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.

Kid Chaos (Amiga) - Part 2 - Guest Post

Previously on Kid Chaos, danger was lurking around every turn as the displaced caveman fought off rats, bats, bunnies and bees in his frantic escape from THE SECRET -GARDEN-. Will mecha-neko ever live to see world 2-1? Read on!

Kid Chaos (Amiga) - Part 1 - Guest Post

This week on Super Adventures, I've captured guest poster mecha-neko and teleported him to the distant past of 1994 to play a game about a caveman in the future. It's classic Amiga platformer Kid Chaos.

Hello everyone! It's time to dig up something really prehistoric!

Developer:

Magnetic Fields

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Release Date:

1994

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Systems:

Amiga 500, Amiga CD32

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This is Kid Chaos. The apex of Amiga platform action. The one where it all comes together. Years of technological experimentation, observation and innovation have led to this moment.

The title screen alone is lush as heck. The Amiga hardware can select 32 colours at once and this image displays 110 of them. The clouds all drift past at different speeds and everything, but you'll have to take my word for that as the .gif would be huge! It's like something you'd see on an AGA machine, but this is an A500 game.

If you want to see what all the fuss is about, read on!

Kid Chaos (Amiga) - Guest PostPart 1 - Part 2