ABOUT


Thanks must go to these 'friendly figures' for their support:

Keith 'Dastardly' Hollis, Kevin 'Jorpho' Anderson, Jean-François 'Jeff' Fabre, John Fairhall,
T.R. 'Wanderer' Schmidt, Sebastian 'Gene' Eichholz, 'Muzkat', Maarten Martens

Why these pages? (December 2001)

Well, web shrines and tribute pages dedicated to classic games and/or to their makers seem to have sprung up like mushrooms recently, so why not do something about Gods and Cadaver, as those were really good games?

But that's not the actual reason why I'm doing this and especially not in this extent that I'm doing it.

Everything started in the beginning of 1997, when the "retro gaming hype" was just about to begin because of the increasing number of emulators. Back in those days, I was playing Gods on the Sega Genesis emulator Genecyst, because I only knew this game from the Amiga and I was curious about the "gaming feel" on a Megadrive. Genecyst had an option to create screenshots from the game, which I assembled together afterwards, thus building up a full image of the first level using 'Photo Paint'. Thus, I was able to view an entire level in the same way the developers that created the game could view it, and I wasn't limited to some tiny screen cuts. This fascinated me a lot, and it encouraged me to create maps of other games like The Chaos Engine.

Then I made a break for a little while, and at the end of 2000, I was stumbling on this topic again and on my old maps I had created back then. With a spoonful of motivation from the outside, and a little webspace which I had no other reasonable use for anyway, I started to rework the maps in the context of a full solution. There was hardly any interest of people for the stand-alone maps either, so I played Gods until the end of the game, compared my gaming experiences to other solutions publicly available and wrote lots of text about it. In any case, it was not the full solution that was the actual purpose of the experience, because there were already several solutions available to Gods (and Cadaver) and also in various forms.

However, Cadaver is one of the games having an isometric view! This is what makes an ordinary map made from screenshots virtually impossible. Just because of personal interest, I tried to draw maps from half-transparent screenshots anyway, but their purpose was only decorative, not practical at all. Nevertheless, I did still have those hundreds of Cadaver screenshots (and the game is very difficult without help in orientating), so I started another full solution of Cadaver which permits the player to view any room, without having to play for a long time, making relations in gameplay and level construction much easier to comprehend.

Thus, these Web Shrines are nothing but a product of my interest and why shouldn't I offer the opportunity to other people so they can see these games in a different light? So I used a lot of the material from the screenshots to design those pages and even some other stuff like scans, demo versions and tools, so voilá, here's the result.