Changing culture, one gamerscore at a time.

That's a lot of different species. And a lot of teeth.

I remember the day I first bought a video game guidebook.

I’d gone along with my mother to W.H. Smiths, and I’d seen it on a shelf, next to a ton of other random literary tripe and paraphernalia. “Final Fantasy VII walkthrough,” it said. It also spoke of cheats, and guides to a few other PSX titles I owned at the time. Seems like a logical purchase, I thought. And so I began to convince my dear parent to part with her hard-earned cash for a book I didn’t really need. I wasn’t stuck in FFVII. I just wanted to see how other people, older people, played it.

As I turned the pages, I realised that the guide was, as I’d known already, a poorly manufactured ideal of someone who believed they knew everything about a game, but sadly, nothing about publishing. All the pages of information that would guide me through a game I had already guided myself through regardless, were in the wrong order. So I began flicking through the guidebook, reading into a topic that, little did I know, would become something of a literary addiction for me: walkthroughs to games I never owned, and never would.

Abe’s Oddysee happened to be one of those games. As I began to flick through, instantly I was stunned by how horrendously ugly he was. As of that moment, I’d been exposed to nothing but Super Mario, his pixel perfect friends at Nintendo, and the various titles on PSX that ranged from childlike anime art style, to the clunky but functional Crash Bandicoot. Abe was a monster, plain and simple. But he was also the most innocent looking fella I’d seen in a videogame thus far. His mouth stitched shut, his eyes yellowed and bloodshot: he was far from a picture of health. But there he stood, smiling. He was malnourished, beaten down and enslaved, but he still smiled and seemingly, was goodhearted, judging by the various tasks the player would undertake, all listed in great deal within the pages of my guidebook.

Abe is a picture of the one thing that makes the Western white man uncomfortable to this day: slavery. No matter what age you are or where you’re from, there’s nothing about a moral mind that could ever agree with seeing another human being and shackling them to your will. Abe had the look of the pious about him: his topknot hairstyle reminiscent of a Tibetan monk, wearing nothing but a hairband and a loincloth. A true tarzan of a tyrannous world, you might say.

Fast forward almost a decade, and I’m sitting at my laptop, furiously typing through what I’m hoping will be the last dissertational piece on Gothic literature I’ll ever have to write. I alt-tab out of Word, frustrated with the lack of progress, and find out via my addictive RSS feed what’s going on in the world. Apparently, Abe’s Oddysee and Abe’s Exodus have popped up on Steam, and Valve are vendoring both titles for the sum price of £2.25. I buy the copies for myself, and gift purchase the copies for my missus, remembering a fun conversation we had on holiday about the PSX era of gaming where she mentioned it with a smile, as the PSX was the only gaming console we had with us in the quaint Italian town her getaway was situated in.

The thing about Abe’s Oddysee is it isn’t trying to actually become an enjoyable videogame. It’s hard, unforgiving, the controls are clunky, and in this day and age the resolution is smaller than, well, something extraordinarily minute. Yet, it’s still such a fantastic title, and for so many reasons.

Ask yourself this: when playing a game on the PC, that doesn’t make use of the mouse at all, how do you feel? Confused? Frustrated? Disorientated? Perhaps all three, as I was certainly guilty of those particular emotions. I’m used to the RTS-FPS way of thinking when gaming on the PC platform: mouse rules all. It is my selector, my gun’s trigger: what it does for me I can’t do with anything else. Even playing Doom feels odd if you’ve just spent the last few weeks on Half Life. There’s a lack of control.

So when attempting to play a game that not only transported itself from console to PC, but did so so diligently it didn’t even bother considering the fact your keyboard isn’t a gamepad, it blew my mind. I missed jumps, I couldn’t remember the controls for longer than five minutes… I was a mess. But at the same time, I was having a lot of fun, because I found it extremely challenging, as it took my contemporary game-control mindset to task and pitted it against the monolithic keyboard-only predecessor I felt that, after playing, I should have more respect for.

What the game can also do very well, albeit if very subtly, is tell a story. Abe is a slave, simple and straightforward. There’s no history given, no motives: he is a slave, and he has masters. They employ repulsively ugly soldiers to keep the peace, and everything keeps on ticking. It’s dark, this dystopian alien future, and it feels dark. The pre-rendered cutscenes depict the boss of the company in a ’20s ganster zoot suit, his cohorts in similar suits, and his minions in metal suits to give them movement. The game’s character design makes a lot of political implications in reference to unfeeling global corporations, and it gets away with it because at the time, we were playing Crash Bandicoot and talking about what colours the feathers on Aku Aku’s face were, not ranting about racism in Resident Evil 5. The “political statement” in videogames didn’t exist, and character design is more free, the implications of their aesthetics and the subtext of the plot more cohesive, given more depth, as a result of this freedom.

The monsters and enemies you will have to face are, in a word, horrifying. Ever wondered what a squid with mechanical legs looks like weilding an M16? Well, head on over to Steam and find out. Starship Troopers, Alien, the inspirations in character design are all here, and they make such a refreshing (if retro at the same time) change to the alien grunts of contemporary videogame design. Covenant, Super Mutants… they’re all the same, really. Humanoid aliens without any redeeming features, or simply mutated humans. The Elites lack a human jaw, but they still talk in flawless American English. It’s farcical.

The Scrabs are something I’d like to highlight. If someone ever asks you what you’d least like to be chased by, this is your answer. This enemy can follow you across gaps, hunt you in the dark (where you hide from Sligs, the mobile squid lifeform that forms the majority of the paid gun and muscle in the title), and they can call out to eachother. Behemoths, each taller than you, a four-legged crab-like entity that consists of jegs, a muscled humanoid torso, and a long, sharp mouth for goring you with. The simplicity of their design is also their strong point: they are violence and rampant genetic disorder personified, created with nothing but violence and flesh-rending in mind. In fact, they’re so violent you can pit them against eachother, if you’d like.

It begs the question of where the simplistic side to game-design creativity has gone, though notably there are a few exceptions. Valve still have their various creations from Antlions to Vortigaunts, Nintendo their Goombas and Koopas, and the various Locust that populate the Gears universe, to name but a few. But as for Super Mutants, zombies in any form (“infected” humans, I’m looking at you), and other such same-old same-old content in the way of videogame antagonists, after playing the Oddworld titles, you begin to question why every title that involves species that don’t originate from either Earth’s biological catalogue don’t seem to look that different to us, at all.

Abe’s voice is something that’s going to come as a shock. Personally, looking at someone with a mouth stitched shut, I barely expected him to stop breathing through his nose, let alone venture into the realms of basic speech. With commands like “hello”, “follow me” and the inevitable farting emote, it makes titles like Tom Clancy’s Endwar look pointlessly complex. I don’t need to tell someone to go somewhere myself if my in-game avatar’s going to do the job for me. You could argue immersion, but when immersion comes through the form of the same headset I use to listen to thirteen year old males question my sexuality because I beat them at Halo 3, it tends to miss the mark.

This wasn’t a review, nor a “retro love” article, simply something to highlight the fact that old games will, more often than not, show up their contemporary counterparts as unoriginal and clunky. You’ll never capture the smoke-filled jazz “cool” of Grim Fandango, nor will you ever horrify in the same way the insane Milkman did in Psychonauts did. However, you may just be able to recreate the fantastic world of Abe and his Mudokon brethren, their plight for freedom in an oppressive, corporate, profit-driven slaughterhouse of a universe, and the storyline, gameplay and character that goes with it. But first, you’d need the rights to a sequel.

See what I did there? Enjoy your Monday morning.