Deadly Premonition: The Director's Cut (PC)

Developer:

Access Games

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Release Date:

2013  (original 2010)

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Systems:

Windows, PS3, Xbox 360

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Good news! Super Adventures has finally returned to give you a new game post every week for the next two months. Unless you're reading this two months after it was posted, in which case I'm sorry but you just missed it. Go read Sci-Fi Adventures for a bit instead.

This week I'm playing Deadly Premonition, which is a game I bought for money just so I could write about it for you! Then I forgot all about it and left it sitting there in my Steam library unplayed for four years, but that just means it's even more retro now. It's also fairly notorious and I've heard a lot about it. Well, I've seen it mentioned a lot anyway; I've tried to avoid exposure to any actual info on the story or how it plays.

Though I did read on Wikipedia that it currently holds the Guinness World Record for the most critically polarising survival horror game, which is a really specific world record. Plus it also spoils that the game's a survival horror! I'd gotten the impression it was some kind of adventure game, a bit like Shenmue maybe. I checked Metacritic and the review scores do go all the way from 20 to 100, so now I'm curious what I'm going to think of it. I don't typically enjoy survival horror much, partly because I don't give a damn about horror or survival mechanics, but if survival horror fans dislike the game then maybe it's more my kind of thing? I am the world's biggest and only Resident Evil 5 fan after all.

I already like the rainy title screen, despite the annoyingly short guitar loop. I'm less keen on crashes though, so I've installed the DPFix patch by game fixing legend Durante in the hopes that it solves more problems than it causes. It does at least give me some graphics options to play with, but I've decided not to push the visuals too far above vanilla.

The game is pretty story driven and features a mystery, so I should warn you there'll be SPOILERS below as I go through the first few hours of the gameplay writing text under screenshots. Though I won't give away anything major, because explaining a detective's deductions in my own words seems like effort.

Fallout 4 (PC)

Developer:

Bethesda

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Release Date:

2015

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Systems:

Win, PS4, Xbox One

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This week month on Super Adventures I'm spoiling the first couple of hours of Fallout 4!

You might be wondering why I'm writing about a complicated modern RPG again when I should know better by now. There's already a hundred reviews, streams and YouTube videos out there about it, so it seems a bit redundant. I have a good reason though: I already played all the others (aside from Fallout Shelter and Brotherhood of Steel) and it seemed wrong to leave it out.

Plus it means I get to mention the drama going on in late 2013 when there were competing teaser sites like thesurvivor2299.com and thepropheteer.com all appearing to be revealing the game's existence, and people were trying to figure out which of them was legit and which were fake (they were all fake).

Thankfully the game actually was being developed in secret, because that's typically what you do when your last game was a huge hit (unless you're Valve). Though it seems weird to me that after all this time this was only Bethesda's second attempt at a Fallout RPG. Obsidian were the ones that made Fallout: New Vegas and I'm curious to see if Bethesda decided to take anything from it. Or take anything away from their last game.

I'll be playing it without any mods, by the way, because I'm not really keen on tweaking my game. I feel like opening the box like that lets some of the magic escape (plus I'd be too tempted to give myself an infinite ammo rocket launcher and fly around on a fire-breathing unicorn or something). Also this means I get to ignore the Creation Club entirely and all of the bullshit that goes along with that!

(Click the screenshots if you want to make them very slightly bigger.)

Boiling Point: Road to Hell (PC) - Part 2 - Guest Post

Hello I'm mecha-neko and I'm playing first-person open-world epic Boiling Point (aka. Xenus)!
Click here to go back to part one.

Boiling Point: Road to Hell (PC) - Part 1 - Guest Post

Back by popular demand, guest poster mecha-neko has returned one more time to write up his thoughts on the first few hours of obscure Ukrainian open world FPS Xenus, better known as Boiling Point.

To hell with Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Get out of here, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.. Begone, Far Cry 4. The future is here. This is the ultimate game.

This is Boiling Point: Road to Hell.

STEP INTO REALITY
Your presence here affects everything. Each step you take is crucial. Every game is different. Forget linear games with levels and loading times. This is real life. Your enemies take things personally and they never forget. Every action you make will come back to haunt you. And with the army, Guerrillas, and Mafia on to you, you'd better watch your back. Help them out, or blast your way through. Either way, the heat is up and you'll be pushed to Boiling Point.

