Fallout 3 (PC)

Today on Super Adventures I've decided to have a look at RPG heavyweight Fallout 3, take a few screenshots from it, maybe put a bit of text under them as well. If I can think of anything to say.

Interplay had a good run with the Fallout franchise, getting four games out of it in the end, but after a few bad decisions (like making Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel for instance) they found themselves suffering from a wee bit of bankruptcy and in 2007 Elder Scrolls developers Bethesda presented them $5.75 million to take the whole thing off their hands. So this is the first Fallout of the Bethesda era, with a new immersive first person real-time approach to gameplay and combat that seems precision engineered to piss off the existing fan base. It was also developed with consoles in mind this time, which was made blatantly obvious to me right away by the fact that I couldn't use my mouse on the menus until I'd disabled my Xbox 360 pad!

Oh, like the Elder Scrolls games, this has all kinds of user made mods available for it, which I won't be touching. I've got nothing against mods, much the opposite in fact, I just like to play games vanilla when I'm showing them off on this site.

(Click the screenshots to double their resolution.)

Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn (PC) - Guest Post

I don't generally play multiplayer games for Super Adventures, as I just don't feel like they're a good fit for the site. But Jihaus here plays what he damn well pleases and today he's taking on the latest MMO to steal a numbered slot in the Final Fantasy line: Final Fantasy 14: Online 2: A Realm Reborn.

Ray was hitting a bunch of Final Fantasy games recently and I figured it'd be a good time to jump back into Final Fantasy XIV. I'm relatively familiar with the game from the short time I played the beta earlier this year but this time I have a chance to start over with it and really analyze it.

This will be the first MMORPG post of Super Adventures in Gaming so some may be wondering how this is going to work, being that MMORPGs are long, drawn out affairs in which it takes a lot longer to do things compared to offline games. The answer to that is, about the same, I'll just be compressing the timeline a bit here so this will seem a lot faster than the game really is.

As a bit of backstory, we're actually playing A Realm Reborn, not the original FFXIV Online released in 2010, which was apparently such a critical flop that Square Enix shut down the servers and redid the game, rereleasing it 3 years later in this newer, improved package. I haven't played the original so I can't compare, but I'd say I'm familiar enough with MMORPG mechanics to give this a fair shake.

Of course you run into the most horrible of MMO roadblocks before getting here: installing the game, and waiting for it to update EVERYTHING, a process I let run overnight as the ETA was in the thousands of minutes at first. Once that was over, I was able to just use the same account I had and proceed.

Mr. Pibb: The 3D Interactive Game (MS-DOS)

I've never tried Mr. Pibb before, but my extensive research has revealed that it's a type of drink, it has its own 3D Interactive Game, and that I'm playing it right now! I'm cautiously optimistic as interactive games tend to be my favourite type of videogame.

According to this screenshot you're looking at right now, a mad scientist has taken over the school and turned all our friends and teachers into zombies! Probably not a coincidence this was made around the same time that Buffy was starting to get popular. Another thing that was popular in '98 was Half-Life, to give this some historical context. But can a cheap fizzy drink tie-in running in DOS compete with Valve's masterpiece? The answer may shock you! Or maybe it won't. I have no idea, I haven't even played it yet.

Wish me luck... 'cause I'll need it.

Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel (PC)

Today I'm looking at 2001 PC strategy game Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel, not to be confused with 2004 console action RPG Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel. No seriously, you probably don't want to get those two confused.

They're both combat driven spin-offs that break with tradition and take the series into a new genre, but one is focused on refining the battle system to be more tactical and involving to the exclusion of everything else, while the other has a Slipknot song on the soundtrack.

Uh, this is the tactical one by the way.

(Clicking screenshots may re-inflate them to their full 800x600 majesty.)

Putty Squad (Amiga)

Happy New Years, welcome to 2014! I'm still Ray Hardgrit, this is still Super Adventures, and I'm still playing games for an hour or so to figure out what they even are and show off some screenshots while I'm at it.

Today I'm taking a look at one of the last games released for the Amiga 1200 computer: Putty Squad, which came out... oh, about a week ago.

Super AiG Screenshots of the Year: 2013

Welcome to the third annual Super Adventures Screenshots of the Year article, showcasing the 52 greatest screenshots featured on the site this year in semi-chronological order! Well, mostly just ones that made me smile really.

WARNING: certain screenshots may display scenes of a disturbing and graphic nature, though I can at least promise no ZX Spectrum screens this year.

Oh by the way, every time you see a highlighted game title, it's a link to the original article. It's not going to take you off to mobygames.com or something. Not that there's anything wrong with mobygames, not now that it's been put back to its old layout again. Those were a dark couple of months though.

Doom 3 (PC)

Today I present to you the final Super Adventures article of the year and yes it's another bloody first person shooter. I figured that I should probably get this one out of the way now while the original Doom games are still fresh in my mind.

I get the impression that Doom 3 (or is that Doom³) isn't the most beloved of the franchise, possibly due (in part) to the fact that very little pisses gamers off more than when a developer tries to turn their franchise into something new to bring in a different audience. I mean when you go out to buy a loaf of bread you wouldn't likely be impressed to find that the baker has suddenly reimagined it all into... ice cream or something to better appeal to the teen demographic would you? Though unlike the XCOM, Syndicate, Resident Evil and Shadowrun franchises etc. with this game id software tried to turn their mindless mainstream shooter series into something slower paced and a bit more intelligent.

Doom 3 isn't entirely new to me, as I actually finished it back when it first came out, but I'm interested in seeing what I think about it now that it's a decade behind the curve and the shine's all worn off.

(Click the images to see them at twice the resolution!)