Reviewer: Dos-Games-Online
This is a stunning sci fi platform game by broderbund.
Here, the hero of the game is a proffessor, who is trying to experiment on some sort of teleporting device. Whilst our hero is experimenting, a crash of lightning blows his experiments up to another world, where he must find his way back home.
The game begins in a big pool of water, and soon tentacles will rise up to pull you under. After a bit of life danger our hero meets a few aliens friendly enough to rescue you… to add you to the other slaves. This is where the game really starts, everything will be either in or around the alien city.
The game`s atmosphere is really intense, and will keep you stuck to the computer for hours. As well as the scenery, even though it`s no hi res supergraphics.
- Platform (action)
- 1 player
- code based level skipping (no savegames)
Reviewer: Dos-Games-Online
Ahh Another World, now this takes me back. Like the original Prince of Persia before it and the classic Flashback that followed after, Another World was one of the first games to truly succeed in merging polygon graphics (which back in early nineties we all believed to be amazing, the panicle of what we could achieve with computer graphics, if you look at some of the stuff now how naďve we all were) with addictive game play to create a truly cinematic experience. Of the three games I mentioned Another World was always my favourite and the one I remember most fondly.
I must have played it around ninety-three or ninety-four back on the Amiga 600 with a converter program (after all the game was originally released for and made on the Amiga 500, backwards compatibility was a real choir back in the day). According to Wikipedia the game was ported to other platforms but if memory serves none of these save the DOS and possibly Atari ST versions saw a release here in the UK. Another World has you take the role of a human scientist who has somehow managed to get himself transported to, you guessed it, Another World! Like any right thinking member of our species thrust thou space on to an alien planet he follows the first rule of diplomacy and makes sure to arm himself with the nearest available weapon, in this instance a nifty laser gun that’s a lot cooler than it is useful. From then on you travel from screen to screen (no side scrolling here kids) avoiding traps, shooting these big black beastie things (think the zombie dogs in Resident Evil were bad wait till you meet these buggers) and avoiding death at the hands of some miffed off aliens.
The real turning point in the game is about have way thou when you get captured by some of the locals. In one of the first truly cinematic cut scenes of its day you meet an unnamed alien, your cellmate, who becomes your fiend and ally. That you can’t understand each other’s language is made clear by the fact that there’s no dialogue, ether written or spoken, thou out the game. The animation manages to get everything across thou the use of movement such as simple gestures. You and your new buddy manage to escape working as slaves in an underground mine and from their travel together around the planet searching for a way to get you back home. You eventually end up in an exotic palace for the final level after crashing thou the skylight of a bath house with an alien spacecraft (in which you get treated to soft-core polygon nudity, the first of it’s kind). And then you’re treated to the biggest twist of all, an ending that will leave you pondering what will happen next for years to come!
Well not really but back in the early nineties it was very ahead of it’s time and not the sort of thing you expected from a computer game. Another World hasn’t aged brilliantly; it was seen as being slow and frustrating a couple of years after it was first realized so now, well over a decade later, it’s almost painful to sit thou. But to its credit Another World does have ambition on its side. The developers have gone out of their way to input as much detail as possible into the screens. Characters and creatures move in as naturalistic way as the technology at the time could let them. And the music, combined with the sparse backdrop art (lot’s of greys, purples, blacks and blues) does make for an atmospheric experience.
Another World is a must for anyone with a taste for retro gaming. Its cult status is justly deserved as seventeen years on from it’s original release, you speak to almost anyone who ever played it, they’ll regale you with story’s of there time on Another World.
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