(If this is the highest rated I'd hate to see the lowest)
When I think of gaming during my childhood years I can't help but think of video game rentals. This is a mostly obsolete concept today, but I grew up during the video store's heyday. I feel like my family rented at least one game every week throughout the entire 1990s. I grew up in a town with about 10,000 people in it, but even in such a small place there were three or four very good video stores with a large selection of games. I played just about every game I could get my hands on too. There weren't too many kinds of games that I did not like. I was never a very harsh critic, so just about any game would get at least passable approval from my part. However, there was one game that I absolutely hated. It was a game that I played for about five seconds before it started to make me very angry. My dad and cousins tried to convince me that it wasn't so bad, but I didn't believe them. That game was Out of This World. Since then I have discovered that many people actually like this game. It is even thought of as a classic. I was always a little afraid to go near it though. I think I had to wait 25 years for the trauma to wear off before I could give it a reasonable chance. Well the time has finally come and I have played through the most hated game of my youth. How do I feel now that it's finished? I'm not really sure.
(Our hero)
If you are planning in playing this game just be warned. You will die. You will be shot, poisoned, drowned, beaten to a pulp, impaled on stalagmites, ripped apart by wild animals, and go splat on the ground potentially every ten seconds or so. Anything that moves on the screen that is not your character or his one companion must be stopped before it can kill you. Every hole you find is either horrible death or your only hope of escaping. There is really only one way to find out. You do have a gun, but shooting the many guards takes very careful planning, and you have to shoot just about all of them before you can move on. There are also places where you can miss vital cryptic operations that will make the game completely unwinnable so be careful. There is really no way to tell until it is too late, so I hope you've been writing down all those passwords. Does this experience sound like a fun way to spend a Friday night to you? No wonder I hated this game so much as a kid.
The gameplay reminds me of Prince of Persia without so much jumping and Oddworld without all the problem solving. You play as a regular person who ends up in a strange and deadly world. I found this to be very strange as a child. It was very confusing seeing a game character doing real world things like drinking a can of soda. Of course if you just press start you will miss the intro movie and end up in a deep pool of water that you have to swim out of before you die. This is about as odd a way to start a game as possible. The first section of the game starts out on the surface where your foes are deadly animals. You eventually run into one of the humanoid inhabitants of this world who, surprisingly enough, shoots you. Strangely you end up in a cage instead of a coffin and with the help of your buddy in the cage are able to slowly escape while experiencing a million annoying deaths. This is one of those games where every creature kills you unless it is vital to the plot that they don't. If they wanted you dead so much than why didn't they just kill you at the beginning of the game? It would have put us all out of our misery that much faster. Even near the game's climax you are falling to your potential death when one of the aliens decides to save you just so he can beat you to death. Why didn't he just let you fall? This game piles confusion upon confusion.
(Guards and prisoners are all identical. Why that's not confusing at all!)
I will say that this game has a very unique look for a Super Nintendo game. It has a very blocky early-90s computer look that reminds me of early concepts for virtual reality. It goes with a bright color scheme which I appreciate even though most of the game largely takes place in caverns and prisons. The only problem is that the blue and green interiors would sometimes make me think I was in a water filled room and about to drown. That's a reasonable assumption in this game. I hated the more realistic graphics as a kid, but now that's my favorite part of the whole game. Super Nintendo graphics have a timeless and unified feel to them for the most part. It doesn't matter if it's a game from 1991 or 1997. You see it and you instantly know it's SNES. Out of this World is one of the rare cases where you could see screenshots and not know what system it came from. It could just as easily be Jaguar or Sega CD. At least I should give the game a few points for that.
(Blue on blue with blue)
My own playthrough of this game was a mixed bag of excitement and frustration. The game plays as one long level, but there are checkpoints along the way, although you don't know where they are until you die and respawn. Some of these sections would involve obtuse puzzle solving while at the same time having to fight about a dozen guards in close combat. I remember some of these sections taking me thirty minutes or more. It is hard for me to feel good about myself when I'm looking at the same three or four screens over and over again. I got tired of the shooting parts very quickly because almost all of the targets are the same guard over and over again so the strategy never really changes. You have to make a shield, blow away their shield, and then shoot them. The only difficulty comes in the speed and timing. I got annoyed when I would complete some puzzle that took fifteen minutes and then get blown away by that guard again because I was a little bit too slow. I enjoyed the non shooting puzzles much better. I liked the part where I was rolling through tunnels and the swimming sections. Yes, this game had a swimming section that I actually enjoyed. The threat of drowning makes for some tense moments that give the game a much needed change in momentum. I will say that I enjoyed when I would finally figure out what I was doing and a whole section would come together, but this feeling was somewhat ruined by the knowledge that it might still take me a dozen attempts to get through a section without getting killed. Sadly, the bad seemed to outweigh the good in this one. I really can't say I had that much fun playing it, and the brief ending just left me feeling empty inside.
(These lasers don't kill you because of reasons)
As you can probably tell I'm not too keen on this game. I expected that due to its awkward gameplay it would have a somewhat mixed reception. However, it seems to have almost universal acclaim. It was well received when it came out, and people still have a high opinion of it now. My question is why? It seems to have every element that people don't like in other games. The gameplay is unfair and based mostly on trial and error. The controls are stiff and awkward. Why are A and X both run and shoot? Couldn't they pick one function for each button? All that does is lead to mistakenly shooting or running when you don't mean to. The graphics are nice, but they lead to more problems than anything else. I hate how sometimes gunshots are just background scenery and sometimes they are deadly. The puzzles are often headscratchers which are nearly impossible to solve without cheating. The ending is worse than an old static "The End" screen in an NES game. Any one of these problems would cause another game to get bad reviews, yet Out of This World has all of them. Why do people love it so much?
So if you both read my blog and enjoy this game, please let me know. What is it that makes you enjoy this one? It's a puzzle I have been trying to solve for the last 25 years. It is more difficult for me to understand than any of the puzzles in the game itself. What is it about this game that impresses people? Your insights would be appreciated, because I am totally lost.
No comments:
Post a Comment