I Suppose the Time Has Come

[KXXX]

It's funny... I never thought I'd be a comic book fan. When I was probably 7 or 8 my old man picked up a stack of plastic-wrapped comics at BJ's (a wholesale club akin to Costco, Sam's Club, etc.) for who knows how much. I flipped through them a couple times. One that stands out now was an issue of Superman where he's basically floating in space and talking to some giant *SQUEE* made of stars named Kismet. Whole lot of nothing exciting happening there. I remember some of the advertisements clearly now because I see them in the 1992 Valiant stuff. If only I knew then how close I was. Those comics are long gone; there was nothing there that interested me.

Fast forward some years and I'm a teenager with some cash in his pocket. I'm standing in this weird country store down the street from my dad's house, looking to spend some of it on something remotely interesting. I see a plastic-wrapped stack of comics and decide to buy it. There was some Image in there and at least one Valiant which stuck out: a Turok book. This stuck out because at this point I owned at least the first Turok game, if not the second, and loved the hell out of it. So I bought them. I read the issue and wasn't particularly enthralled. Turok and this Captain Red guy weren't as exciting as the game. All those books are long gone as well.

Fast forward just a little bit more and I'm 19 or 20 and I'm standing at a game shop with some cash in my pocket. I'm looking at the used Nintendo 64 games. I usually never buy used games without a box and Instruction Manual (I'm very OCD about my game collection), but seeing one cartridge in particular for the umpteenth time and thinking it at least looked cool on the label was enough to say screw it. I paid probably $10 for it.

That game was Shadowman.

So I played it. I still love the *SQUEE* out of that game. The storyline, to this day, is one of the best things I have ever experienced. It's better than anything in Vol. 3 and anything I've read in 1 or 2. It was about this time that I was really experiencing the internet (this was 2003 or 2004) and habitually researching things for fun. It was this that led me to discover that Shadowman was based on a comic book property. I'd played the Turok games and understood that they too were based upon a comic, but the stories there never really moved me as much as Shadowman. I had to see what this Shadowman was all about.

Now, I can't remember what my first Valiant book was, or where I bought it or any of those warm and fuzzy facts you guys enjoy sharing. All I know is that at some point after getting my first few books (it was likely around this time that I first started ghosting this site... I've been here in spirit a LONG time) something happened. I'm fairly certain that this something had something to do with Unity and the realization that all these titles intersected at various points.

This something manifested itself in the form of me driving to every damn comic shop I could find in MA and ripping piles of anything with a Valiant logo out of bins and boxes. Sometime during this flurry I stopped into what is now my current LCS, New England Comics (home of The Tick!), and ripping through their boxes. I distinctly remember finding my first (of too many) Secret Weapons #1. I got my first long box and put it together completely wrong, with the inside tabs on the outside. I wrapped it in duct tape to keep it together.

I filled in a lot of the middle of Valiant during this time, as well as a complete A&A run and most of the X-O issues. I moved out of my mom's house about a year later, and the comics got put in storage for a long time. They went largely ignored for three apartments, several girlfriends and a handful of jobs. At some point early last year (maybe even longer) I googled 'Valiant Comics' and saw a page set up heralding their eventual return. Since then I am now a weekly customer at my LCS, a variant hog and a collector hoping to find and bind all of VH1.

Oh... adn I bought a Dreamcast to play the slightly better version of Shadowman

[caniac]

Thanks for sharing bro!

[betterthanezra]

Oh... adn I bought a Dreamcast to play the slightly better version of Shadowman

One of my favorite games for that system.

-Brian

[KXXX]

Oh... adn I bought a Dreamcast to play the slightly better version of Shadowman

One of my favorite games for that system.

-Brian

So I'm sure you're well aware of the 'play as Bloodshot' cheat code. Made zero sense until I started reading the books!

[Daniel Jackson]

Loved the Shadowman game too. The atmosphere and music really helped to set the mood. The voice work and story were top notch as well.

[MarkRoseHFX]

I've never played any of the games, now I really wanna check that one out.

[grendeljd]

Cool story, dude. I've always been curious about the Shadowman game... I wonder if it would still be a good game experienced for the first time now, with games having come so far since then.

[KXXX]

It's amazing story-wise and still relatively playable. It's a little 'blocky' control-wise (much like the old Tomb Raider games), which makes some of the sections a bit of a pain. It's Acclaim, so you can imagine bland textures abound, but in the case of Deadside that actually really works out. There are some interesting dynamics that aren't original, but still very interesting in their execution. Mike in the world of the living uses completely different weapons and I believe he's more vulnerable to certain things. In Deadside he gets to use all the cool weapons. The enemies are pretty scary Deadside, but don't expect them to look super detailed. It's moody, it's creepy and it's downright scary at times. The gameplay isn't spectacular but it gets the job done. The story is what drives this game and it's incredible to say the least. Traveling between worlds is great, although there's much more to Deadside than Live.

Check it out on Dreamcast or PC if possible, N64 is solid but the PS1 version is to be avoided at all costs.