Exodus: 3010 - The First Chapter (Amiga) - Guest Post

This week on Super Adventures, guest reviewer mecha-neko has returned to pass judgement upon an old Amiga game from the early 90s that's presumably set 988 years in the future. Unless the title's lying to us.

Happy new year, everyone! Can you believe it's been over ten years since I started playing games as mecha-neko for Super Adventures in Gaming?

Today I'm going to revisit a game from my childhood. It's also one of the first games I wrote about as mecha-neko, but it's not one that's appeared on this site as a Super Adventure.

Developer:

Temet

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Release Date:

January 1992

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Systems:

Amiga 500

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To celebrate its thirtieth anniversary, I present space survival management/flight sim Exodus: '3010: The First Chapter'!

Flight of the Amazon Queen (MS-DOS)

Hey, Super Adventures is back again! I'm ready to give you two more months of game articles, before disappearing off to write for Sci-Fi Adventures instead for a while. Actually, no, I'm bored of that system now. Plus telling people to come back in two months is kind of a terrible idea now that I think about it.

Okay, starting today I'm switching to a new plan: a new Super Adventures every two weeks, all year round. So one week I'll play a game, the next week I'll write about an sci-fi episode, the week after that I'll be back to playing a game, and so on. I'll be doing the same amount of work, you'll be getting the same number of articles, I'm just shuffling the order they get published in.

Developer:

Interactive Binary Illusions

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Release Date:

1995

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Systems:

MS-DOS, Amiga

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This week on Ray Hardgrit's Super Adventures, I'm playing FLIGHT OF THE AMAZON Queen.

I don't know why it's capitalised like that, but I have a suspicion that the gradient is inspired by the Indiana Jones logo. The title itself is probably inspired by the 50s adventure movie The African Queen, starring Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn. The African Queen is actually the name of a boat in the movie, so it wouldn't have been doing much flying. I assume. I haven't actually seen it.

Flight of the Amazon Queen was the second and final game by Australian developer Interactive Binary Illusions, who'd previously worked on Halloween Harry (aka Alien Carnage). This is a point and click adventure and that's a run and gun platformer with a jetpack, so they've done a bit of a genre shift here.

It's another one of those freeware adventures available for free on GOG, like Lure of the Temptress, Beneath a Steel Sky and Teenagent, except with one major difference: I haven't written about it yet. I really did mean to though. In fact I pretty much announced that it was coming soon... back in March 2017. The thing you've got to understand about my plans, is that they were all made by an idiot. Speaking of things being announced, it was revealed earlier this month that a sequel is in development called Return of the Amazon Queen. I only just found out about this, so my timing here is pure luck.

Alright I'm going to try the game for a bit, just long enough to see what it's like and show off some pictures without really spoiling anything. I'll be playing the original PC version running through ScummVM (the free version released on GOG), not the updated 25th Anniversary edition sold on Steam.
 

Super AiG Screenshots of the Year: 2021

There are two Super Adventures traditions that I give a damn about: the site always begins a new year on January 30th and it always ends a year with screenshots. And sometimes GIFs. Maybe even graphs if I'm feeling statistical. This is the last article of 2021 so that means it's time for another Super Adventures clip show!

I'm a little worried about the screenshots this time though to be honest. It's been months since I played most of these games, I can't remember what screens I took, but I do know that I played a lot of mainstream critically-acclaimed mega hits this year and it's possible that the images are going to be a bit... I dunno, normal. Mundane. Humdrum. There has got to be a few good ones in there though, surely. I guess I'll see what I can dig up.

If you want to go read a game's original article you can click on the highlighted game title, and clicking the images will sometimes open a slightly bigger version to look at/collect/post on Discord to give me free advertising etc.

Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies (DS) - Part 2

This week on Super Adventures, I'm still taking a look at Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies! It's a JRPG, so it takes a while to get started. If you want to jump back to PART ONE instead, just click that text.

This was the second mainline Dragon Quest game to be released in Europe and the first to get a number. Dragon Quest VIII was just called Dragon Quest here, so if you're going off the titles it seems like we skipped 8 games. The series had made it over to the US though, where it was known as Dragon Warrior for a long while, and I tend to use the titles interchangeably when talking about earlier entries just to be unnecessarily confusing.

Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies (DS) - Part 1

Developer:

Level-5

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Release Date:

EU/NA 2010 (2009 JP)

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Systems:

DS

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm taking a look at Dragon Quest IX (not to be confused with the latest game in the series, Dragon Quest XI).

