The Gameroom

May 1998

Developed by Digital dialect, 1997

These games are usually as 2-dimensional in their content, as they appear on your monitor. The emphasis is on eye/hand co-ordination and no small amount of repetitive action. As a result, most platform games lack a central purpose other tan jumping up and down and throwing bananas at your PC controlled opponents.

Thankfully an offshoot style quickly developed that incorporated the essential elements of good story telling, characterisation and a sense of purpose lending a conscious sensibility to 2D games that gave them an extra dimension: entertainment. Unfortunately these platform adventures were few and far between, but include such classic titles as Prince of Persia (Jordan Mechner, the now aged Another World (Delphine) and my personal favourite oldie Flashback (Delphine). Not only are platform games of this variety few and far between, but there hasn't really been one for absolutely yonks.

Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee is a sumptuous graphic feast and as you'd expect the minimum system requirements to be in excess of a Pentium 120 with 16Mb RAM and at least a quad speed CD ROM. Even then you'll find your PC will struggle with some of the graphics its trying to throw up on the screen. People with faster machines in all departments will be rewarded with a surprisingly immersive adventure that demands attention.

Abe is the unlikely hero of this tale. He's a scrawny little blue Mudokon fella wearing naught but a loincloth. Aside from his psychic abilities, carries no weaponry and has just escaped from slavery at Rupture Farms — the "biggest meat processing plant on Oddworld.." where profits on their existing range of fast food meat products is beginning to slide and the decisions of the annual board meeting reveals the plan to transform the current batch of slaves into pie filling in order to compensate financial losses... Okay, so I'm not going into the story details because they're such a crucial part of the Oddworld gaming experience with surprises abounding and to give away plot details would spoil too much of the fun. I'm not that kind of guy. However, I must remark upon the animated cutscenes which the player is presented with upon completion of certain tasks.

These are superb and essential to propelling the story forward. The cutscenes aren't just tacked on to help fill out the CD. Just imagine a piece of high quality video animation that provides an informative narration focusing on the Abe character and then segues seamlessly into the gaming screen. You start playing in the highly detailed background that was effectively the final frame of that animation. Gratefully these cutscenes don't interfere with the pace of the game, provide scene setting and plot development and are frequent without being dominating. It is a difficult but well-achieved balance.

The interface for the game is the standard cursor keys and a dozen or so miscellaneous keys including the numericals so, as is typical of platform games, is easy to learn and control. On screen messages early in the game make learning it a breeze. Sound effects match the visuals for quality as you'd expect. Abe has a small vocabulary controllable by the player which is used to assist in puzzle solving. Just don't forget to instruct escaping slaves to ‘wait' at crucial points or they'll stumble into traps that Abe easily avoids and become instant Mudokon hamburger.

The only true failing point is that it lacks any variations in difficulty level. There is no implementation of Pathetically Easy, Easy, Normal, Hard, Mega Hard or Ultra Friggin' Super Human or any way to modify the game to suit your skill level. You just have to cope with what's been given to you.

Abe's Oddysee is the first of five proposed titles under the Oddworld inhabitants banner. Four sequels in the pipeline sounds somewhat extravagantly optimistic but it seems there has been considerable thought on the part of the developer as to the content of each new title. Future episodes will feature new characters in widely differing circumstances hopefully making each Oddworld title a fresh experience rather than falling to the trap of releasing and regurgitating a prior success with overly familiar faces.

Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee takes an anachronistic adventure platform game and breathes fresh life into it. Mario, Sonic and Rayman are crashing bores by comparison, so stand aside, you three, Abe's passing through to deliver the meat.