Light Crusader (Genesis/Mega Drive) - Replay

Super Adventures in Gaming Replay 2014 - Game 6

And the final game I'm replaying this year is... action RPG-type thing Light Crusader. That logo's looking so Roger Dean that I wouldn't have been shocked if I'd seen 'Psygnosis' written down there instead of 'Treasure'.

In fact this is a pretty atypical art style for Treasure, who at this point were famous for flashy cartoon action games like Dynamite Headdy, Gunstar Heroes and, uh, McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure (hey, it's actually a pretty decent game). Like all Treasure games up to this point it was Sega exclusive, the final game they released on the Mega Drive/Genesis before switching over to the Saturn for 1996's Guardian Heroes. They continued supporting Sega right through to the end of the Dreamcast but they weren't particularly exclusive to anything at all by '97, and gamers everywhere soon received the benefit of their videogame design genius. Well except for PC gamers, but I hear that they'll be fixing that this year.

Fatal Labyrinth (Genesis/Mega Drive) - Replay

Super Adventures in Gaming Replay 2014 - Game 3

With a distant rumbling that sounds more like screechy irritating static, rises the lavender fortress of the Fatal Labyrinth! Again!

Today I'm going to take another look at this classic Sega roguelike on the Genesis/Mega Drive. Though I don't mean I'm literally going to take just one glance at it and then turn it right off like I did last time, I promise.

Despite being a first party Sega title the game doesn't start with my beloved 'say-gah!' jingle, but just this once I can forgive them for not including it as the game is tiny. There's around 128k of content here, eight times less than your typical Genesis/Mega Drive cart. In fact this is even smaller than the average Master System game, though there's a good reason for its diminutive nature and that's because the game was actually a download only title in Japan.

Seriously, you'd connect a 1200 bit/s Meganet Mega Modem to your Mega Drive (only 47 times slower than 56k) and then download the game onto a Sega Game Library cart. Or more likely you wouldn't, as it was never released in the West and nobody bought the device in Japan. Even the home banking keypad add-on couldn't make the poor Meganet into a success! Sega eventually had to admit defeat on this one and redesigned the console in later revisions to remove the EXT modem port entirely. And that's the story of what the EXT port was for.

Mercs (Arcade)

Super Adventures in Gaming Replay 2014 - Game 2

This one might seem like a bit of a strange choice to replay as it's a pretty basic run and gun arcade shooter, not the kind of thing you need to play much of to get an impression of how it's going to carry on. Plus I got two levels into the Genesis/Mega Drive version the first time around, so it's not like I didn't give it a fair chance. But I'm reasonably sure I promised someone I'd take a look at the arcade version at some point, so here it is.

Here's something I didn't mention last time: Mercs is the second game in the Wolf of the Battlefield series and a sequel to 1985's Commando (which has absolutely nothing to do with 1985's Commando movie). It started off as an arcade game in 1990 and was ported to around seven home systems the following year (and there's no way I'm going to be comparing them all this time, sorry.)

Soleil / Crusader of Centy (Genesis/Mega Drive) - Replay

Super Adventures in Gaming Replay 2014 - Game 1

Super Adventures is three years old today! I don't know if that's a cause for celebration, but it's definitely cause for a brand new (hand-pixelled) logo.

Though really I should probably pretend those first few months never existed and move the birthday along a little, as the site was pretty terrible when I started off. Games were lucky if they got more than a handful of screenshots and a teaspoon full of commentary back then, as I hadn't yet gotten my head around the concept of taking the time to give them a fair chance. Actually better yet, I could do what I do at this point every year and replay a few of those games and maybe see if they get any better after the first 20 seconds.

First up is the game known in Europe as Soleil, though back when it first appeared on my site on February 2nd 2011 it was under the US title of Crusader of Centy.

General Chaos (Genesis/Mega Drive) - Replay

Super Adventures in Gaming Replay 2013 - Game 5

Super Adventures has reached 800 posts, and what better way to celebrate this monumental milestone than for me to replay a game I didn't even understand the first time around, never mind like. To be fair to General Chaos, I kind of made a snap judgement on it and gave up about 10 seconds into the first level.

