The Lion King (Genesis/Mega Drive)

Developer:

Westwood Studios

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Release Date:

1994

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Systems:

Genesis/Mega Drive, SNES, MS-DOS, Amiga

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm voluntarily playing a movie tie-in game from the 16-bit era! Maybe this is one of the good ones though. I mean, there have to be some good ones, right?

I've actually played The Lion King before, so I already know what I'm getting into here... and I know I won't be getting very far in it. Games were generally more challenging in the 80s and 90s, so when you load up one that was notorious even back in its day for its extreme difficulty, you know that you're in for a bad time.

The game was re-released for modern platforms a few years back by Digital Eclipse, so I'm sure it has all kinds of new quality-of-life features now (or at least a gallery to look through when you're stuck). I'm not going to be playing that one though. I'm going back to the original games with all the original frustrations.

Disney's Aladdin famously got two different platformers, a Sega version by Virgin Games and a Nintendo version by Capcom, though it also had a third version for 8-bit systems. For The Lion King, all the 16-bit systems got the same game, by Command & Conquer devs Westwood Studios, and that's what I'll be playing. Though I'll also take a look at the 8-bit games as well, because I'm curious.

Alright, I'm going to see if I can finally get past the graveyard stage for the first time in my life.

Command & Conquer (MS-DOS)

Developer:

Westwood

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Release Date:

1995

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Systems:

PC, Mac, PSX, N64, Saturn

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This year on Super Adventures, I'm celebrating 10 years of the site by playing games that you'd find on a 'top 10' list, and that means I've ran out of excuses not to write something about Command & Conquer. The game was retroactively relabelled Tiberian Dawn, but I'm not calling it that. Partly because I always get it mixed up with the sequel Tiberian Sun, partly because I can never remember if it's 'Tiberian' or 'Tiberium'.

You might be wondering why I've been so reluctant to write about such a well-respected and beloved classic. Well that's because it's an RTS game and that means it's going to take effort. I have to play it for hours and then somehow summarise what I did and how it plays with just a handful of screenshots, all of them of little dudes standing in a grassy field firing at smoking buildings. This is why I write about so many platformers, they're easy! "Hey it starts with a forest level, huge shock. I guess I'll go jump on the spiders then? Oh no the bottomless pit killed me! And now I'm in a sewer, wow." RTS games almost never have sewer levels for me to whine about!

There's lots of different ways to play this game now, like a modern source port, or fan made patch for Command & Conquer Gold. But the best way is almost certainly Command & Conquer: Remastered, which improves the sound and visuals, and updates the interface without messing with the gameplay. Everyone showers it with praise and it seems like it's earned it. But I won't be playing that. Instead I'm going back to my original CDs, the very first DOS version, unpatched. Why? Because the DOS release is incredibly zoomed in compared to later versions and I want to give you a fighting chance to see the tiny little tanks and soldiers in my screenshots.