Handkerchief. (Demo) (PC) - Guest Post

This week on Super Adventures, rogue guest reviewer mecha-neko has returned to dredge up a forgotten piece of PC history. And this time he's even found an ancient demo of it so you can try it for yourself!

Handkerchief doesn't exactly fit in with my 'games from a top 10 list' theme I've been going with this year, as it's so obscure that even the people making 'Top 10 Most Obscure PC Games' lists apparently haven't heard about it. But whenever mecha-neko plays a game I get a week off, so I'm giving the theme a week off as well.

Developer:

Opus Corp.

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Release Date:

22nd September 2000 (Full game)

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Systems:

Windows

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Hello everyone! It's my tenth anniversary of writing for Super Adventures! It seems like just yesterday that I was rummaging through mouldy disks and finding gems like David Wolf: Secret Agent, and doing foolish things like trying out sports games.

To mark the occasion, I'm playing a much-loved game from my secret past. It's one that doesn't appear on any Top Ten lists that I can find, sorry Ray. This is Handkerchief., a demo that I used to play endlessly back in 2000, over twenty years ago!

Let's go!

Drakengard (PS2)

Developer:

Cavia

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Release Date:

2004 (2003 JP)

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Systems:

PlayStation 2

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Love. Crimson blood. Poison. Eternity. Revenge. Two. Sacrifice. Mother. Ritual. Scarlet. Prayers. Heresy. Hell. Solitude. Clouded skies. Madness. Goddess. The World. Watchers. Adore. Us.

That's what a voice says if you leave the title screen on too long... so that's different. And a little creepy. I don't know what any of it means, but then I don't know anything about this game. Except that it made it onto thegamer.com's 10 Great Games With Storylines That Didn't Make Sense list.

Oh, this week on Super Adventures, I'm playing Drakengard, or Drag-On Dragoon as it's known in Japan. The original title was considered to be wrong for a western audience, and I think they made the right call there.

The game's by defunct developer Cavia, who made an impressive number of anime games seeing as they were only around for 10 years. I mean games based on an anime or manga, like One Piece: Nanatsu Shima no Daihihō, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Dragon Ball Z: Supersonic Warriors etc. They also made two Resident Evil rail shooters and the original Nier, which is actually a Drakengard spin-off.

Here's a fun Drakengard fact for you: there's apparently a model of Neo from The Matrix hidden in the game's files (Twitter link). Some more incredible trivia: a voice says "Square Enix" when the game starts up. It's not up to the standards of the 'say-gah' jingle from Sonic the Hedgehog, but it's handy if you're not sure how to pronounce the publisher's name (it's pronounced Eh-nix, not Eee-nix).

Oh, also it's the PlayStation 2's 21st birthday today, which I only just found out now. It's honestly a coincidence that I had this scheduled to be published on this exact day. A creepy coincidence.

Micro Machines (Amiga)

Developer:

Codemasters

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Release Date:

1993 (Amiga)

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Systems:

Amiga, NES, SNES, SMS, SMD, GG, CD-i, GB, GBC, DOS

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing classic overhead racing game Micro Machines! It looks like it's called MicroMachines, but there is apparently a tiny imperceptible space between the words.

It seems a bit redundant to tell you it's a racing game seeing as I've already written up there that it's by Codemasters, but this was from way back in their early days when they were still allowed to dream of other genres. The title Micro Machines also seems like a bit of a giveaway, but I bet they could've found a way to turn it into a platformer if they'd wanted to. It wouldn't have been the first car platformer I've played.

Though hang on, is this actually the first Codemasters developed game I've played for Super Adventures? It doesn't seem likely, but the only other Codemasters game I can think of is Fantasy World Dizzy and that was developed by the Oliver Twins. Wow, 10 years and there's still veteran AAA developers I haven't played anything by. Though they were more of a B game dev before this came out.

My gimmick this year is that I'm only playing games that I've found on top ten lists, and Micro Machines was #6 in 1995s Amiga Power All-Time Top 100 list. Weirdly it started off down at #17 the year before but I guess it grew on them. The game started life on the NES a couple of years earlier, in 1991, but Codemasters didn't exactly have a licence from Nintendo, so they teamed up with Camerica to come up with sneaky ways to get around the lock out chip with their unlicensed cartridges. My favourite is the pass-through cart that comes with a handle to get it back out of your NES, because it's so distinctive looking. No handles on the Amiga disks though, sadly.

The NES game didn't go through quality assurance either, which made things a bit awkward when they found a bug after they'd started producing ROM chips. I don't know how many console games got a hardware patch, but this is apparently one of them as they stuck a device inside to correct the code. No chips soldered onto the Amiga disks though, sadly.

In fact the Amiga game's been a real let down so far and I haven't even turned it on yet.

Fade to Black (MS-DOS) - Guest Post

This week on Super Adventures, habitual guest poster mecha-neko has returned with another game for you. It's Fade to Black, the sequel to classic cinematic platformer Flashback from three years earlier (F2B... FB2, I see what they did there).

This year I've been playing games that have showed up in someone's top ten rankings and Fade to Black fits nicely with that as it was one of PC Zone's top ten PC action games in their August 1997 issue. In fact it was listed along with games like TIE Fighter, Quake and Tomb Raider, so it seems like it's going to be something really special!

Developer:

Delphine Studios International

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Release Date:

31st August 1995

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Systems:

MS-DOS, PlayStation, Dreamcast

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Hello there! This is Fade to Black, the sequel to Flashback: The Quest For Identity, following the continuing adventures of 90s rotoscoped polygon space hero Conrad B. Hart.

This has been on my agenda for a million years, but when I got out the DOS computer for Halloween Harry, I knew it was time for some space adventuring.

