Flashback is Back!!

A year ago I recorded a full playthrough of the old game Flashback, of which I'm fond of to this day. I had initially uploaded the videos to the host Vimeo but sadly they changed their policy a few months ago and deleted all derivative game related media. My friend Sylpher had a copy of the videos so they were salvaged and have now been uploaded to a new host, Viddler, which is decidedly more lax in its policy with videogame-related media (also has a neat full-screen mode). You can go see the whole playthrough over here.

Also, once the comic is finished I might work the above quick pencil drawing into a digital painting. I'm not much for fan-art and shit like that, but I love Flashback very much.

If I ever do another detailed playthrough, it'll probably be for another mega drive game, Shinobi 3.

Also hey, new header for the blog! In a ZX time a man-machine's gotta do what a man-machine's gotta do.

New pages every Monday, random stuff in between, as usual.

-Helm
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ZX page 12: Hyper Back-alley Brawler II CE, to be exact

The fires are out, the house escaped (barely) and the political fallout is well underway. The destruction was very extensive, but in purely ecological terms and in houses and livelihoods lost. What will this all mean and whether people will stop trying to figure that out once somebody explains it away for them (as per usual) one can only hope against but we'll just have to see.

But how about a comic, right? Here's some thoughts on the comic, on this comic blog.

That tree in panel 2 came out pretty much procedurally, if you'd believe it.

Anybody notice the Space Invader bandanna? ZX's not playing our side, if you know what I mean.

About clipping through stuff in videogames. I've been talking with Graham Lackey for a few years how somebody's got to make a live action short film full of 'early 3d' tropes and bugs like say, people talking without their mouths moving, or holding something with a hand that is just all the fingers glued together in a karate arm form and the item just glued on the open palm, or, of course, glitching out in geometry all over the place, noclipping. Dudes bunnyhopping to get somewhere faster, you know what I mean. Somebody will do this eventually, and I'll know it was our idea first!

ZX wears shorts out of courtesy.

Really not much theory to talk about this page, I think the technique is pretty straightforward if you've been attentive to how I use rendering to convey mood. It'll be interesting to see the whole comic from beginning to end, I'm starting to be hopeful of that day, since I'm on page 20 now and the comic'll be about 35-40 pages, so I'm past the point of no return now. Keep reading, keep commenting and keep trying.

Also, this summer I conquered Neapoli for the second time. It was a great time, I'm sure we'll go there again.

-Helm
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