I'm pretty sure Out of This World is an ambitious game; it's theoretically ahead of its time.
I'm also pretty sure it's hard for a Genesis game to be innovative when it looks and plays like an Atari 2600 cartridge.
Out of This World, like the more polished Flashback, was an attempt to turn gaming into a cinematic experience. The game updates the still cutscenes of Ninja Gaiden and Super Star Wars with dynamic, animated ones. When you die, you don't just die -- there's a closeup of a giant land leech sinking its fang into your leg. During the game, no points, stars, life bars, powerup icons, maps or shuriken counters clutter the screen.
Most important, Out of This World substitutes the flat character sprites of most video games to that point with an early attempt at 3-D polygon graphics.
3-D OR 1-D?: The game's biggest problem is that for all the graphical ambition, the characters look less like proto-3D models and more like the "wizards," "baseball players" or "airplanes" in late-generation Atari games -- they're a bunch of splotches and individual pixels slapped together to resemble alien guards or monsters.
The cutscenes aren't half bad, but they don't really look three dimensional either. There's little shading, so a table looks like the 3-D boxes I used to doodle during history class, with jagged edges. In some levels, your character walks through a dark blue tunnel with a dark blue wall behind him; crude white lines form a staircase or the ground, but otherwise it's basically a uniform screen.
The less said about the gameplay the better, but one annoying sequence stood out. One level starts off in a cage hanging off the ground. You have to move the controller back and forth as the cage slowly starts swinging, until it falls. If you die, you're back in the cage and have to rock back and forth, again and again, until you clear the level. Grrrr.
UNDER THE INFLUENCE: I remember Gamepro magazine presenting Out of This World and Flashback as big leaps forward (the latter for its animation). And done well -- as Flashback was -- this game could have been a cool precursor to two-thirds of PlayStation 2 and Xbox games.
Instead, it's one of those forgotten games that had a lot of ideas about how to do new things, and somehow got all of them wrong.
Or maybe Out of This World's suckiness is its influence: Games like this were essentially developers' beta tests for the post-16-bit systems. Death cutscenes may seem like a good idea, but once you sit through them 50 times they don't seem so great. A screen devoted entirely to action does turn a game into something different, unless what's on that screen is so dull that you wish for numbers or coins to break up the visual monotony.
Of course, game-length beta tests are much easier to take when you can pick them up at a pawn shop for two bucks . Out of This World's real influence is as one of the many titles in the D-Pad Dustbin that shame gamemakers who still want to charge $50 for failed experiments.
[Last modified February 4, 2005, 16:50:03]