Super AiG Screenshots of the Year: 2014

Welcome to the fourth annual Super Adventures Screenshots of the Year event, featuring screenshots and animations from the last 12 months of the site chosen for their beauty and their allure. Actually I mostly just went with the ones that jumped out at me and caught my attention while I was scrolling through the 122 game posts that ended up on my site last year.

As always every highlighted game title is going to take you to the original article if you click on it.

(Every now and again you'll see a shot from a modern PC game, if you click them they'll likely open up into a slightly higher resolution image.)

X-Com: Enforcer (PC) - Guest Post

Hey look, former guest-posting superstar mecha-neko came back just in time to play the last game to be featured on the site this year! It was only a matter of time before X-Com: Enforcer made an appearance I suppose, and I'm kinda glad I wasn't the one who ended up having to play it.

This was a gift from a most X-cellent person. It was X-tremely X-pensive, so my X-pectations are high!

Once again, the Earth is under attack from a relentless alien foe. Only one cat can possibly stop them.
(Click the pictures to fill your monitor with X-ceedingly high resolution images of X-Com: Enforcer.)

Star Wars: X-Wing - Collectors' CD-ROM (MS-DOS)

Today on Super Adventures it is my privilege to bore you with my thoughts about the first hour or two of Star Wars: X-Wing: Space Combat Simulator: Collectors' CD-ROM '94! No, no, come back, I've brought gifs as well.

A few months ago I said I was going to bring back balance to the site this year, and this post should finally pull the Star Wars games even with the Star Trek games (in quantity if not quality). Actually I suppose this one should count three times, as LucasArts kept rereleasing it with a new engine and different graphics throughout the 90s. It only ever came out on PC and Mac though for whatever reason (unlike the rival Wing Commander games which made it everywhere).

This was actually the very first Star Wars game developed in-house at LucasArts, by an independent team that later formed Totally Games and went on to make a bunch more X-Wing space sims (plus a Star Trek one) before kinda dropping off the map. After 1999's Freespace 2 bombed there just wasn't as much demand for space combat games like this any more. I can't help but wonder if the genre might have lived longer though if console gamers had gotten to play the best of them.

Xmas Lemmings (Demo) (Amiga)

Aww, they even dressed up the 'TM' with a bit of holly.

Welcome to a special Christmas edition of Super Adventures, where I'm playing a special Christmas edition of a game you've probably heard of. I figured that I should put the effort in to find something interesting to look at this year, something with a bit of festive charm to it... but mobygames and a team of experts couldn't come up with anything suitable that begins with the letter 'X', so you're getting this instead.


There's actually a few Xmas Lemmings and Christmas Lemmings games around, with the first two being 4 level demos made to promote Oh No! More Lemmings, and the last two being proper retail releases with 16 levels each. But I'm only playing the earliest of them, which I found on an Amiga Format coverdisk (Issue 30, on sale Christmas 1991 if you're curious).

Oh, plus I should mention that I have played Lemmings plenty of times before and I'm very familiar with it. I'm crap at it mind you, but I know what the buttons do.

Wasteland 2 (PC)

Today on Super Adventures I’m taking a relatively brief look at the actual sequel to Wasteland that now actually really exists in the world for real. It hasn’t been all that long since I wrote about Skyrim, and yet here I am writing about another insanely massive RPG, I guess I must just hate having free time.

Wasteland 2 is one of the big isometric RPG Kickstarter success stories that came out of nowhere these last couple of years, along with games like Divinity: Original Sin, Pillars of Eternity, Shadowrun Returns and Torment: Tides of Numenera. Maybe this is just a fad, or maybe we’re looking at the glorious rebirth of a subgenre unfairly killed off long before its time by developers chasing more mainstream audiences, I dunno. Personally I’m happy with what we’ve got so far, as five of these games combined must be like… 30,000 hours of gameplay, at least.

I’ve only been semi-looking forward to finally playing this though, as to be honest I’m not a huge fan of Wasteland or its spiritual successor Fallout, and seeing as this is a sequel to one and a successive spiritual successor to the other, there’s a fair chance I’ll come away from this disappointed. On the other hand it’s mostly their dated game design and interface that puts me off, so maybe a more modern take on the formula will win me over! It worked for Fallout 3 after all, but then that's not quite the same thing.

(As always when I played one of these new-fangled PC titles, you can click the screenshots to view them in their original resolution. Might give you a fighting chance to make out some of the text).

Wing Commander (Amiga CD32)

The first 'W' game on Super Adventures this year is... Wing Commander, on the Amiga CD32!

Yeah I realise that the original PC DOS version is likely to be a better experience, but I got this version bundled with a CD32 years back (on the very same disc as that piece of crap Dangerous Streets in fact), and I really should give it a try at least once.

Wing Commander is one of the big games from the early 90s like Doom and Myst that made the PC into a serious rival to the 16-bit game machines of the era, with its advanced 256 colour VGA graphics and... music. Sound cards existed a couple of years before Wing Commander, but this inspired people to buy their first Sound Blaster and turn their sensible personal computer into a gaming platform. Amiga owners were already jealous of the Genesis/Mega Drive at this point, they were getting ready to be jealous of the upcoming SNES, and now they had to be jealous of really expensive 386 PCs too! Sure all three systems eventually got a Wing Commander to call their own a few years down the line, but none could pull the game off with the same speed and visuals as the PC. Probably.

Anyway this is going to be the same deal as ever: I'll play it for an hour or two, share my opinions of how it's been so far, and then leave a comment box at the bottom for you to tell me that it's a good game and my 'review' sucks.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (PC) - Part 2

Click the highlighted text if you'd rather be reading part one.