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.

Awesome (Amiga)

Developer:

Reflections

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Release Date:

1990

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Systems:

Amiga, Atari ST, FM Towns

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm looking at classic 90s shoot 'em up Awesome, which was suggested by the folks on my Discord. They realised I'd gotten caught in a bit of a rut last year, playing so many great games, and felt I should bring Super Adventures back to its roots. Its roots of me trying to figure out what the hell I'm doing in some obscure old Amiga game.

You can tell that the game came out before the internet was a thing as Awesome is not a Google friendly title. It says on the box that it has an awesome t-shirt included, but search for 'awesome t-shirt' on image search and you'll be scrolling for a long while before you find it. That's a bit of a difference from Reflections' earlier game Shadow of the Beast, which has a very Googlable name. One thing the two games have in common is the box art, which was a painting by frequent Psygnosis collaborator Roger Dean. You could tell Psygnosis games right away at this point because they were the ones that looked like Yes albums. Edit: none of that is true, the cover is actually a painting from John Harris called MASS: The Building of FTL1, painted about 10 years earlier in 1979.

Alright I'm going to play this for an hour or so and I hope you like GIFs because I'm in the mood for some moving pixels.

Brian the Lion Starring In: 'Rumble In The Jungle' (Amiga) - Guest Post

This week on Super Adventures, mecha-neko has returned to tell you a tale about a lion, called Brian.

Developer:

Reflections

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Release Date:

1994

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Systems:

Amiga 500, 1200, CD32

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Ray and I have played more than a few mascots and almost-mascots for the Amiga, but it's time to show you the last, and best. Introducing Brian the Lion.

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).

Shadow of the Beast (Amiga)

As requested/suggested, I'm finally playing Shadow of the Beast. Or just 'Beast' according to the title screen.

This seems to have been released for almost every game system at the time, (except for the SNES and PC surprisingly). But I'll be playing the original Amiga version, seeing as it was an important game for the machine.