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IKARI – yet another classic from the all time #1! Level crunching was so IKARI’s thing. I don’t know of any other group doing it, or if they did, they didn’t market it like IKARI. And then there’s the matter of Excel: he really had a knack for great intro design.
Yes, others did this to. Snacky of Genesis Project was the best of them (sorry… had to write this… 😉
A nice classic Intro. I remember having played quite a number of games with this one in front of them back in the days… 🙂
Hehehe, Good subject. Snacky did invented the IFFL technique (If I am not mistaken, and it was Antichrist’s idea for the name) but it was not used/improved as much by G*P as the other groups did. Among them – mighty Ikari 😉 ;P
“The term was to the best of my knowledge coined by Snacky when he released Another World in 1989 (or by OMG if you read the interview with Snacky). This was a version of IFFL version 1. It’s quite interesting that Gollum had used the same technique before, but just not given it any special name – see RoadBlasters from 1988. So Snacky didnt invent it – GP just coined the term.” Source: http://bergatrollet.se/blog/2020/02/the-obsolescence-of-iffl/ Also IFFL is file linking, not level crunching. Since files are written on disk using blocks, last block was pretty much never full. So if you… Read more »
Very interesting to read. Yes…things in time change.
How did level-crunching actually work? Was it just run length encoding (packing) or was it non-trivial compression (crunching)? I imagine the entire thing was useless without writing a custom loader which would depack or decrunch while loading, but that in turn implies major modifications to the original software, can you please shed some insight on the subject matter?
Sorry… I never was a cracker… I only have a rudimentary understanding of what those guys were doing… 😉 I was more interested in demo and graphics stuff… Here is a (really long) interview with Snacky/G*P where he also explains a bit of his IFFL-technique.
http://www.atlantis-prophecy.org/recollection/?load=interviews&id_interview=161
“A nice anecdote about one of my jewel cracks is Ballmania, a game from Amok and developed by a friend of mine, Oliver Malms also known as Scrap.
[…]
When I called Scrap and told him that he gets his game back as a single file including everything else he told me that this is not possible. Once he got the game however, he was impressed by the techniques that I used in order to optimize his game.”
Interesting interview. 🙂
Don’t remind me of that… I know, I was a horrible coder… 😉 And this Game was so bad, It should be erased from planet earth, so that no one will ever see it… But at least, I improved a little in the following years. 🙂
Don’t be so hard on yourself. You managed to release a game back in the days, which, in my book, is worth of respect.
Oh, even more than one. I fact enough to buy a (small) brand new car after a while… 😉 There were a lot of magazines back in the days, that bought nearly every crap 🙂 But Ballmania was really very, very, very shitty…
Excell left a cool note in the intro, just before the scrolltext. It reads – “Buzz off!” 🙂
Anyways, pitty the scroller speeds up by the end so much that it’s almost impossible to see the animated pacman chars.
Yup, that pacman is a very nice touch =). In other intros Excell used a bouncing ball instead =).
And stars, as in this one:
https://flashtro.com/ikari-total-eclipse/
Kind of his signature – animated chars and sprites behind the text.
Oh yesssss 😉 ! Great shuriken like rotations! I liked it very much, especially in this intro (I was in a happy possession of, back then ;)).
Yes, it was kinda his mark, I think as well. And the animated sprites behind the txt as well. There were other groups who had already used sprites behind the scrollers (Legend or Zoom, for example), but might be than Excell was the first who started to animate them.
That sprite animation and the colors he used, gave the intro a very fresh and original look, impo.
Hahaha “Buzz off”. I think I found it back in the days. Might be back in the early 90 while doodling in the memory of the first c64 emulators on the PeeCee, or while ripping the music for the very early HVSC back in the late 90s :).
Never submitted thou, due to lack of email address back then. Still have my dozens of old rips somewhere 😉
Here is the long awaited “Ikari intro” by TStorm (Thank you TStormDude for this GREAT remake ;).
This on is really great! A CLASS-ic!
And what a game it was released with!
Wrap time is here ;)!
thx TStorm for the remake. I like how title scrolls from left to right. I would have added two springs on the left and right borders.
Not too bad an intro, major release! Also fun to see the “rankings” scrollers that were common back then 😛
And the fun part is, IKARI was one of the rare groups that could get away with ranked greetings, since they were the ruling elite, and the groups in the greetings were elite too. Not many groups could allow themselves that luxury.