Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow (GBA)

Developer:

Konami

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Release Date:

2003

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Systems:

Game Boy Advance

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing the 17th 2D Castlevania platformer, Aria of Sorrow!

My gimmick this year is that I'm playing games you can find in a top ten list, and this one can be found in Nintendo Power's 20th anniversary Best of the Best list (in the 'GBA' section). It actually made top three, with the other two games being Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga and Metroid: Zero Mission. Hey I've played both of them already!

This was the last of three Castlevanias on the GBA, though the first to have a title beginning with 'A'. The series continued on the DS with a direct sequel called Dawn of Sorrow, which cleverly referenced both the 'D' and the 'S'. Sadly the adventures of Soma Cruz didn't get a second follow up on the 3DS, so we never got to see how they would've worked the number 3 into the title.

There'd been handheld Castlevania games for over a decade by this point, ever since Castlevania: The Adventure came out for the Game Boy in 1989, but whenever people talk about the classic 80s and 90s Castlevania titles they're generally talking about the console games. Something weird happened in 1999 though. Veteran game series were making the switch to polygons, with sequels like Super Mario 64, Ocarina of Time and Metal Gear Solid presenting a good argument for 2D being hopelessly archaic, and Castlevania was no exception. The thing is, Castlevania 64 was bloody terrible (I've been told), especially compared to Symphony of the Night from two years earlier. So when the 2D GBA games started mimicking Symphony's style and carrying on the 'music term of X' naming tradition started by Rondo of Blood, they were ones that came across like the true successors to the Castlevania franchise instead of the 3D games.

Anyway I'm going to play the first hour or so and write too many words about what happened. Plus there'll be screenshots! So many screenshots.

Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker (PSP)

Developer:

Kojima Productions

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Release Date:

2010

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Systems:

PSP, PS3, Xbox 360

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing the fifth of the main Metal Gear Solid games, Peace Walker on the PlayStation Portable! Or maybe sixth, depending on whether you count Portable Ops (creator Hideo Kojima doesn't). In fact it was originally going to be Metal Gear Solid 5 and it pretty much still is in everything but title, as it continues the story of the fall of Big Boss.

I've never been keen on handheld exclusive sequels to console exclusive games (or the opposite) as unless you're playing on a Switch it's going to really change the experience. Plus it means you have to get extra hardware to continue the story, which kind of sucks if you've spent all your money getting a PS3 to play Metal Gear Solid 4 and don't feel the need to take games outside with you. (Personally I had a PSP in the house before I had a PS3, but that's just the same problem backwards!) Ideally I'd want developers to port everything to everything, but if that's not possible and they really want to make a portable game, then they should make it a spin-off like Metal Gear AC!D that doesn't continue the storyline. In my opinion.

Part of the reason they went portable with this one is because Monster Hunter Freedom did really well on PSP, hitting a broader demographic, and they wanted some of that for MGS. Peace Walker was aimed towards a younger school-age audience and in Japan they found it, making the game a big hit. Outside of Japan, not so much. In fact the game sold so poorly in the West that they took one of its characters off the cover of the international versions of Ground Zeroes because no one knew who he was. The game did pretty well in reviews though, as it's one of the highest rated PSP games on Metacritic (sharing third place with Lumines and Persona 3). In fact it's actually way higher than Monster Hunter Freedom. It's also a pretty late PSP game as it came out a year before the release of the PS Vita. And a year before Peace Walker HD Edition was released on consoles.

Okay, I'm going to play this for an hour or two and hope that gets me past the first cutscene at least. Either way there's going to be a lot of SPOILERS here for both this game and earlier Metal Gears, so please don't accidentally ruin a game for yourself by reading something here you didn't want to know.

Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence (PS2)

Developer:

Konami

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Release Date:

Snake Eater - NA/JP 2004, EU 2005 Subsistence - JP 2005, EU/NA 2006

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Systems:

PS2, PS3, PSVita, Xbox 360, 3DS

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing the first canon Metal Gear game to never come out on a computer! Even to this day it hasn't had a Steam release, despite getting a HD remaster a decade or so back on consoles. Because Konami are strange.

The title screen up there claims that this is something called Subsistence, but really it's just Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater with a new camera mode and a few extra features. In fact it's a bit like the Substance release for Metal Gear Solid 2 (funny how similar those subtitles are). But there's no VR missions this time! That's possibly because the game's a prequel set 40 years earlier, in the 60s, and VR was less of a thing back then. The story starts on 24 August 1964 in fact, which also happened to be creator Hideo Kojima's first birthday.