This year I've been playing games that have made it onto someone's top 10 list and this one did one better than that, making it onto Gamesutra's "Best Of 2010: Top 5 Handheld Games" list. In fact it got first place, beating Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, Persona 3 Portable, and Warioware D.I.Y.

There's no remakes, ports or mobile versions for me to mention for this Dragon Quest as the game only ever came out on one system: the Nintendo DS. They actually went and did it, they made a handheld exclusive sequel to a console exclusive series! Those monsters! I know it made total sense at the time for them to move to the DS because of the much lower costs, but I wasn't keen when Metal Gear Solid pulled this and I'm not keen on it here either. Handheld gaming isn't really the same experience and it doesn't necessarily appeal to the same people, so people who own one system aren't necessarily going to have the other. I suppose it could've been worse though: Dragon Quest X is an MMO!

I've actually beaten this one before, in the distant past, but I've no idea what to expect because I can't remember anything. Except maybe it has a side view battle system for a change? I do know that it's a bloody long game though, so I'm going to have to stick with it for a few hours longer than usual to give it a fair test. Long enough to get a party together and go complete a quest together at least. What I'm saying is... this is going to be another two-parter.

Stonekeep (MS-DOS)

Developer:

Interplay

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Release Date:

1995

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Systems:

MS-DOS, Mac

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm checking out Interplay's notorious first-person dungeon crawler RPG Stonekeep.

All this year I've been playing games the people have placed on a top ten list, and I found Stonekeep in Computer Gaming World issue 148. It made it to #10 in its '15 Top Vaporware Titles in Computer Game History" list. The game was a bit of a Duke Nukem Forever in its day as development dragged on for way longer than intended when feature creep took hold. It was supposed to cost $50,000 and take 9 months, it ended up costing $5,000,000 and taking 5 years. That's longer than Daikatana took to come out!

Sure 5 years seems like nothing compared to DNF's 15 years in development hell, but time worked differently back in the early 90s. 5 years was the difference between Ninja Gaiden and Doom, A Link to the Past and Final Fantasy VII, or Super Mario Kart and Gran Turismo. When the developers started work on Stonekeep the average PC was put to shame by an Amiga 500 and they couldn't assume that players would have a hard drive or a mouse. When it finally came out it was released on CD with live-action cutscenes and full voiced dialogue. They just kept working on it until PC hardware had caught up to their ambitions, even after main programmer Peter Oliphant quit because he'd had enough. Here's some trivia for you: he went on to work as an extra on the TV series Deadwood, and no I'm not getting him mixed up with Timothy Olyphant.

Okay I'm going to play the first hour or so of the game, and hopefully get far enough to understand the basics of what you're actually supposed to do in it. I haven't had the best track record with games like this, but I'll do my best.

WARNING: There's a jump scare coming up at some point. I'll let you know when.

Blinx: The Time Sweeper (Xbox)

Developer:

Artoon

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Release Date:

2002

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Systems:

Xbox

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing a game about a cat called Blinx: The Time Sweeper. I gave guest poster mecha-neko plenty of chances to be the one to write this, I know he's a cat person, but he decided to pass so now I'm stuck with it. But there is a good reason why this has to be this particular game on this particular day.

It's because today is the Xbox's 20th birthday and I'm covering an original Xbox exclusive to celebrate! I needed to select a game that was never released on PC but could be played on an Xbox One to make it easier for me to get good screenshots, and once I narrowed my list down to games I could get hold of easily there was only one name left on it. But I think this was probably the best possible choice; I mean it's even got "Only on Xbox" written on the title screen, how perfect is that?

Oh plus it had to be on a 'top ten' list somewhere, that was also important seeing as that's Super Adventures' gimmick this year. Fortunately I found the game on videogamer.com's Top 10 Most Disappointing Console Exclusives. I suppose poor Blinx is probably on a 'Top 10 Failed Mascot Characters' list somewhere as well, seeing as Microsoft straight up abandoned the trademark in 2015. That's not entirely fair though, as he's actually doing pretty well these days as the mascot for the Poorly Aged Things twitter account.

The game's by Japanese developer Artoon, which had a pretty mixed output, with lots of red and yellow scores on their Metacritic page. Though they did also create Blue Dragon and The Last Story with Mistwalker. Unfortunately that really was their last story, as they went defunct in 2010. It was directed by Naoto Ohshima, the legendary character designer who came up with Sonic the Hedgehog. He also directed Sonic CD and Nights into Dreams... and his latest project was designing characters for Balan Wonderworld. So Blinx is actually part of a pretty, uh, remarkable lineage.

Anyway I'm going to give it an hour or so and see what it's like.