Munch’s Oddysee for GBA
While searching for information about Elisabeth Lutyens for my music homework, I was delighted to discover that AMG, the All Music Guide, actually stands for ‘All Media Guide’, and that it has sections on movies and games as well. I browsed through every Crash Bandicoot game I knew, noting with interest the place has box art and a video of Crash Nitro Kart—I will have to head over to Crash Place to let them know, later—but didn’t find anything interesting about Oddworld. That, however, reminded me that I was going to go over to gamefaqs.com to look for a walkthrough for the new game—that would hopefully provide any new information this game is going to offer, such as information about the Evenwurst Weiner Factory mentioned in the Dear Alf section of Oddworld.com’s October updates. As it happened, there’s no walkthrough yet, but I did look through the board and find some interesting posts.
Firstly, people who have played this game are totally unimpresed. And, as you’d expect, it being a highly public board, they’re flaming it, saying things like “I’m saving your money!” and other ridiculously untempered statements. One person mentioned that the game consists almost entirely of collect “green things called spooce” as if this was somehow remotely interesting news. Surely every true Oddworld fan knows that Munch’s Oddysee involves Spooce by now. However, as I read on I realised these people were highly anti‐Xbox, and so had probably end up not playing MO. They claimed that Xbox was crap because it has no games, that OWI sold out to its PS2 fans and that if they have any sense they’ll return to 2D gaming. I can single-handedly (double‐handedly, actually, since I’m typing) counter each of these ridiculous claims, basically because it’s so simple.
The Xbox is not crap, it is the greatest console on the market. You can hardly blame the Xbox for not having many highly‐acclaimed games, since the Xbox itself does not, strangely enough, create games for itself—that duty is handed out, more often than not, to development teams who spend months beavering away on design, programing and testing. If they don’t want to make any Xbox‐only games, then that’s simply them selling out, trying to get the most money.
It seems strange that these morons are willing to blame OWI for selling out a) when they’re perfectly willing to ignore the blatent money‐grabbing game producers who put their games on every console and b) when OWI have done no such thing. At no point did OWI say they would release their game on the PS2—in fact Paul O’Connor blatently said in the Oddworld Group that they had not even started to program their material into the PS2’s dimensions just two E3s before the game’s release. It was Sony who claimed MO would come out on the PlayStation 2, not OWI. These people ought really to get their facts right before they start resorting to slander.
What’s even more elementary is that there are no such things as OWI’s PS2 fans, simply because there are no Oddworld games on PS2.
Oddworld has been about providing realism right from the very start of its existence. It has always strived to deliver the best performance possible. Only now that 3D gaming has reached a stage where properly realistic and structural secure environments and entities can be constructed have OWI started making 3D games—that’s the sole reason AO and AE were in 2D. I’d also like to know what these morons would do if told to create a series of at least 10 games using the exact same 2D level platform engine. To conclude, these idiots are not fans of Oddworld, they merely claim to be. If they truely knew anything about Oddworld they’d know what SpooceShrubs were even if they don’t and never will own or use an Xbox; they’d know OWI have sold out to no console fans, and they’d be more concerned about the SoBe deal that occured a while ago. They’d also have a clue about what they’re talking about. I considered stepping in and correcting them, but I honestly don’t think they’re worth the effort.
By the way, if anyone knows anything about Elisabeth Lutyens’s String Quartet Number 6, specifically the ‘Secondo’ movement, I’d love to hear from you.