back to article Flashback: The Quest for Identity

Nobody wants to wake up in the wilderness with no memory of how they got there - though it sounds eerily reminiscent of a typical Saturday morning in Camden Town. Flashback: Quest for Identity screenshot Who are you? More to the point, who am I? But that's just what's happened to Conrad Hart - and he doesn't even have …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Thanks for the memories......

    I spent many an hour playing this on my Amiga 500, when I should have been completing coursework for my degree. Bearing in mind it is really just a fancy 2d platform game, it is nevertheless one of the most absorbing games I've ever played (perhaps even more absorbing than Mercenary).

    1. Jeremy 2

      Me too. Alas I don't think I ever got anywhere near completing it. It was way too tough for my 10-year old gaming brain...

  2. Tim Ling
    Gimp

    Awesome Game

    I played Flashback on the Amiga, and it was an awesome game with fantastic character animation and a great story. The sequence in the generator is still one of my fondest gaming memories. They released a sequel on the PSX which sucked though.

  3. Lottie

    Addictive as all hell

    I remember staying up 'til 6AM playing this on the Megadrive. My folks got very angry with me.

    What a game. The sequel Fade to Black was good too.

  4. Russ Tarbox
    Thumb Up

    I'd forgotten all about this

    I used to play the demo of this on my Acorn A3010 (it was on a cover disk - remember those?). The music used to suddenly kick in (as you mention) when something kicked off ... I remember it building the tension brilliantly.

    1. Andrew Garrard

      Another Acorn user

      Yes, I was going to say that the article missed the Acorn port. I've forgotten whether it was my A310, my A5000 or my RiscPC on which I played it, but it was a fine game. A little more obscure than I expected to see mentioned in this list, but I'm not complaining!

    2. heyrick Silver badge

      And yet another Acorn user ;-)

      I think games like this ought to be used as a benchmark for how to design a lasting game. It's not necessarily about fancy graphics (though I do enjoy Liberty City's sunsets), it is about a story you can be immersed in. In this, Flashback succeeds wonderfully.

  5. LuMan
    Thumb Up

    Utterly Brilliant

    I loved this on my old Miggy and played it to hell (and back). My mate had the MegaDrive version and I completed that as well (under a thinly-veiled guise of 'helping' him with it). The graphics, animation and use of sound were awesome in their day and there also a good story, too!! I was laid up with a bad back last year and couldn't move much. Within 10 minutes I had a MD emulator up and running with this on it and completed it again. Joy!

    There was a sequal, Fade To Black, which was OK - completed it on the PS, but Delphine also released another game in a similar style on the Miggy called 'onEscapee' which didn't do so well. Worth checking out for the completists among us, though.

  6. Greg J Preece
    IT Angle

    Both Excellent Games

    I have Another World Anniversary on PC - I'd love to see the HD version too. Flashback was the first of the pair that I played, and I really liked it (other than the annoying chirping sounds on the first level). Pity some of the SNES versions had a game-breaking bug at the start of the second area. It was basically a pit that you could jump on the Mega Drive, but not on SNES. But I have the MD version now, so that's definitely on my to-do list.

    1. Greg J Preece

      Icon

      I didn't mean to do that, apologies. It's right next to the submit button.

  7. SminkyBazzA
    Joke

    "Even amidst the running, jumping, climbing trees and putting on make-up [while you're up there]"

    One of Eddie Izzard's if I'm not mistaken, well done

  8. Smallbrainfield

    Wonderful game

    played through several times on the Mega Drive, then went and found a copy of Another World and played that to death as well. The graphics were pretty unique for the time and still stand out today. I think it was the fluid movement of the characters that made it also, the freaky aliens were cool as well.

  9. Herby

    One can go back even further...

    49 00796

    Play spot the computer.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    That reminds me....

    When will we see "Shadow of the Beast" in this series???

  11. Rob
    Go

    Love he memories...

    ... I think I ended up buying all of Delphine's games after playing Another World and Flashback.

    The Golden age of gaming for me usually involved something from either Delphine or Bullfrog, they usually produced games that used to really draw you in.

  12. Ross 7

    Is it bad that I seem to have played *all* of the games you've had in this section so far? Must be an age thing...

    Loved this one - the rotoscope gfx were sooooo fluid. I'd never seen anything like it before. Only annoying bit were the head zapping things. You spent most of your time ducking, rolling away, popping up and firing off a few rounds. Could he not aim upwards?!

