Final Fantasy (NES) - Replay

Super Adventures in Gaming Replay 2013 - Game 2

This is a pretty terrible choice of game for me to replay really, considering that I didn't play it myself the first time around and the original guest post by Ocean is actually fine. Plus the game isn't exactly photogenic enough to be worth showing off a second time. Not that the art's bad, it's just that it's an 8-bit NES game and even at their best they don't tend to be eye candy.

This didn't even reach the West until 1990, well into the 16-bit era, so it must have looked pretty basic to Westerners even at the time. In fact the game didn't get a European release until 2003 as part of the Final Fantasy Origins compilation on the PlayStation. The first FF game released over here was actually Final Fantasy VII, which hit shops a full decade after the franchise began in Japan.

Uh, what was I even talking about again? Whatever, here's a quick absurdly long look at the original Final Fantasy on the NES.

QuackShot (Genesis/Mega Drive) - Replay

Super Adventures in Gaming Replay 2013 - Game 1

I'm sure it can seem sometimes that as a writer and a gamer I'm basically flawless, but even I occasionally make mistakes. Like this one time I made a game blog and wrote a whole lot of terrible posts for it. And as Super Adventures reaches its second birthday, it just so happens that this is the time of year when the shame gets too much for me and I have to go back and do something about it.

So I'm going to take a look back at the site's past, at all my shitty posts that suck ass, and pick a few more of the really terrible ones to replay. It's second chance week again!

First up is Disney's QuackShot, a slightly Indiana Jones inspired platformer released on the Genesis/Mega Drive in 1991. I gave this about ten minutes to win me over first time around, then quit on the first level because... you know, I'm reading the post again now and I can't even tell why I stopped playing. Apparently I didn't even put in enough effort to figure out that pressing start opens up my inventory, or that I could press up on the d-pad to climb ladders. Bloody hell, man.

Sadly I can't go back in time and punch myself, but I can at least give the game another chance now. Consider this post my sincere apology.

Little Big Adventure / Relentless (MS-DOS)

Today I'm taking a quick look at Little Big Adventure, released as Relentless: Twinsen's Adventure outside of Europe (no relation to Little Big Planet... probably), as the internet asked me to. The internet even bought me a copy to make absolutely sure that I played it and made it a priority. If I was a paranoid man I'd suspect the internet was scheming to make me suffer (again), but I'm sure this will actually be a perfectly enjoyable and not at all frustrating experience!

The game was originally released for DOS CD-ROM, then it got a floppy disk version, and two years later it was ported across to the PlayStation. But I'm playing the PC CD version because it's what I've got.

Devastation (PC) - Guest Post

You ever heard of this?

Didn't think so!

(Click the pics to see them in 1280x1024.)

Silent Hill (PSX)

It occurs to me I've been getting a bit too comfortable with my genres lately. I'm trying to explore the whole weird and wonderful world of video games here, but I've ended up with a site full of first person shooters, RPGs and platformers instead.

So today I'm finally getting around to another requested game: the original Silent Hill on the original PlayStation, one of the original survival horror games. Honestly I'm not expecting to like this much as survival horror isn't really my thing, but I will try to give it a fair shot. You can all laugh at me as I get hopelessly lost and fail to solve basic puzzles.

I suppose I should "start" the "game" then.

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!

Marko's Magic Football (Genesis/Mega Drive)

Alright, today I'm going to find out what Marko's Magic Football is. It was released in the US simply as Marko, because I guess 'Marko's Magic Soccer Ball' just wasn't working for them as a title.

I'll forgive you if you haven't heard of this one before, as the game's so obscure that even the developers were apparently unaware it'd ever been released. Well okay VGJunk's heard of it, but his site's practically a shrine to the esoteric, so if anything that just proves my point. (Like I can talk...)

The game came out on the Genesis/Mega Drive, Mega CD, SNES and Game Gear, and I'll be playing the Mega Drive version, which I'm guessing came first.