Be warned that this game continues on from the ending of Flashback so there will be SPOILERS for the ending of Flashback. Also, if you find the violent deaths of 3D prerendered men disturbing, this is not the post for you.

Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss (MS-DOS)

Developer:

Blue Sky

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Release Date:

1992

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Systems:

DOS, FM Towns, PC-98, PlayStation

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This year on Super Adventures, I'm celebrating 10 years of the site by playing games that have earned their place on a 'top 10' list at some point. Maybe I found a game on a 'Top 10 Best Game Over Themes' list, or perhaps a 'Top 10 Most Underwhelming Sequels' list, it doesn't matter as long as they made it there.

In this case I'm playing Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss which I found at #5 on PC Gamer's 1994 'Top 100', and at #3 on PC Zone's October 2000 'all-time classics' list. You could probably find it all over the place though as it's a bit legendary. It's part of the foundations that some of the biggest franchises are built on, as series like Deus Ex and Elder Scrolls can trace their lineage right back here. Tomb Raider and Minecraft too actually. Though there's a more direct link with Looking Glass's System Shock series, seeing as this is the first game by Blue Sky Productions... later known as Looking Glass Studios.

I haven't played this myself yet though, even though it seemed like an obvious choice for Super Adventures, and the main reason for that is that it looks like an absolute bastard to write about, and I'd want to do it right. Plus I haven't really played the other Ultima games and I know nothing about the series!

I checked Wikipedia however, and it turns out that Underworld was released just before Ultima VII, in 1992, and the Ultima series was 11 years old at the time. So this was a bit of a Resident Evil 4 situation I suppose, as it's an inventive and influential successor released about a decade after the original. Except here it's a spin-off, not a change in direction for the franchise, so fans of the classic gameplay weren't faced with their series making a genre shift. In fact it wasn't even originally an Ultima game at all, and they had to rewrite it during development to fit the lore and really turn up the 'ye olde English' dial.

I should mention that I'm playing the GOG version, which is presumably the CD release, and I should also mention it may include cartoony low-res spiders.

The History(s) of Video Games

This decade on Super Adventures, the site has covered around 1300 games, and I don't think I've spent enough time thinking about all the ways I could make lists with those games. Just imagine, instead of spending hours playing games, choosing screenshots, writing what happened in them etc. I could just put a bunch of game titles in a column and call it an article!

I need to put the games in some kind of order though, so I've decided for this article I'm going to sort them chronologically. This is going to be a big long list of years. Though they're not going to be the years the games were released in, they're going to be the years the games take place in.

This article is basically going to treat the games like they all take place in the same shared timeline where all the events happened, especially the ones that contradict each other. Because judging by how the number of characters added to each new Smash Bros. sequel keeps increasing, in a few decades all these games will all take place in the same universe. Unfortunately I can't mention events without mentioning events, so there may be a few minor SPOILERS here. But I'm not going to go ruining the plot of games or anything like that... hopefully.

Metal Slug: Super Vehicle-001 (Neo-Geo)

It's Super Adventures' 10th Anniversary today, which means it's time for a shiny new logo and a shiny new gimmick for 2021. I figured I should celebrate ten years of my site by giving year eleven a theme, and that theme is 'Top Ten'. Super Adventures is mature and respectable now, so I'm going to play only the very finest games... well, games that have made into the top ten of somebody's rankings anyway. Most of the time I'll be getting them from some 'Top 10 Objectively Greatest Video Games Ever Made' list I've found, but maybe I'll throw in something from a list like 'Top 10 Most Embarrassing Movie Tie-Ins' or 'Top 10 Shovelware Releases on the Wii' every now and then to keep things interesting.

It's not a flawless plan, as it means I'll be writing about games that everyone already knows about. Plus I've already played a lot of the games that tend to show up in these lists, especially the console games, so they're out of the running. So to help limit your expectations, here's some links to a few of the legendary titles I've already covered during the last decade:

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To be honest, I only put this row of boxes here because I felt like seeing if I could figure out how to do it. Plus the site needs more game covers on it. More title screens as well, especially the ones that look like this:

Developer:

Nazca

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Release Date:

1996

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Systems:

Arcade, Neo-Geo, Neo-Geo CD, Saturn, PSX, PC

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing the legendary Metal Slug, as seen in arcades and on the Neo·Geo home console. I should warn you that this article will contain flashing GIFs, so if that's an issue for you, then you probably don't want to scroll down much further.

This game almost ruined my 'top ten list' gimmick right at the start, because I struggled to find it anywhere. I did the research, searching through dozens of top 100 lists from magazines and websites, and none of them had the game ranked high enough! Fortunately Shacknews' Top 10 Run n' Gun Arcade Shooters video bailed me out (spoiler, it was #1).

I was a bit surprised when I saw that the game was released in 1996, as it's a bit later than I expected. That's the same year that Super Mario 64 and Tomb Raider came out, and 2D had already started going out of fashion a couple of years earlier, with Virtua Fighter and Daytona USA hitting arcades in 1993 and Donkey Kong Country faking 3D in 1994. The Neo·Geo MVS arcade cabinet and AES console both predate the Super Nintendo by a few months, so this could've potentially come out as early as 1990 and still looked just as good. I guess the original Neo·Geo was tough to kill, as they were still making 2D Metal Slug sequels for the same hardware as late as 2003, long after the N64 and PlayStation had been replaced.

Uh, I should apologise to you for mentioning so many years in one paragraph, it was a bit excessive. In my defence, this is the first time I've ever covered a Neo·Geo game and I want to talk about the system! I suppose it's also technically the first time I've covered a Neo·Geo CD game as well, which is a newer version of the console which came out a few years later in 1994... sorry, sorry.