Here's a non-trivial bit of trivia about this title screen: you can change the background camo style and colour by clicking the analogue sticks. There's nothing you can press to stop Snake beating up this poor guard over and over though. Here's some more trivia: that's not actually Snake. Well, it is a Snake, but it's not series protagonist Solid Snake (because he was born in the 70s).

I'm not going to assume you've played the other Metal Gears or know anything about the convoluted continuity, but there are going to be SPOILERS below for the series so far, so try not to read anything you don't want to know.

Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance (PS2)

Developer:

Konami

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Release Date:

2003 (Sons of Liberty 2001)

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Systems:

PS2, PS3, Vita, Xbox, Xbox 360, Windows

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March 4th, 2000, two decades ago, the second and most popular of the sixth-generation consoles was released in Japan. That means that today is the PlayStation 2's 20th birthday!

My first idea was that I could play one of its original launch titles to celebrate, but then I looked at what they were and decided that I could do better. So this week on Super Adventures, I'm playing Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty! Actually to be precise I'm playing the re-released Substance edition (PAL version) but really it's the same thing. They were just getting people to double dip for a handful of special missions. Well okay, lots of handfuls of special missions.

I actually beat this game once, many years ago, on PC. So I'll have a vague idea of what I'm doing but not what buttons to press to do it. Though one thing I definitely haven't forgotten, is how great the opening theme by Harry Gregson-Williams is. I think it sounds even better the original Metal Gear Solid theme by TAPPY, which sounds better than "The Winter Road" by Russian composer Georgy Sviridov. Unfortunately it also sounds kind of similar, and the other song was written back in the 70s, so Konami had to stop using their own MGS theme in the MGS games. This means they won't get to use it in the movie either!

Okay, I'm going to be playing the game up to a little bit into the Plant chapter, so there'll be SPOILERS for the first two hours or so. I might also mention at some point that the story becomes a bit of a confusing mess by the end and the game left a lot of questions that weren't answered for seven years.

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.

Hybrid Heaven (N64)

Developer:

Konami Osaka

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Release Date:

1999

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Systems:

Nintendo 64

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Super Adventures is back again! It's only going to be around for eight weeks before going back into hibernation over the winter, but I'm going to be writing about so many games. Like, maybe even eight of them.

First I'm playing an N64 game called Hybrid Heaven. It's one of those games that I've been meaning to check out for years, but it's finally completed the arduous climb to the top of my 'to play' list. It made it just in time as well, as it's the game's 20th anniversary this year, though that's true of a lot of N64 titles. In fact my half-assed research on Wikipedia tells me that about a third of the system's games came out during 1999. Then after 2000 the console dropped like a rock for some reason (PlayStation 2).

Hybrid Heaven wasn't exactly the N64's biggest hit, but I don't feel like it can be that obscure, at least not to people who owned the system. I think it's probably one of those games that lots of people have heard of but not necessarily played themselves. It's one of the few carts my family had for the console back in the day and I even I haven't played it, though my brother did spoil the twist for me.

The game was nice enough to give me two title screens to pick from for my screenshot up there, but I decided to go with the one with menu options on it instead of the one with the Twin Towers filling the screen... because it gives me an excuse to talk about the resolution!

A few N64 games offer a 'high resolution' option if you've got the Expansion Pak installed, which doubles the resolution to 640x480. Or at least that's what you'd expect it to do, but it was apparently more like 480x360 for most games (or even less in widescreen). Hybrid Heaven seems to be one of the few N64 games that actually does something close to proper 640x480... but I've heard that the frame rate's terrible in that mode so I'm going to leave it on standard definition.

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!

Coded Arms (PSP) - Guest Post

Today on Super Adventures, guest poster mecha-neko's back with another first person shooter for another Friday. But this time there's a shocking twist: it's on the PSP!

Hey, get a load of this!

Developer:

Konami

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Release Date:

2005

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Systems:

PlayStation Portable

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It's Coded Arms, the first Sony PlayStation Portable game on the site! It's a PSP exclusive and it's the very first first person shooter on the system or so I'm told.

I found it for just a buck, all boxed and nice, so I'm going to share it with you!

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.

Rocket Knight Adventures (Genesis/Mega Drive)

Today on Super Adventures I'm spending an hour or so playing Konami's Rocket Knight Adventures, released exclusively on the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive. This is the first game of a series, though Sparkster here wasn't really the most well loved mascot hero of his time. Sure three games is a lot better than many of his rivals managed during the Anthropomorphic Mascot Wars of the early 90s, but after 1994 he was left forgotten for sixteen years before landing his fourth (and possibly final) starring role in Rocket Knight.

I've seen his other games but I've never really had a go of this one before, so I can promise that I'm coming at this entirely unburdened by nostalgia or foreknowledge. Though I admit that I'm always going to be a little biased towards liking games with 'Super' or 'Adventures' in the title.

