Well here we are again with another boring idea (or rather an experiment) from me.

Story
The story behind this idea is rather bizarre, but I'll tell the tale anyway. It all started a while back when I was messing around with jj2, trying to get it to work in multiplayer using resolutions 800*600 and beyond. Most of the time I got it working in the main menu, but the game crashed afterwards when I attempted to join a server. By poking the graphics settings a bit I managed to join one server at some point, but the problem was that the whole screen was almost entirely black. The tiles didn't show up at all, but my character, the events, gunfire and the hud were still fully visible. I thought the server was hosting a black level, so I asked around a bit and people told me there is likely something wrong with my display as they could fully see the tiles/level without a problem. I played with my GFX settings a bit more and turned off MMX. Suddenly all tiles became visible again and I realized the server was hosting Battle1. At that point a light bulb lit above my head.

The idea
I'm guessing you're already getting the idea behind all this. I thought the idea of playig Battle1 in black would be something interesting to try out. So I made my own black versions of the tileset and applied it to B1 (and later B2/B3). I used the original tileset mask and image which were extracted from the J2T's with Neobeo's tileset extractor. The levels inside this pack are basically unedited versions of B1* (bubbles removed), B2 and B3 with the exception that the whole levels are completely black. Hence its name - Blackout. This way you cannot see the level and you have to rely on your own knowledge of the level layout and whatever visible events to navigate. Since most of the battle levels are well overplayed, it should not be a problem for people to play these. The darkness adds an interesting new element to the gameplay. While I tested the levels online some people were already impressed by the idea. I thought I'd make this widely available and see what the community has to say about this. The idea is rather an experiment at this stage and I probably *could* modify a few things so comments are welcome.

Change: I made the dest blocks visible and I have no idea how to make the pinball use proper colors :s

Screenshots


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~ Overlord