Flashback: Quest for Identity can easily be considered one of the best platform games ever made. Following the initial success of the 1992 release, in 1995 Delphine has released an enchanced CD version featuring new cinematics with better music and digitized speech.
When I finally obtained a copy I wasn't sure what to expect, really.
The custcenes are good indeed. Instead of the vector graphics and subtitles of the floppy version, here we get high quality rendered scenes with enchanced audio and digitized speech.
Altough by today's standards, the 3d graphics used in the cinematics are nothing incredible, they still look pretty darn good. It also seems that either the background music has been re-recorded in a waveform standard or this version of the game uses software rather then hardware synthesis. Whichever is the case, the music will sound exactly the same on any real or emulated audio hardware - unlike the floppy version, where different sound hardware produced varied music quality.
Digitized speech is decent, altough I'd risk saying that removing the subtitles was a bad idea - players with little knowledge of spoken English might have problems with understanding what is exactly happening.
Also, all of the vehicles and devices in the animations have been redesigned and the script slightly altered in a few places - so don't expect the exact same scene just with improved graphics.
Unfortunately, the change of graphics and music has taken away the feel of the original cinematics, and this is most noticeable in the outro scene - with the changed music, it doesn't hold a candle to the breath-taking awesomeness of the floppy version outro.
Also, the change of cinematics somewhat breaks the player's immersion into the fictional world of the game - a problem often encountered when the game engine and cinematics have radically different feel and quality.
As to the gameplay itself, it's a little disappointment.
Apart from fixing a particular clipping bug (that enabled the player to pass through most of the walls, if they ran away from the wall and immediately walked back), the actual game has not changed one jot, however.
Not only are the levels exactly the same (one would think that an "Enchanced CD-ROM" version would contain a minimum of one extra level or at least add new stuff to the existing ones), but also the ingame sounds have not been replaced either (they still sound like they play at 11 kHz or lower), and the digitized sound so abundant in the cinematics has not been used in in-game discussions either (which seems a bit surprising, at least).
Despite all that, it's not any worse then the original version, and people who have played Flashback before and enjoyed it will not any less enjoy replaying the game to see the new cinematics - especially when all the level passwords have been changed.
The floppy original has 5/5 in my book, but the CD version just doesn't live up to being called "Enchanced" version... Delphine could (and should) have done a lot more then just revamping the cinematics. For that reason and for killing the outro sequence, I cannot help but drop the score by two points.
Technical notes:
1. Copy protection from the original is nonexistent in this version. Thus no crack or copy protection codes are required.
2. In DosBox, the cinematics experience graphic glitches if the graphics output is set to "surface". The nature of the glitches is exactly the same as if you tried to play them on a GPU with an insufficient amount of RAM. Changing the "output" setting in dosbox.conf to "overlay" or "ddraw" solves the problem.