Let me tell you all about my holiday in Realia!
You can click on my holiday snaps to view them in full resolution.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (PC) - Part 2

Click the highlighted text if you'd rather be reading part one.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (PC) - Part 1

Today on Super Adventures I'm finally done with that awkward 22nd letter of the alphabet, and the last 'V' game I'll be taking a quick look at this year is... Elder Scrolls: V (also known to some as Skyrim).

Released in 2011, five years after Oblivion, Skyrim is the fifth of the main Elder Scrolls series, and the first to sound like it's a James Bond movie title. This theme music on the other hand sounds more like what you get when 90 people chant their own made up lyrics to the Elder Scrolls theme introduced in Morrowind... it's basically amazing. Here have a youtube link, may it make your day just that little bit more epic.

I sank a considerable number of hours into this game a considerable number of months ago, so I'm not coming into the game blind, but I can't remember any of it in any kind of detail. As always I'll be playing it utterly unmodded, like a fool, to give you the most authentic screenshots possible. I'm not really a fan of mods to be honest, as I don't like the idea of tweaking a game to suit my tastes. For me it's a bit too much like getting out the red pen and scribbling edits over the pages of a novel I'm not liking. Once I've tasted the power of godlike power of an author I can't immerse myself in the experience in the same way.

(Click to view images in an astoundingly modern 1280x720 resolution. Actually I've just upgraded my PC at bloody last, so this time I've thrown in a few at 1920x1080 for you to enjoy. That's 125% extra pixels, free!)

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.)

Fallout: New Vegas (PC)

New Vegas is the sixth game in the Fallout franchise, released between Fallout 3 and a theoretical Fallout 4 that may or may not definitely be in development right now.

Though Bethesda are the current custodians of the series after buying it from Interplay, this game was passed on to Obsidian to make instead... which is a company founded by ex-Interplay employees. Annoyingly they haven't used their years of PC RPG developing experience to fix the issue where I have to disable my Xbox 360 controller to use the mouse in the menu though.

This is awesome theme music though, it's like a slightly wild west-tinged version of the Fallout 3 theme (youtube links, don't hate me if there's ads). I know people liked that the first two games began with classic songs by The Ink Spots, but I think its cool that the series has an original theme of its own now. One of their tunes will show up in the intro though, they always do.

(Click the images to see them at the original resolution.)

Fallout 3 (PC)

Today on Super Adventures I've decided to have a look at RPG heavyweight Fallout 3, take a few screenshots from it, maybe put a bit of text under them as well. If I can think of anything to say.

Interplay had a good run with the Fallout franchise, getting four games out of it in the end, but after a few bad decisions (like making Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel for instance) they found themselves suffering from a wee bit of bankruptcy and in 2007 Elder Scrolls developers Bethesda presented them $5.75 million to take the whole thing off their hands. So this is the first Fallout of the Bethesda era, with a new immersive first person real-time approach to gameplay and combat that seems precision engineered to piss off the existing fan base. It was also developed with consoles in mind this time, which was made blatantly obvious to me right away by the fact that I couldn't use my mouse on the menus until I'd disabled my Xbox 360 pad!

Oh, like the Elder Scrolls games, this has all kinds of user made mods available for it, which I won't be touching. I've got nothing against mods, much the opposite in fact, I just like to play games vanilla when I'm showing them off on this site.

(Click the screenshots to double their resolution.)

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (PC)

A super-sized look at the fourth game in the main Elder Scrolls series! No mods, no graphical enhancements. Just pure, straight out of the box Oblivion.

I have played this one before, but I never did finish it. If I remember right I mostly hid out in the Arena until I ran out of enemies to fight, then got bored with it.

(Click the pics to make them big.)

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (PC)

In Elder Scrolls: Arena my bow broke and I was murdered by skeletons. In Daggerfall I roamed the land for days on foot, never finding out how to start the main quest. In Battlespire I got stuck in a bloody Battlespire... but this game I've played before. So hopefully I'll at least remember how to get to the plot.

And I'll be playing it 100% UNMODDED! Not even a graphics mod, this is vanilla Morrowind in its purest form. Click the pics for a super huge version. Well, 1280x960... slightly huge.

The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall (MS-DOS)

This is the second game in the Elder Scrolls series, and it definitely has a more stylish logo than poor Elder Scrolls - Arena. Also you travel to a place called Daggerfall in it so the title has some connection to the game this time.

The game is now free and can be download from the official site. This is the version I'm going to be playing.

The Elder Scrolls: Arena (MS-DOS)

(*May not actually include an arena.)

This is the very beginning of the Elder Scrolls series, which seemed like a sensible point to start from. The game is available for free from the developer's website, and that's the version I'll be playing.