This is the final 'R' game I'll be looking at this year before I move on to the letter 'S', and to be honest it's one more than I'd originally planned to play. But it was requested, and I felt bad for not having one single 16-bit Sega game on the site since early February, so here's a bonus platformer for you. Though of course this does mean that one of the other letters is losing a game.

Metal Gear Solid (GBC)

I really hate it when developers reuse game titles. Konami were doing great when they gave their PlayStation game the name Metal Gear Solid, as no one else on Earth would have ever dreamed of putting those three words together in quite that way. It was unique, but then they had to go and ruin it by sticking the same name on something else. They could have at least given this a subtitle, maybe something clever using the initials GBC.

Fortunately the Japanese version was given the name Metal Gear: Ghost Babel, so I'm just going to call it that instead from now on.

Metal Gear Solid (PSX)

Super Adventures at Christmas 2012 - Game 4:

At last, I'm playing a Metal Gear game people might actually care about! This was the third in the main franchise, released eight years after Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, but the first to really get mainstream attention, at least in the West.

Along Tenchu: Stealth Assassins and Thief: The Dark Project, this was a big part of the '98 stealth game revolution that helped establish the genre and inspire countless other games. Therefore it is DIRECTLY RESPONSIBLE for all those shitty forced stealth levels that started to pop up halfway through otherwise decent action games, in the same way that Shenmue can be blamed for the curse of QTE. You opened up Pandora's box Snake!

Biker Mice From Mars (SNES)

Today I'm going to find out what this Biker Mice from Mars Super Nintendo game is. Seems more like 'Insect Robot Teddybears From Mars' looking at the logo.

I'm sure I must have seen an episode of the cartoon this is based on at some point, but I remember next to nothing about it. And anything I do remember probably actually came from that Avenger Penguins cartoon. But I'm sure all the crucial info I need to know is included in the game's title.

Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (PS2)

Today I'm having a look at Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, the second attempt at making a sequel to Metal Gear, this time by the original creator Hideo Kojima. This one is considered to be the true follow up though, kicking poor Snake's Revenge out of the franchise.

Wai Wai World 2: SOS!! Parsley Jō (NES)

I played the first Wai Wai World game a few months back, and while it was alright, it had massive room for improvement. Getting all the most famous Konami characters together in one crossover platformer is a great idea, and I hope this sequel comes closer to doing the concept justice.

Snake's Revenge (NES)

On today's exciting instalment of Super Adventures, I'm taking a brief look at Snake's Revenge, the initial apocryphal sequel to Metal Gear, released only on the NES. Despite being developed by a different team, it apparently helped kick off the proper Metal Gear franchise by inspiring the original developer, Hideo Kojima, to make a return to the series and create his own sequel to wipe this one from the canon.

In fact I get the impression that this one isn't very well liked by anyone, and it's got me curious why.

Bio Miracle Bokutte Upa (NES)

Okay this one's a Famicom Disk System game by Konami called Bio Miracle Bokutte Upa. Sounds like a brand of plant food.

Oh no, don't tell me I'm playing as the baby? Maybe I'll be lucky and it'll turn out to be a genetically engineered bio-weapon disguised as a baby.

Metal Gear (NES)

Because YOU demanded it (and I was probably going to get around to it at some point anyway), today I'm taking a look at the very first Metal Gear.

The game originally came out for the MSX2 computer, and I was surprised to find out that it actually did get an English language release in Europe, though apparently it doesn't have a great translation. A few years later the C64, PC and NES got their own ports of the game, and I've heard that they weren't translated from the MSX particularly well either. I'll be playing the Nintendo version so I suppose I'll find out.

Konami Wai Wai World (NES)

I love Super Mario Crossover (browser game link), and I'm kind of surprised Nintendo hasn't taken the idea for themselves yet. Someone put Mario, Mega Man, Samus Aran, Simon Belmont etc. together in one game, and for once it wasn't in a fighting game or a racing game! Uh, not that there's anything wrong with those genres, it's just not really their natural habitat. So when I found out there was a game called Wai Wai World starring famous (pre 1988) Konami platformer heroes, I thought it might be worth a look.

I just hope they don't make me play as that Captain America wannabe sticking his head through the title screen.

Ganbare Goemon! Karakuri Dōchū (NES)

Ganbare Goemon! Karakuri Dōchū Aka. Mystical Ninja. This is the second of the Goemon games, and the first to be released on home consoles. Or so wikipedia claims.

This title screen hangs around for exactly three seconds before the game goes into demo mode, and I can certainly understand why they wouldn't want players to get a good look at it. It wouldn't be a finalist in a 'greatest NES title screens' tournament for sure.