Les cercles du pouvoir from '94. The Wikipedia article says a lot of stuff I didn’t know.
This album was a major influence on the 1997 Luc Besson film The Fifth Element . Jean-Claude Mézières was contracted in 1991 to provide concept art for the film. He produced concepts for the futuristic New York, with its flying cars, as well as the Fhloston Paradise space-liner. When the production on the film was suspended in 1993, Besson turned to making the film Léon and Mézières returned to Valérian where he reworked several of the concepts he had been working on into The Circles of Power — most notably the flying taxi cabs. When the album was finished in 1994, Mézières sent a copy to Besson who was so taken with the cab-driving character of S’Traks that he rewrote the script of The Fifth Element , changing the occupation of protagonist Korben Dallas from a worker in a rocketship factory to cab driver.[1] The film resumed production in 1996 and was released in 1997.
Quackshot on the Sega Megadrive. It features some non-lineair gameplay as you can travel around the world to find “keys” to unlock “doors” (metaphorically speaking) in any order you like. And there is even a Indy-like fly line on a world map.
The screenshot is from near the end of the game, which is pretty hard. This scene involves jumping in the air and landing on platforms that appear just as you are at your summit. Or missing them.
Whoever said pixel hunting is unfair hasn’t played (or finished) this game!
It even has mazes!
That´s really interesting especially the last part since it only recently dawned on me that the futuristic cab driver who takes in a red headed lady in distress is also very similar to the “Harry Canyon” segment of the animated movie Heavy Metal (also obviously heavily influenced by Moebius).
The graphics look very Sierra-like but without dead-ends and abundance of deaths, I definitely have to play it!
I don’t even know why people bother with realistic graphics at all.
Recently I tried the re-release of Mafia 1. Great graphics, but in most other aspects it’s either slightly worse or worse than the original. Imagine what you could do with all the energy spend on the graphics…
I don’t know if this is just nostalgia but what I liked about DOS-games from an era with simpler graphics (e.g. EGA) were that backgrounds often were black, especially in caves or at night. You could imagine yourself the horrors awaiting you in the darkness.
In more modern games everything is shown, no mystery, less adventure to expect etc.
Embracelet has been “just” released… (OK it was one month ago, I’m quite busy lately).
I’ve been following the development for a while. It’s from Machineboy, the maker of Milkmaid of the Milky Way (currently on sale btw.).
Embracelet is avaible on Steam (Windows only) and Switch.
No DRM-free version yet though.
I saw one reviewer recommending playing with controller.