Donald Duck: Quack Attack / Goin' Qu@ckers*! (PSX)

Alright, the last 'Q' game I'll be looking at this year is the Playstation version of Disney's Donald Duck "Qu@ck Att@ck"?*! (AKA. "Goin' Qu@ckers*!" in North America). Seriously, that's what it's called, you can see the title screen right there. I'm going to assume the bonus punctuation is standing in for unintelligible angry duck swearing, because it totally is.

Today's game is a request... uh, a suggestion... well okay someone basically just pointed out in a comment that the thing exists and begins with 'Q', but that's good enough for me. It turns out that Q isn't the most popular letter for video game titles, so I appreciate the help. R, S and T on the other hand I've got covered (and then some), so I wouldn't recommend recommending anything beginning with one of those letters for the next four months or so.

I've never even heard of this one before by the way, so I've no idea what kind of game it is or what the critical response to it was. Somehow though I don't expect to be impressed, but I'll give it an hour or two to surprise me.

Quake 4 (PC)

Today, at last, I'm taking a quick look at the first few hours of Quake 4. Though it should really be called Quake II-2, as it breaks the series' long tradition of each game having basically nothing to do with each other, and instead continues the tale of Quake II.

The game came out a year after Doom 3 and is built on the same engine, but it was actually developed by id's sidekick Raven Software, who've used id's tech in the past to bring the world first person shooters like Heretic, Soldier of Fortune and Star Trek: Voyager - Elite Force. But not Return to Castle Wolfenstein, that was actually someone else (though Raven did make the next Wolfenstein game... called Wolfenstein.)

Anyway I've played (and finished) the game once before, but thanks to my superpower of being able to completely forget pretty much anything and everything (aside from bad pop songs and 16-bit game tunes), it'll be just like I'm seeing it all for the first time!

(Click the images to view them in a larger resolution.)

Super Adventures's Disappointing 1000th Post Spectacular!

When I realised I was getting close to the 1000th article posted to the site, I figured that I'd do something interesting for the occasion. But nothing came to mind, so I gave up on that and decided to just show every single title screen, box shot or logo added to the site in the last four years, in one absurdly long alphabetically organised grid of thumbnails.

No commentary this time, just several big images containing hundreds of tiny ones.

Quik the Thunder Rabbit (Amiga)

I'm done with those 'P' games now for the year so today I'm finally moving onto 'Q', starting with 1994 Amiga platformer Quik the Thunder Rabbit; not to be confused with other Amiga games like Quik n' Silva or Qwak. Or the Nesquik Bunny for that matter.

The logo up there's kind of weird as it implies Quik will be a mechanical construct with a red helmet, the Mega Man of lagomorphs, but he's nothing like that. I've only played the game before very briefly, but I know enough about it to know that I won't be playing as a robot rabbit. He's called 'The Thunder Rabbit' because he's fast as lightning (or a well known console mascot hedgehog), not because he runs off electricity or has the powers of Thor or anything like that.

Probability 0 (PC)

Hi, I'm Ray Hardgrit, I play games, and today I'm taking a brief look at Probability 0, a "downward-scrolling infinite arcade platformer" by Droqen, the maker of a bunch of other indie games I've never heard of: www.droqen.com. Starseed Pilgrim sounds a little familiar though.

I'm playing this one though because I kind of know the composer and I ended up with a copy, so disregard anything nice I have to say about the soundtrack. In fact it's probably safer to just ignore everything I have to say entirely.

Alright there's apparently two modes here, Beginner and Expert, so I'll go with Beginner for a bit and show you what happens next via the medium of screenshots.

Postal (PC)

Not the prettiest title screen, but at least it's more cheerful than the music collection of sounds playing in the background when it comes up. I figured the game would be leaning more towards dumb comedy than grim psychological horror, but that shows what I know.

Hi, welcome to Super Adventures. I'm Ray Hardgrit and I know absolutely nothing about the first Postal game. I've played a lot of Postal 2 and I've heard that Postal 3 is so bad that developer Running With Scissors basically disowned it (in fact it's so bad that they added the game box into Postal 2 and you get an achievement for pissing on it), but the original Postal remains a mystery to me. I'll soon fix that though.

(Fair warning: there's a good chance I'm going to end up calling the game 'Portal' instead of 'Postal', and it likely won't just be once, so try not to be confused if you catch me screwing up.)

Pokémon: Red Version (GB)

Today's 'P' game is POKéMON: Red Version! Okay there's no way I'm writing it out like that for the rest of this. I'll let it keep the acute accented é but that's where I draw the line.

I was surprised to find (because I know astoundingly little about the series) that the game is not called Pokémon in its native country. I mean I get that it's a portmanteau, but I assumed the name originated in Japan, like with 'Tamagotchi'. In fact the original Japanese title for this is basically just pronounced as 'Pocket Monsters'; so someone took a sensible English title and then mangled it up for the English release. It's a perfectly likeable mangled up name though, so I ain't complaining.