 version on the Xbox One, which has about 2000 times the RAM. I would've played the PC version and used a mouse but to this day the game still hasn't got a PC port.

If you're wondering why there's an N behind the title despite the letter not appearing in either word, that's so that the Nintendo logo can spin around and morph into the logo! It's a little different in the Xbox Live Arcade version, as 4J Studio's logo takes Nintendo's place. Not a lot of Nintendo logos on Microsoft games I've noticed. If you're wondering why there's a dakuten (ﾞ) after the K... I've got no idea. They thought it'd look cool I guess. Like how Street Fighter II′ has a dash.

Alright I'll put this on and give it an hour or two then. I used to love the game but I can't remember if there's anything notable I should be playing up to (mostly because it's the multiplayer I was obsessed with), so I'm just going to play the first few levels and document my findings.