Flashback

If you come across an Another World review, you will probably find a Flashback review somewhere nearby. It's actually pretty funny how people seem to instictively associate these two games. I remember walking to my hometown's only game store about fifteen years ago and asking the man behind the counter if he knew anything about Another World 2 (I'd read about the then-upcoming sequel in a magazine). He replied with "Of course, we have it right here" and showed me Flashback. By that time, I had already played Flashback for months, so I was kind enough to tell the guy "that's not quite what I meant, sir" and leave the premises. (a ten-year-old kid laughing at an thirty-year-old bald guy would be a little inappropriate and that was the ONLY game store in my town, I did want to go back there someday).

The truth is, that, if you think about it, these two games don't have quite so much in common as people say. The story is again science-fiction, but this time we deal with distant future, interplanetary travel, teleports, aliens, high-tech devices and so on. The protagonist actually SPEAKS, as most of the NPC's do. The gameplay is more platform-based as on each screen we have three levels which are constant. We have a much wider array of movements which are always executable, unlike Another World, where most of them were trigger-based (they worked in specific locations, under specific circumstances). And we have an inventory screen.

The game was a huge success (the most successful French game ever) and on the Internet you could probably find hundreds if not thousands of reviews, so I'll just skip the casual stuff and tell you why *I* like this game a lot. First of all, I like games which mix the genres. Take a shooter, take an adventure (with usable items, puzzles, dialogues etc), pour a good or even decent enough story all over it and you got me. Why oh why weren't there more games like that? I was able to find just one, and that's onEscapee (maybe I'll write something about it in the future) but even in spite of the remarkably good graphics and the great music (I especially like the intro song, but, really, the guy might have used some singing lessons) the game wasn't even remotely as good as it's two grand predecessors.
And what about today? Today we have sandbox games, which I enjoy a lot, large RPG-FPSes like Mass Effect, which I enjoy a lot as well and unconventional games like Omikron or Fahrenheit (also known as Indigo Prophecy) which I simply adore (Okay, okay they screwed up the shooting and fighting sequences in Omikron, but damn it, at least they tried!) The world of today's games is much richer than it used to be fifteen years ago and as everyone tries to make their games more realistic, they throw in elements from different genres every now and again. The golden line of ultimate balance between thinking and fighting is really thin however, and one can easily see not a lot of games in the history have achieved that level. Many don't even try. What a shame.

Alright, back to Earth...
The direct sequel, Fade to Black, disappointed me a little. The controls were a little awkward - especially aiming - the graphics were... Let's just say the game was a fully 3D Third-Person-Shooter and the year was 1995, the glorious Doom-clone era. There were virtually no textures (let alone low-res ;-P). The game turned out anything but successful, simply because everyone felt this was NOT Flashback.

A similar thing occurred with the so-called CD versions of the original game (these include DOS-CD, Sega CD, CD-i, Jaguar and probably 3DO ports) which featured new music, dialogues read by actors (pretty badly, I might add) and, above all, the cutscenes remade into 3D. If you look at some screenshots of those ports, you'll see what I mean. The colors are all wrong, completely different from what we see during the actual gameplay, the scenes are considerably shorter (for the sake of disk space, I guess) and therefore more chaotic, finally, in some cases their sci-fi action style manage to completely alter the game's atmosphere. Some people might have liked it, I believe, but despite the obvious eye-candy features of the CDs, most people, including Yours Truly, prefer the original.

One last thing...
There was an attempt to revive the franchise on portable systems, but I'm actually glad it failed. Just take a look.