Of course I made a post about it anyway, because I didn't want the internet to do without that handful of badly cropped screenshots!

Super Ghouls'N Ghosts (SNES) - Replay

Super Adventures in Gaming Replay - Game 7

It's been nine months since I last played this game, if you can even call what I did 'playing'. I mostly just wandered into zombies. I doubt I even made it more than four screens into the first level.

But that was then.

I've played a lot of platformers since then. Games like Super Meat Boy, the Castlevania games, Ninja Gaiden, Shadow of the Beast... I must have gotten at least a little better at the damn things by now surely?

So okay Super Ghouls'n Ghosts, I'm ready for a rematch.

Soccer Kid / The Adventures of Kid Kleets (Amiga)

Super Adventures in Gaming Replay - Game 6

Aka The Adventures of Kid Kleets in the US... but only for the Super Nintendo release as far as I know. This was originally an Amiga platformer, but eventually got ported to most of the early 90s consoles.

I wrote about the game once already, but I seems that I forgot to say anything about how it plays or what it even is, so I'm giving it another look.

Probotector II - Return of the Evil Forces (NES)

Super Adventures in Gaming Replay - Game 5

I wrote about the Amiga version of Super Contra (aka Super C) just over a year ago, and besides pointing out that it looked a bit shit, I really didn't say much of anything about it. But I know a Contra fan who was... unhappy with my post. After all it's a critically acclaimed and well respected title, I should at least explain why I didn't like it.

But just for a change I'm going to play the NES port instead. The European version in fact, where everyone is a robot.

Return of the Evil Forces™... oh no, not those bastards again! That's not the Robocop font by the way, I checked.

But is that a doughnut next to the '1 Player' option?

Beyond Oasis / The Story of Thor (Genesis/Mega Drive) - Replay

Super Adventures in Gaming Replay - Game 4

Beyond Oasis, aka The Story of Thor. I last played this almost exactly a year ago, and I still think that the title screen looks like it's from a Windows 3.1 game.

It's not often that I see the game's composer get the star credit on a title screen, but Yuzo Koshiro also runs the company that developed the game, so I suppose he can put what he likes on his title screens.

Atomic Runner Chelnov - Nuclear Man, the Fighter (Arcade)

Super Adventures in Gaming Replay - Game 3

Today I’m playing the original arcade version of Genesis/Mega Drive game Atomic Runner, which I wrote about exactly one year ago today.

That title screen is very different to the one on the Mega Drive port, which had the hero standing in a city firing lightning from his hands. I’m going to make a wild guess and say the game might possibly have something to do with the Cold War in some way.

Rocky Rodent (SNES) - Replay

Super Adventures in Gaming Replay - Game 2

I didn't get very far first time around in Rocky Rodent (aka Nitro Punks: Might Heads in Japan... damn that is an awesome name). In fact I got stuck at the very start of the first level and decided I didn't like the game enough to even check youtube to see what to do. I figured it'd be funnier just to leave it there and move on to something else instead.

But now I know what I'm doing, so I'm going to take another look at the game, and hopefully make enough progress to do it justice this time around.

Gain Ground (Arcade)

Super Adventures in Gaming Replay - Game 1

Super AiG is one year old today! So I thought this would be a good time to go back to some of the games I wrote about during the first few months and take another look at them. And maybe do a better job of playing them this time around.

I wouldn't even dare animate that title screen in case the flickering static gave someone an epileptic fit. I don't know what Sega were thinking.

I wrote about the Genesis/Mega Drive version of this way back on the 3rd of February last year. In fact I managed to write about eight lines about the game and finished off by saying "There's just... nothing good about this game at all."

Well how the hell do you know that Ray? You played it for literally 20 seconds according to the timer on the screenshots. You basically just made an idiot of yourself in front of the whole internet. Yeah I think this game definitely requires another look.