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Jan 12th, 2007 at 00:47:12 - Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus (PC) |
I started playing again today with the intention of figuring out how to rescue those five blind Mudokons I'd been struggling last time, but after twenty minutes of getting ground up and wandering around, I simply couldn't figure it out and decided it was time to move on. Oh, well. At least I didn't outright kill them.
I got killed a lot in Mine 5 because of the motion sensors setting off the alarms, so I got in the habit of Quicksaving after every step I took, just in case. Disarming the explosives was pretty easy--it's easier to do it by sound than by sight since every three beats is when it's safe to turn them off anyway. After being shot or blown up a couple of times (I liked this mine because it was challenging enough to be intriguing but not so challenging as to make me want to bash my head against the wall), I finally made it to the mine car and got in and started wreaking havoc. At this point, however, I didn't know how to get out of the car--either through neglecting to read the little info scroll or just because I didn't realize--and ended up killing at least three Mudokons accidentally. Oops. I didn't want this to mar my record, so I eventually figured out how to escape the mine car and got myself shot so I went back to my last Quicksave. This time I got farther without killing any Mudokons before quitting to go to dinner.
One thing that really stood out to me this time while I was playing was the importance of sound in the game--I noted in my last log how useful the speaking is within the gameplay, but the little things in the background noise (mine noises and whatnot in this level) really add to the atmosphere of the gameplay. The tense moments in the game when Sligs or Slogs are alerted to your presence are accompanied by appropriate music that really heightens the anxiety of the situation; I found myself really getting too much into the game and having to pause and minimize it for a moment so I could distance myself from it. Abe's Exoddus is, if nothing else, really effective at sucking one into the gameplay and making one "be" Abe.
The point I stopped at had me a little stumped, because I couldn't figure out a way to kill the Slig and get out of the mine car without killing the Mudokon present, so I'll have to work that out next time. (That, or try and finally interpret one of those internet walkthroughs for myself.)
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Jan 11th, 2007 at 18:39:00 - Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus (PC) |
Although I've been quite fond of video games all my life, I've never owned very many myself. The family Dreamcast and N64 are both in my brother's eternal possession, along with most of my game choices, and I rarely remember to buy PC or GameBoy games for myself when out and about, so for this assignment I was left with a grand total of three choices: PokeMon Blue for GameBoy, or Black & White or Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus for PC. Having played the first two over the summer, I opted for Oddworld, which I've owned for some years but have never actually played all the way through, despite it being a very entertaining game. (I have the attention span of a salt shaker, so I guess this isn't too surprising.)
Upon restarting Oddworld, I was immediately engaged by the story once again; despite having never played the first Oddworld game (of which this is a continuation), I still found the plot easy enough to follow. The opening cinematic scenes are animated very well for a game that's almost ten years old, and I find them just as appealing as I did back when I first bought it. Okay, so the bad guys, the Glukkons, have enslaved the generally good guys, the Mudokons, and are using them to mine old Mudokon burial grounds so they can make SoulStorm Brew with the exhumed bones. GASP SHOCK HORROR. I get to control Abe, the protagonist, and run around rescuing my enslaved bretheren from the clutches of evil and ultimately saving the day. I've always wanted to be a hero.
After all of the cutscene exposition business, I got to start playing. The game's set up so the player gets to learn how to work all the controls and make Abe do what is necessary, like running or sneaking or crouching and doing rolls. None of it's very complicated, just Shift+right arrow key or Spacebar or whatnot--I remembered it all pretty well from previous plays, and if I needed to refresh myself for a moment, I could just pause the game and consult the little booklet again. I also got to learn how to make Abe speak. Each number key makes him say something that helps the player to rescue fellow Mudokons, so with some experimentation you learn how to say such things as "hello," "follow me," and "wait." This last one is particularly useful when dealing with blind Mudokons that will heedlessly walk in the direction of Abe's voice (potentially to their doom) unless the player directs them otherwise. It's all very nifty and doesn't take long to grasp.
Through my first bout of gameplay I got about as far as I had during previous sessions; by now, though, I've learned to desensitize myself somewhat to game violence, so I didn't flinch anymore when I accidentally got Abe ground up by by a bone drill. You have unlimited lives and time for any given section of the game, so a lot of learning how to play is based on trial-and-error and not being afraid to make mistakes and kill Abe in the process. (Quicksaving is quite useful to this end so the player can restart in the same place over and over until they find a way not to get killed--but beware of closing the game without remembering to save for real.) After a few tries I managed to get down the rhythm of a particularly difficult pair of crossed-path bone drills and passed them by without getting cut into bite-size pieces. A lot of it's really about timing--with the bone drills and with sneaking by Sligs when they aren't looking--so once I got my timing down I started going through mines faster and more efficiently. It's difficult to save all the Mudokon slaves in any given mine because there are (at least, according to any of several game walkthroughs I looked at on the web) a lot of secret ways to find extra slaves and lead them to freedom, which I've never been particularly good at, so I more or less saved the ones that were convenient to get to and figured that was good enough for what's essentially my first run. (I don't really count my previous plays because I always chickened out and quit after the first few mines, and that was so long ago anyway that a lot if it's faded from memory.)
I got slightly stuck at one section where you have to use a succession of dumbwaiter-like setups to lower yourself down several stories while being persued by Slogs and Sloggies (weird little two-legged eyeless things that like to chew Abe up if they get the chance)--once again, it mostly came down to timing and zapping the Slogs with electricity before they could kill me. (I got killed plenty of times before I got the combination of run-that-way and pull-the-lever right so as not to be mauled.)
I ended up quitting in frustration after about an hour, though; I discovered a small gaggle of blind Mudokons to rescue, but despite all my efforts I couldn't divise a way to lead them out of their area and over to a bird portal without getting crunched up by one particular bone drill that apparently had no on/off switch like most had previously. The walkthroughs I looked up in frustration were too confusing to be able to properly understand, and none of my experiments seemed to be leading anywhere. I suppose I could just go down and go to the next mine and leave these blind Mudokons to rot, but somehow I just put too much effort into trying to figure this out to be able to do that. Admittedly, it IS quite rewarding to be able to figure a difficult bit of gameplay out on one's own without being spoon-fed what to do by a tutorial or a walkthrough, but when I quit I was just plain stumped. We'll see how the next session goes.
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