Flashback is a lot like a sci-fi Prince of Persia, only the controls don't make you want to throw yourself off a cliff. Poor Conrad takes a few blows to the head and rolls around more than a hedgehog, but he gets to bypass much of the game with his magical ability to walk through walls. That doesn't let him completely off the hook, though: He still has to hunt down the credits to buy his way to the second and third levels, and can't do the missions in level 2 out of order. Additionally, enemies have a nasty habit of hitting Conrad when he's trying to walk through a wall, so they have to be dealt with.
Emulator used: Gens v.9
Glitches:
- Invincibility: Some animations render me invincible. The policeman in level 2 doesn't hit me because of this.
- Walk through walls (confirmed Genesis version only): Stand right next to a wall, facing away from it. Hold A, tap away from the wall, then release A and hold the d-pad towards the wall as you're turning around. When you're done turning around, you'll be starting on running straight through the wall; at this point you can hold A again to continue running.
- Fun with walls: As much as it looks like it, the game is not set up like a grid of rooms. As a result, if I try to walk through a wall to a new screen that doesn't have a legitimate exit, either I get death by falling, wall-and-floorless rooms which lead directly to death by gravity, or in a couple rare cases, an error code which crashes the game. Inside a wall, movement is limited mostly to running and run-jumping, unless you're exiting said wall.
- I have stuff: If there's something I need in the next level and I don't have it going through levels, the game gives it to me. The ID card, the force field, and the teleporter all magically appear in my inventory even though I never pick them up.
- Gunplay: A force field will only absorb one shot, so in the case of the mutant at the start of level 2 I have to shoot twice; once to get rid of the shield, once to kill him. It's faster than waiting for the shield to disappear.
- Sit and deliver: For anything you would normally have to turn towards the middle to do (talk to people, flip switches, etc) you can do while crouching with no lag whatsoever. There are a couple instances where this doesn't apply, for whatever reason.
- Backwards walking: If I'm facing a wall and try to draw my gun, I'll take a step backwards first. I can then hit the button again to not draw my gun.
- Going up, the hard way: On level 2 of Death Tower, I start climbing up just as the little electric orb thingy hits me, and for whatever reason the game thinks I've already climbed up, so I get blasted onto the upper deck.
The game screen is divided into sixteen steps, so I don't have to do any pixel-perfect maneuvering. However, there are a lot of options for getting from point A to point B, so I wound up measuring the number of frames it takes to perform a majority of the moves in the game, and used that as a basis for planning the majority of my movement.
Bisqwit: Well explained enough :) Processing this movie.
