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Marek

Stranger is looking good

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"Might wanna look for a big sign saying 'Bounty Stoooore'?"

Stranger, the new project of Oddworld Inhabitants, has finally been properly revealed at a recent EA press event. Eurogamer has the complete video of Lorne Lanning's presentation. The game sort of fits nicely with other imaginative action-adventures like BGE and maybe Psychonauts (sort of).

The game shows what Armed & Dangerous could have been if it had been allowed to be fully realized. Stranger has a lot of that same brand of humor going on. Although the gameplay mechanics don't seem to go too far off the beaten path, the weapons and character designs are extremely creative.

The projectile weapons are in fact little animals. You have skunks (stink bombs), really annoying chipmunks that distract the enemies and get them all frustrated, and so on. The animals are upgradable, which means the skunk gets a gas mask (larger radius) and the chipmunks get two loudspeakers on their head to spread their annoyance just a little bit further.

Somewhere at the beginning of the presentation is also a cool bit showing some intelligent AI stuff where a bunch of NPCs in a town seem to respond pretty naturally to what the player does. Hmmm. Hopefully they didn't just fake that for the demo cause NPCs that are a bit more responsive is exactly what these games need.

The locations shown in the demo seem a little unimaginative compared to what else is in there, and the gameplay doesn't seem penis-nailingly original, but on the whole it's really neat. Check it out.

Also: Gamespot | GameSpy | Team Xbox

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and the gameplay doesn't seem penis-nailingly original

'Penis-nailingly original'. Just think about that for a second. Idle Thumbs = quality journalism, these are the kind of descriptions we need. :clap:

I played Abe's Oddysee (is that the correct mis-spelling?) and found it a pretty entertaining little platformer, some nice new ideas well-executed. It wasn't really ground-breaking or anything, but I dug it for one play through. Not played any of the Oddworld stuff since, but the pic here looks very cool and the article promises much (not watched that hefty video file yet). Potentially this is an addition to my rather meagre collection of XBox games come next Spring.

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Okay, this title is sounding rather fresh. Should be a good romp for Xbox, I'm starting to get just a leetle desperate for something for the console, most of the games coming out are so fooking boring. The only title I'm looking forward to so far is Obscure (for its co-op play in a survival horror world).

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'Penis-nailingly original'. Just think about that for a second. Idle Thumbs = quality journalism, these are the kind of descriptions we need. :clap:

That one's straight from our press release! :ratched:

Hey guys, why haven't we put the original press release up on the site somewhere just for posterity's sake?

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For the record, Marek and I discovered that Penny Arcade beat us to the penis-nailing bit by a decent while, and it was probably bubbling around in my brain because of that, though I didn't remember it.

In other news, Stranger looks good. It needs to not get cancelled.

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Oh, well.

So yeah, how about that Stranger?

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Just watched that big video of the presentation, seeing Stranger in action I'm more excited about it. It seems like a lot of fun but there need to be plenty of different types of mission, I'm hoping that what Lorne Lanning showed wasn't basically everything the gameplay had to offer. I suppose constant new types of ammo are going to keep it interesting along the way. His stress on story in that interview is encouraging too, a deep epic story and lots of plot twists is a fine thing in a game.

The animations seemed nice, I like Stranger running at full pelt. They've preserved the Abe's Oddysee tradition of being able to explode/grind up/mangle the bad guys into chunks as well, which is of course great fun for all the family.

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