Metal Slug: Super Vehicle-001 (Neo-Geo)

It's Super Adventures' 10th Anniversary today, which means it's time for a shiny new logo and a shiny new gimmick for 2021. I figured I should celebrate ten years of my site by giving year eleven a theme, and that theme is 'Top Ten'. Super Adventures is mature and respectable now, so I'm going to play only the very finest games... well, games that have made into the top ten of somebody's rankings anyway. Most of the time I'll be getting them from some 'Top 10 Objectively Greatest Video Games Ever Made' list I've found, but maybe I'll throw in something from a list like 'Top 10 Most Embarrassing Movie Tie-Ins' or 'Top 10 Shovelware Releases on the Wii' every now and then to keep things interesting.

It's not a flawless plan, as it means I'll be writing about games that everyone already knows about. Plus I've already played a lot of the games that tend to show up in these lists, especially the console games, so they're out of the running. So to help limit your expectations, here's some links to a few of the legendary titles I've already covered during the last decade:

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To be honest, I only put this row of boxes here because I felt like seeing if I could figure out how to do it. Plus the site needs more game covers on it. More title screens as well, especially the ones that look like this:

Developer:

Nazca

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Release Date:

1996

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Systems:

Arcade, Neo-Geo, Neo-Geo CD, Saturn, PSX, PC

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing the legendary Metal Slug, as seen in arcades and on the Neo·Geo home console. I should warn you that this article will contain flashing GIFs, so if that's an issue for you, then you probably don't want to scroll down much further.

This game almost ruined my 'top ten list' gimmick right at the start, because I struggled to find it anywhere. I did the research, searching through dozens of top 100 lists from magazines and websites, and none of them had the game ranked high enough! Fortunately Shacknews' Top 10 Run n' Gun Arcade Shooters video bailed me out (spoiler, it was #1).

I was a bit surprised when I saw that the game was released in 1996, as it's a bit later than I expected. That's the same year that Super Mario 64 and Tomb Raider came out, and 2D had already started going out of fashion a couple of years earlier, with Virtua Fighter and Daytona USA hitting arcades in 1993 and Donkey Kong Country faking 3D in 1994. The Neo·Geo MVS arcade cabinet and AES console both predate the Super Nintendo by a few months, so this could've potentially come out as early as 1990 and still looked just as good. I guess the original Neo·Geo was tough to kill, as they were still making 2D Metal Slug sequels for the same hardware as late as 2003, long after the N64 and PlayStation had been replaced.

Uh, I should apologise to you for mentioning so many years in one paragraph, it was a bit excessive. In my defence, this is the first time I've ever covered a Neo·Geo game and I want to talk about the system! I suppose it's also technically the first time I've covered a Neo·Geo CD game as well, which is a newer version of the console which came out a few years later in 1994... sorry, sorry.
 

Ion Fury (PC)

Developer:

Voidpoint

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Release Date:

2019

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Systems:

PC, Mac

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This month on Super Adventures, I've only got the one game for you, and it's been reviewed and streamed by everyone else already! In fact it was in Early Access for months, so a whole chapter of it's been around for everyone to play for ages. What I should've done is hang on for a couple of decades until the game's properly retro and write about it then, but I'm impatient.

Ion Fury is the second Duke Nukem spin-off starring Shelly Harrison after 2016's Bombshell, except not really as the character never actually turned up in any of the Duke Nukem games she was intended to appear in. This worked out for 3D Realms though as it means they got to keep her when they sold the rest of the Duke IP to Gearbox a few years back. They can't make Duke Nukem games anymore but they can make all the Bombshell sequels they want. Or a prequel in this case.

Bombshell was a top down shooter, but this is a bit more like Duke Nukem 3D. In fact it's a lot more like it, as it was made using the Build engine that powered the last of the great 2.5D games like Duke 3D, Shadow Warrior and Blood. Why did they go back to such an archaic game engine? Same reason that Baldur's Gate got an expansion made recently in the Infinity engine I guess: because the developer had already updated the engine for new systems and knew people were nostalgic for it (Voidpoint is run by the guy who made the EDuke32 source port). Plus they wanted to.

I'm immune to nostalgia though, as I never really left the 90s (or the 2000s). In fact I played a few levels of Doom II, Quake and Duke 3D while I was waiting for the final version to go live and the download to start, so all it has to do is be better than them and I'll be impressed.

Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell (GBA)

Developer:

Gameloft Srl

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Release Date:

2003

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Systems:

Game Boy Advance, N-Gage

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This week on Super Adventures I'm finally taking a look at a Splinter Cell game! Just not the one you want.

GBA Splinter Cell came out around five months after the Xbox original and I don't see a subtitle on it so I'm presuming it follows the same plot. But have they turned it into an isometric action game or a platformer? It's a mystery.

I don't dislike sneaking around in games but I do hate it when failing stealth leads to absolute disaster, so even though I've played a lot of the Splinter Cells I didn't play them very long. All I remember about them now is nice looking shadows and a man on the radio yelling at me for ruining everything. But I played them long enough to know that the generic funky spy music coming out of this GBA game right now isn't normal. Tom Clancy games are supposed to be about serious people on serious business! Not that I'm complaining, it's nice that it's cheered up a bit since its console days.

Alright I'll give it a couple of levels, sharing my thoughts as I go, and once I've played enough to satisfy my curiosity I'll finish off with a block of words that looks very similar to a review.

Illusion of Time / Illusion of Gaia (SNES)

I have no idea what happened to all the SNES games this year. A year back I must have been playing a new Super Nintendo game for the site every other week, but somehow I've managed to avoid writing about one for over seven months straight (aside from like seven screenshots worth of words in my Genocide 2 article) and I don't even know why!

Well I'm fixing that right now, by taking a look at a classic Super Nintendo game, Illusion of Time. That's what it's called in Europe and Australia anyway, though you might know it better by the US title: Illusion of Gaia. You could also call it Soul Blazer II I suppose if you wanted to confuse people, as it's part of a trilogy of SNES RPGs by Japanese developer Quintet that ended with Terranigma (or Granstream Saga if, like author Douglas Adams, you consider the definition of 'trilogy' to be more of suggestion than a rule).

Spider-Man (GBA)

At last, the game that no doubt everyone's been waiting for: the GBA version of Spider-Man (The Movie)! Though this title screen music definitely ain't the Spider-Man: The Movie theme. Sounds like it'd be more at home in Spider-Man: The Old Amiga Game.

This is another case of a handheld game released alongside a console game with the same title, same cover art, same everything... except for the actual game inside the box. I get why they do it, they want to sell two games with a single marketing campaign (plus in this case it's a movie tie-in as well), I just wish they'd give each version a subtitle or something so it's clear that they're different products.

UFO: Enemy Unknown / X-COM: UFO Defense (Amiga)

It took me way too long to get around to this one. UFO: Enemy Unknown is the original XCOM game, a genuine classic, renamed to X-COM: UFO Defense in North America presumably because they wanted to sell it to the X-Files audience, which was huge at the time.

It was originally released for DOS, then ported across to Amiga, CD32 and PlayStation. As far as I can tell, the PC version runs fastest and looks the best, though they're all basically the same thing with similar graphics and music. But I'm playing the Amiga AGA version instead, because sometimes I do crazy things for no reason!

Gods (Amiga)

Super Adventures in Bitmap Brothers Games - Game 6

Shiny metal text, blue and orange colour scheme... yep this looks like a Bitmap Brothers game to me.

The title screen music (youtube link!) is 'Into the Wonderful' by Nation 12, converted into mod form, and it ain't bad. Doesn't really fit the image at all, but I couldn't really care less.