Fade to Black , apart from being a great Metallica song from 1984, is also the name that received the first official sequel to the legendary 1992 Flashback. It came out three years later, drawing attention for the radical change in its perspective .
From being considered the spiritual successor to an icon like Another World, also from Delphine Software , the rise of 3D caused Conrad Hart’s second adventure to take on a totally different look. And this has caused a huge retro-break in the long run, by aging fatally at the graphical and playable level.
Escaping New Alcatraz in a 3D world
Set 50 years after the first Flashback , here Conrad woke up from a slumber seeing again the beings whose planet he had destroyed in the first adventure. Yes, those aliens nicknamed Morphs, with the appearance of mutant longhands and the ability to mimic themselves in human appearance to deceive us, caught us by surprise, dragging us to the New Alcatraz of the Moon .
Luckily, an ally, named John O’Conner, emerged from this prison, who facilitated our escape with a PDA to communicate with him and open the cell door, apart from a pistol. However, the feeling of being in a different game was more than palpable, going from a side scrolling game to one within a three-dimensional world, ironically flatter in its verticality .
Just compare the image above with the video below …
From that jungle environment with which Flashback started , we move to a completely closed and less showy environment in this sequel. Luckily, yes, the futuristic prison (year 2190, by the way) was just one of the many scenarios to visit, although graphically there was a significant downturn if we compared the cinematics of its introduction scene with those of the game itself in action.
Today his Gouraud shaded polygons are very minimalist. But is that the choice of a view from the shoulder was not something that worked perfectly, making waters with the aim at the time of shooting, with Conrad’s own head obstructing the vision . It was not even a satisfactory mechanic with the control because of how slow the movement was if we wanted to dodge by side steps or when ducking.
Fade to Black has not known how to age well at all
The Flashback essence that so captivated us in 1992 , was gradually fading. That measured control, heir to Jordan Mechner’s Prince of Persia, was complicated here with an unusual clumsiness and slowness, partly typical of a 3D world that would reach its zenith the following year with Super Mario 64. It is that there is an abyss if we compare both works. And only a year separates them!
Of course, the design of its rooms did not help, with great similarity between all those in the same region. And it is that from the initial prison, the most austere of all, we went to others with more color, but the same pattern: an alien ship, a temple … The problem is that it became a more corridor game in which everything is it summed up solving puzzles by stepping on certain tiles or activating certain mechanisms by hand, while eliminating the presence of enemies in a game of “let’s see who shoots faster.” And the jump? Here it was relegated only to prevent us from stepping on some trap tile. He was quite orphaned.
I still can’t explain why a certain magazine in our country gave the PlayStation version of Fade to Black (which debuted in 1996, a year after MS-DOS) better than the first Resident Evil, because in its day I it seemed very inferior and replaying it now shows that it has aged fatally. Like the old man we have to escort in one of the phases of history … Or, worse if possible, in a section in which we control a ship that does not stop bouncing. Very irritating .
That there is going to be a sequel to Flashback, is something that undoubtedly makes us happy, because everything seems to indicate that Microids will bet on the same style of the 1992 classic, also having Paul Cuisset himself, creator of the saga, as supervisor . Although this also invites us to be cautious, because it not only worked on the “first” sequel from 1995, but also on the failed Flashback reboot in 2013. At worst, we have the promising Lunark.
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