  13. Daniel Buttery

    You forgot the bit

    about how you could go through walls. Once known, the game was never the same again....

  14. mark 63 Silver badge
    Coffee/keyboard

    great language

    you have an entertainning turn of phrase sir!

    urging him to get his ass to Mars New Washington.

    various aliens, robots and alien robots,

    amidst the running, jumping, climbing trees and putting on make-up, (thanks eddie)

    guys in purple capes informing us that all our base were belong to them.

    splodgy, squelchy sounds of aliens squidging about their home planet.

    ---------

    lol

  15. Alan Dougherty
    Thumb Up

    Gryzor

    Goddamn that game was good.. swapping from platfrom, to '3d' corridor levels, only to find that you got screwed anyway..

    I was so shocked, at 12 years of age, on my CPC6128, that I had to instantly start another game, just to see Earth explode again....

    Ahh good times :)

    Glad to see some current games don't always have happy outcomes for the player characters...

  16. A. Coatsworth Silver badge
    Happy

    What a great game!!

    As many have already said in the comments: Thanks for the memories!

    I played it on a Sega Genesis I bought with my brothers, in the mid 90's. We had to pool our savings and in the end got the console, 2 controllers and 5 o 6 games. Flashback was by far the best of them.

    At that time, I was on high school, and was just starting to learn English, so my level was bad, to say the least (not that it is stellar now...). I remember the struggle to understand the dialogs and the plot, with a dictionary by my side. In the end I and my brothers played it so many times we knew it by heart... but it was a great way to learn English

    Oh, and the phrase "you're too young to drink... beat it" the bartender says when you question him about the Replicants baffled us to no end. The expression "beat it" remained meaningless for us for years!

  17. Frank Bough
    Thumb Up

    Brilliant Game

    runs PERFECTLY under emulation on the iPhone.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      @Frank

      Is that on a Jailbroken phone or the Manomio version?

  18. Tasogare

    I seem to remember this was also available on the 3DO. I had it on that platform.

    It was excellent, though I do remember having some complaints about laggy controls.

  19. DragonKin37
    Thumb Up

    Ahh a great classic

    This game along with out of this world and Blackthrone have a special place in the halls of classic games. There were some control issue moments but that never stopped the game from making it un playable and for its time it was a breath of fresh air.

  20. dave.lawrence

    That was me!

    Acorn port? That was me! I was sent Amiga 68000 source code (with variable names and comments [such as they were] in French) and very little else! The whole thing had to be recoded into ARM. I was really on my own for much of the work trying to decipher strange routines and opaque data structures. I remember it being quite a challenge in places to fit it all in to the sparse memory of the time. The only thing I didn't like doing was the music and I ran out of time before getting it /just right/ (you can tell that the timings with some of the cinematics is a little off!).

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Spoiler alert

    They actually rotoscoped some fella fallin' 4 stores and grabbing on a ledge? A normal human would have their fingers ripped off and splatted.

    PS. Oh yes, you can do that in the last stage, when you lazy bum could skip some portion of the game finale run to beat the clock of the ticking bomb... IIRC. That elevator shaft still bring me fond memories of jumping into the void, predating Lara Croft neck-breaking experiences.

    BTW, Motorola 68000 was the chip inside Mega drive, so the porting was probably trivial, to and from it.

  22. acreda
    Megaphone

    Now that's a game to make a film out of, not DOOM!

    Placed on various School Acorns and my RISC PC :)

  23. Dan 55 Silver badge

    Never liked Flashback as much as Another World

    I was kind of expecting a sequel and it turned out it wasn't. It was also much harder than Flashback (I didn't get very far) and somehow not as quite as atmospheric, or maybe that was because I didn't get anywhere.

  24. Dave 129
    Thumb Up

    Flashback was awesome

    I first played it on the Megadrive and loved it! My mum still remembers the game because she loved the animation of the man - it made that much of an impression. I later played the PC version with the additional and longer cut-scenes and then tracked down a copy of Flashback CD which never did quite make it out on the MegaCD but some of the changes weren't so good.

    I used to have the sequel Fade to Black on PC but it disappeared and I never found it (found the box but not the CD). Never did finish that.

    A HD re-make would be awesome, as would a complete re-build - I think if done properly and carefully it could work really well as a third person action/adventure a'la Tombraider.

    Shame that Delphine disappeared like so many of the other great game devs of that time.

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