Kid Chaos (Amiga) - Part 2 - Guest Post

Previously on Kid Chaos, danger was lurking around every turn as the displaced caveman fought off rats, bats, bunnies and bees in his frantic escape from THE SECRET -GARDEN-. Will mecha-neko ever live to see world 2-1? Read on!

Kid Chaos (Amiga) - Part 1 - Guest Post

This week on Super Adventures, I've captured guest poster mecha-neko and teleported him to the distant past of 1994 to play a game about a caveman in the future. It's classic Amiga platformer Kid Chaos.

Hello everyone! It's time to dig up something really prehistoric!

Developer:

Magnetic Fields

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Release Date:

1994

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Systems:

Amiga 500, Amiga CD32

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This is Kid Chaos. The apex of Amiga platform action. The one where it all comes together. Years of technological experimentation, observation and innovation have led to this moment.

The title screen alone is lush as heck. The Amiga hardware can select 32 colours at once and this image displays 110 of them. The clouds all drift past at different speeds and everything, but you'll have to take my word for that as the .gif would be huge! It's like something you'd see on an AGA machine, but this is an A500 game.

If you want to see what all the fuss is about, read on!

Kid Chaos (Amiga) - Guest PostPart 1 - Part 2

Body Harvest (N64)

Developer:

DMA Design

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Release Date:

1998

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Systems:

N64

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I've always wondered why this space station has a skull painted on it. Up there at the top, next to the dish.

Anyway it's Super Adventures' 12th birthday today yesterday, so I figured I should write about a video game or something to celebrate. It has to be something a little bit special though, so I'm checking out DMA Design's notorious time-travelling alien-slaying action-adventure Body Harvest, on the Nintendo 64.

One thing I like about this era is that console designers were all making the leap to full 3D using different approaches, so you can tell an N64 game from a PlayStation game instantly just by looking at a screenshot. Even multiplatform games look different on each system. Body Harvest is a true N64 exclusive though. In fact it was supposed to be a launch title for the console, but original publisher Nintendo wasn't impressed with what DMA were coming up with. It didn't make it onto the system until two years later, when Gremlin Interactive bought DMA and published it themselves in the EU.

In fact it ended up getting released a month or so before DMA Design's other N64 game Space Station Silicon Valley. Except in America, where the two games were released a day apart! This was a bit of a problem as it meant they both came out right before The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and Nintendo fans were saving their pennies for what was certainly going to be the safer bet. Then a year later DMA released Grand Theft Auto 2, which was the beginning of the company's 'making nothing but GTA games for the rest of all eternity' era. Well okay they released Manhunt in 2003 shortly after becoming Rockstar North, but aside from that it's been all GTA as far as the eye can see.

Okay I'm going to do what I always do: try the game for an hour or so, type my reactions under screenshots, and then write a long review at the end with an unearned tone of authority, as if experiencing an hour of gameplay is enough to really get what a game is like.

Super AiG Screenshots of the Year: 2022

It's that time of year where people look back over what they've been up to over the last year and post about it on the internet. Even Steam's doing it now with their new Steam Replay feature. But I've been revisiting the last 12 months of screenshots at the end of the year since 2011, so you're probably not surprised to be reading yet another Super Adventures Screenshots of the Year!

I've gone through every post this year, skimmed through 700 images and picked out the shiny ones that caught my eye. There'll be nothing new here if you've been keeping up, but the screenshots are the best part of my site and this time there'll be fewer words underneath to distract from them. Though if you do want to go back and read the full write up, you can click the game's name to be teleported over there.

Oni (PC)

Developer:

Bungie

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Release Date:

2001

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Systems:

PC, PS2, Mac

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing third person action game Oni, by Bungie, the developers of the Marathon, Halo and Destiny franchises! You can tell they're the ones who made it as their name is right there in the corner underneath the title.

Though hang on, it says 'developed by Rockstar' all over every copy I own, and there's no one from Bungie credited in the manual. So that's kind of weird.

It was ported to the PlayStation 2 by Rockstar Canada, so it makes sense that the logo would be on that version, but I'm not sure why it's on the PC game. I get that the credits were complicated by Take-Two acquiring the rights and Microsoft acquiring the company, but that doesn't mean it was retroactively developed by someone else! It might explain why it never made it to digital stores though.

Unfortunately Windows 10 didn't want to install it off the CD, so I ended up having to use Universal Extractor to get the files out of the installer and then run it with the fan-made Anniversary Edition. The thing includes a bunch of fixes and a huge list of mods to install, so it seems like the game has had a lot of support from its fans over the years. But it also stuck the words "Anniversary Edition" on my title screen, so I switched to playing the OniX rebuild instead. They both seem pretty authentic though from what I can tell.

I wish I could warn you about SPOILERS, though I don't think I'm going to make it that far to be honest. I remember the game having some serious difficulty spikes, mostly involving lasers. I also remember it looking kind of bad for its time, though that's maybe less of an issue 20 years later.

Operation GII (Demo) (Amiga) - Guest Post

The week on Super Adventures, guest reviewer mecha-neko has dug up something properly obscure for you. It's the demo for a cancelled Amiga first person shooter called Operation Gii! Uh, Operation G2 sorry.

All these Alien Breed games Ray has been playing has inspired me some! I'm going to play a sci-fi shooty survival game of my own.

Developer:

Psygnosis

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Release Date:

August 1994 (Demo)

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Systems:

Amiga

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"Are you ready to battle with rogue robots on a radio-active spaceship in our fab Coverdisk demo?"

You bet I am, Amiga Format!

Black (Xbox)

Developer:

Criterion

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Release Date:

2006

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Systems:

Xbox, PS2

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing a first person shooter from the dark times of PC gaming, where first person shooters had migrated to consoles and didn't always get ported back (I'm still waiting on The Darkness and the TimeSplitters games to suddenly appear on Steam). 

Black is exclusive to the Xbox and PlayStation 2, which means it never got a release that featured mouse controls and quicksaves. The game did make it onto Microsoft's backward compatibility list though, meaning that I can play it on the Xbox One with an increased resolution and presumably a more stable framerate! So that's what I'm going to do.

The game was developed by Criterion, who are more famous for racing games like Burnout Paradise and Need for Speed: Most Wanted (2012). They decided to use their own engine for it, RenderWare, which was practically the Unreal Engine of the PS2-era, allowing developers to make cross-platform games without knowing all the dark arcane secrets of the hardware. In fact it was used in almost 300 games before EA decided they wanted out of the engine licensing business. It turned up in some pretty big name titles as well, like Grand Theft Auto 3, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3, Suikoden 3, Broken Sword 3 and Max Payne 2.

I'm sure I've played Black before, many years ago, but I only got about halfway through and my memories are really fuzzy. I remember that it had a forest level, a church level and a factory level, but that's about it. I feel like I was impressed by it somehow though. Hopefully there'll be something special about it that'll make it worth showing off, otherwise this is going to be a bit of a disappointment.