Saints Row (Xbox 360)

Developer:

Volition

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Release Date:

2006

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Systems:

Xbox 360

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This week on Super Adventures I'm going to fix an obvious omission on my site that's been bothering me for two years. I've written about Saints Rows 2 to IV, but I've completely overlooked the original game in the series! No I'm not talking about Grand Theft Auto 3, but I understand your confusion.

I'm a big fan of the Saints Row sequels but I've only played the first game once back when it was new, and only long enough to think 'wow, this is familiar'. The impression I've been getting from others is that the game was pretty much a practice run for Volition, a generic GTA: San Andreas clone without the personality the series developed later, so now I'm going to play it properly and see how true that is.

By the way, the game's 10 years old this August, and the console it was released on was discontinued in April, so that means it's officially retro! Maybe. Either way it's a pleasure to finally introduce the Xbox 360 to Super Adventures (even if I'm only doing it because this bloody game didn't get a convenient, easy to screenshot PC release like its sequels).

(Clicking the images will make them big, so you can see all the nice H.264 video compression artefacts).
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Prey (PC)

Developer:

Human Head

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Release Date:

2006

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Systems:

Windows, Mac, Linux, Xbox 360

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm having a go at Prey! I've already played Doom 3 and Quake 4, so I figured it was about time to give the third id Tech 4 game a go.

Prey was going to be 3D Realms' cutting edge graphical showcase, a game designed from the ground up to require a 3D card! It was originally intended to come out in 1998 you see, as a competitor to games like Unreal, Half-Life, Turok... Daikatana and Duke Nukem Forever.

The advanced 3D game engine was going to support things like area sourced coloured lighting, reflections, dynamic shadows, and dynamic portals. This portal technology was actually a clever way to divide the levels up into smaller areas of geometry so the processor only had to think about one room at a time, meaning higher polygon counts at faster framerates. Though by 1998 the developers were also showing off proper Portal-style placeable tears in reality, and there was much hype.

But then 3D Realms went and pulled a '3D Realms', scrapping all the work they'd done so far due to issues with the technology and starting over with a different engine. The project fell dormant until Human Head took over in 2001, and in 2002 they licensed the shiny new id Tech 4 engine (with its working portal tech) and spent four years putting together an entirely different Prey with it. Which was then completely overshadowed by Portal the following year. Alas.

TECHNICAL BOX

Before starting it up, I created an autoexec.cfg file and typed in a couple of lines to hopefully turn off the mouse acceleration and smoothing:

seta m_accel "0"
seta m_smooth "0"

(Click images for slightly bigger screenshots).
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FORBIDDEN Siren 2 (PS2)

Developer:

SCE Japan Studio - project SIREN

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Release Date:

2006

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Systems:

PlayStation 2

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This week on Super Adventures I'm having a look at FORBIDDEN Siren 2, or maybe Forbidden Siren 2 depending on whether you're going to trust the box spine or the manual. In North America it's known as... well, nothing actually as it was never released there. The first game was though, under the name of Siren.

I was going to start the article by dropping the bombshell that in five years of the site I have never once played a horror game for Halloween, not even accidentally. But I just checked and it turns out that I have, twice: DecapAttack and Blood. My memory betrays me again.

But the point I was leading to was that I'm not really all that interested in Halloween and never have been. Horror isn't really my thing and I find that horror games often involve way too much creeping around in the filthy darkness with awkward controls, looking for the door/cupboard/bookcase/piano you haven't examined yet. I'll still give the game a fair chance to win me over (I wouldn't have much to write about otherwise) but I can't help being predisposed to despise it.
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Sam & Max: Save the World (PC)

Developer:

Telltale

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Release Date:

2006

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Systems:

Windows, Xbox 360, Wii

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Today on Super Adventures I'll be having a go of Sam & Max: Season One, later retroactively relabelled Sam & Max: Save the World. Because I was asked to.

Save the World is the second of the Sam & Max games... or maybe games 2-7 depending on how you look at it, seeing as it's made up of 6 episodes, each released separately with their own executables. It's like a game entirely made up of standalone DLC. I'll be playing the first episode, Culture Shock, and I'm thinking that I might as well finish the thing if it's short. This means I'm going to end up SPOILING THE WHOLE FIRST EPISODE, puzzles and all, so don't actually read or glance at any part of this article.

Anyway, Save the World is/contains the second of the Sam & Max games released (after 1993's Hit the Road), but LucasArts had started work on an alternate sequel called Sam & Max: Freelance Police back in 2002. Production went well for 18 months or so, they'd gotten about two thirds through and everyone was happy, but then LucasArts was informed by an external marketing analysis group that adventure games were over and so they went and cancelled it. Couldn't be helped, the genre was dead and that was that.

A group of LucasArts developers who'd been working on Freelance Police decided that the best thing to do was to go off and start their own adventure game company called Telltale Games (not to be confused with Traveller's Tales, Tale of Tales or Tales of Game's). Actually their original plan was to buy the rights to Freelance Police itself and finish it off, but they couldn't make it happen. Fortunately for them LucasArts lost the rights to the crime fighting duo the following year and Telltale were able to get a damn Sam & Max game finished and released at last!

Save the World was a big enough success to get two sequel seasons so far, and Telltale are doing alright for themselves these days with games like The Walking Dead and A Wolf Among Us. I guess that means that one of the reasons adventure games weren't selling during the early 2000s is because LucasArts kept cancelling them all.

(Click on any screenshot to expand it to 1280x960 res.)
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Dark Messiah: Might and Magic (PC)

Developer:

Arkane, Floodgate and Kuju

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Release Date:

2006

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Systems:

Windows, Xbox 360

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Today on Super Adventures, I'm finally taking a look at Dark Messiah of... hang on, where's the 'of'? Everyone knows the game is called 'Dark Messiah of Might and Magic', that's what it's called on Wikipedia, that's what it's called on Steam, that's what is written in the press releases, so why isn't there an 'of' on the title screen? It's not there on the box either, or the manual, or the official website... huh I guess the game really is called Dark Messiah: Might and Magic.

Though 'Might and Magic: Dark Messiah' would've made more sense, seeing as it's part of the Might and Magic franchise. Just saying.

Anyway, this was actually the very first game I ever bought on Steam, way back in July 2012. It's not that I was still holding a grudge after 8 years for all the bullshit I had to go through to install my DVD copy of Half-Life 2... I'd just stopped buying PC games entirely by that point because companies were in an arms race to see who could develop the scariest DRM, and retail discs had become a minefield. Not that I didn't have a Steam library, but at that point it was basically a handful of Half-Lifes, a Humble Bundle or two and Ricochet. And yet it's still taken me until now to play the bloody thing.

Now I'm wondering what was I playing that month that was so much more worthy of my time. Hmm, my site notes say MDK, Superfrog... and Sensible Train-Spotting? I didn't even publish that last one until June the next year, so I don't know what the hurry there was. It's very annoying how my notes don't include explanations for all my bad decisions. Anyway, I'll be playing this for an hour (or more) and yelling out how it plays as I go. In text.

WARNING: EVENTUALLY SPIDERS.

(Click the screenshots to make them bigger).
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