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Flashback iPhone draws early user criticisms - is it how we remember?

Or is it time to flashback to the drawing board

Flashback iPhone draws early user criticisms - is it how we remember?

Being as the Pocket Gamer team are all a bunch of sad, middle-aging gamers who (deliberately) don’t get out much, we love to reminisce about our days as sad, young gamers who didn’t get out much.

So, as you can imagine, there were lots of girly screams of excitement when Rob spotted the Amiga classic Flashback had been ported to the iPhone.

Pocket Gamer reader NewJorg made us stop in our celebratory tracks, however, when he pointed out that Flashback might not be the direct bus ticket to Memory Lane that we’d hoped.

The diminutive use of the iPhone’s screen, coupled with some irksome control issues, suggest this isn’t so much a conversion of the game itself, as a conversion of a previously released (freeware) REminiscence engine - a cross-platform rewrite of Delphine Software’s original game engine.

With REminiscence, however, you needed your own ROMs, which got around the copyright issue. Flashback might well be abandonware by now (if there really is such a thing), and the iPhone version does refer to itself as a ‘player’ and requires a further in-game download after installation (possibly of the game ROM, as Apple probably wouldn’t be too happy about approving code from the original Amiga game), suggesting this is actually a port of REminiscence.

Other reports from players are saying they’re getting the hang of the unusual controls as the game progresses, so if you snapped up this retro treat, let us know your initial thoughts on its faithfulness to the Amiga classic.

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Spanner Spencer
Spanner Spencer
Yes. Spanner's his real name, and he's already heard that joke you just thought of. Although Spanner's not very good, he's quite fast, and that seems to be enough to keep him in a regular supply of free games and away from the depressing world of real work.