Ganpuru: Gunman's Proof (SNES)

Developer:

Lenar

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Release Date:

1997

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Systems:

SNES

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This week on Super Adventures I'm playing a game definitely absolutely did not ever get ported to the Commodore Amiga, for a change. In fact this one wasn't even released in English, though it did eventually get a fan translation.

I like fan translations, I think they're a fantastic idea and that everyone who's put their time and effort into making games accessible to more people for absolute zero financial reward is awesome. But I don't play fan translations on my site (it's one of the rules written in the box on the right), so I'm going to be struggling through the original Japanese version of the game for an hour or two. Well, unless it's got a lot of dialogue in it, then I'll be struggling a lot longer than that.

The katakana in the title says Ganpuru, so some people call it Gunple and others say it's probably a compound word formed from 'gunman' and 'proof' (like how Pokémon comes from the words 'pocket' and 'monsters'). Man, if the very first word in the game's giving me this much trouble then that's not a good sign. Google Translate tells me that my two choices beneath it are “From the beginning” and “From the rest”, so at least I don't have an options screen to interpret.

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Legends (Amiga)

If my calculations are correct it should be Super Adventures' 6th birthday right about... now. I've been watching it creep up on me for a while, struggling to come up with an idea of what to do about it when it got here.

One idea I had was that I could turn the site around and start going back the way I came, revisiting all the games I've played, starting with Carmageddon, then Spy Fox, and so on all the way back to Deathbringer. Then I had a slightly less terrible idea: I could work through a huge chunk of my game requests all at once! 50 games in one article, each getting a screenshot and a couple of lines of text. It'll be just like the olden days when I'd put up a few dozen half-assed posts a day because I didn't know what the hell I was doing.

But in the end I realised that if I want to go back to Super Adventures' origins what I really need to do is find an old obscure Amiga game I haven't heard of and go into it blind.

Developer:

Krysalis

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Release Date:

1996

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Systems:

Amiga AGA, CD32, DOS

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So this week on Super Adventures I'm playing Legends!

I know about all kinds of games, Amiga games especially; it's a side effect to suffering prolonged exposure to a shelf full of game magazines as a child. But I have never heard of this one in my life and that's kind of weird, because it's by Krysalis, the folks who created Soccer Kid and Arabian Nights.

I've got a theory about why it slipped under my radar though, and that's because my Amiga magazines only go up to 1995. By the time this came out everyone was moving away to SVGA PCs and next gen consoles and I doubt even the DOS port of this low-res Amiga game got much attention. So they left it a bit late there. But then I suppose a game like this takes a while to make... possibly. Depends on what kind of game it is really.

The title screen up there makes me think it's some kind of strategy game with empires clashing across the world, or an RPG with classes from across history, but that doesn't narrow it down much and it's just as likely to be another platformer. All I know for sure is that it's not that classic isometric RPG; that's Legend without the S.

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Batman: Arkham Origins (PC)

Developer:

WB Games Montréal

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Release Date:

2013

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Systems:

Win, PS3, Xbox 360, Wii U

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This week on Super Adventures, a game about punching people at Christmas!

It's been ages since I've played a Batman game, in fact I think the last one on the site was probably Return of the Joker for the NES, back in April 2015. Though it still seems too soon to play Batman: Arkham Origins, because of how similar it is to the other two. In my Batman: Arkham City article I joked that I'd be able to copy/paste parts of my Arkham Asylum post and save myself some work, and here that's doubly true! But it's a Christmas game and I feel like playing it again, so I am.

I love these beautiful tableaux of frozen Batviolence behind the menu by the way. Batman's so gritty in this one with his tactical Bat-armour and his permanent bad mood, that I keep expecting the camera to pan across blood and displaced teeth flying through the air.

This used to be the black sheep of the franchise, due to it not being developed by Rocksteady, and the bugs, and the fact that they prioritised releasing paid DLC instead of fixing them all, but I think Arkham Knight's claimed that position now (at least on PC). There's still a bit of an issue with the multiplayer, seeing as it was switched off forever earlier this month, but I didn't even know it had multiplayer, so that shows how much I care about that.

(Click on the images to view my original full size screenshots. DX11 mode, all settings on full... resolution at 1280x720).
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