Fade to Black (PlayStation) Playthrough
156A playthrough of Electronic Arts' 1996 action game for the Sony PlayStation, Fade to Black.
Played through on the medium skill level.
I included a few extras after the ending. You can find a compilation of the FMV death scenes at 2:16:41, and the bad ending is shown at 2:18:07.
Fade to Black, originally released for Dos PCs in 1995, is the direct sequel to Delphine Software's 1992 best-seller, Flashback: The Quest for Identity ( • Flashback: The Quest for Identity (SN... ).
Following the destruction of the Morph's homeworld at the end of Flashback, Ellen Ripley Conrad Hart sets his shuttle adrift and places himself in cryostasis, hoping to evade his pursuers. However, fifty years later, he awakens to find himself surrounded by a Morph boarding party.
Conrad is taken to their penal colony on the moon, New Alcatraz, but soon after he arrives, he is contacted by members of a resistance faction. They explain that the Morphs have attacked Earth and are now in possession of a potent mind control weapon. It looks like it's up to Conrad to once again take out the trash in the name of humanity!
Like Flashback, Fade to Black is a "cinematic platformer" chock full of gunfire, computer terminals, and references to 80s action movies, and conceptually, the two games are very similar. But in practice, the shift from 2D to 3D was a complete game changer. The game looked amazing - arguably even more so than Flashback had three years prior - and the use of 3D gave everything a heightened sense of weight and scale. Given that Fade to Black comes from a time when 3D accelerators were not yet commonplace, and that it predates the first Tomb Raider by more than a year, I think it would be fair to say that it was ahead of its time.
Fade to Black was an ambitious pioneer that provided a tantalizing glimpse at the future of 3D games, but that was also its greatest weakness. There was no genre blueprint to work from, and that's made plain by the inherent clunkiness of the controls, the uncooperative camera, and the design of some of its puzzles, all of which were points of criticism leveled at the game when it first released.
Suffice it to say, Fade to Black has not aged well, but it's still quite playable, and even fun, if you can avoid judging it by the standards that you'd apply to a modern game. The PlayStation port is pretty solid, too, and it runs the game better than the average PC of the time could.
I, for one, prefer it to Flashback.
(Except for the flying vehicle sections. Those are truly, truly terrible.)
Does anyone else remember how the Dos version could bring even a mighty Pentium 75 or 90 to its knees in SVGA mode?
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