Abe’s Oddysee

Playground Whispers ・・・ The Truth in Cheating

April 3, 2015 — Leave a comment

Before the internet was a welcoming place for pre-teens, we relied on two sources for gaming tips – magazine walkthroughs that were often spread across multiple issues, and hearsay from kids at school. Everyone ‘knew’ how to get Lara Croft naked, how to catch Mew…all because a friend of a friend of someone’s older brother read online about some secret cheat. These kinds of cheats spread like wildfire, and there were always very specific, yet very different tactics to completing them. We had memorised button combinations for level select codes, and the exact sequence of events needed to run into Missing No. But nine times out of ten, these very specific cheats turned out to be a complete waste of time. How many of us tried to get to that weird looking truck near the S.S. Anne?

There is of course, some truth to a few of these cheats. Encountering a certain trainer with a particular Pokémon in Pokémon Red/Blue that corresponds to the hexadecimal for Mew can trick the game into loading a random encounter with a wild one. It is stuff like this that I hadn’t really understood until I started to play around with hex values in emulators – since there was no risk of corrupting a cartridge this way. Even now, I only have a limited understanding of how the values correspond to one another, but it’s amazing that someone was curious enough to crack the game back then and work it all out. As a kid with no programming knowledge, it just seemed like a magical coincidence that a certain chain of events could trigger this kind of pay-off. Continue reading

Everything I Learned, I Learned From Gaming PART TWO: Oddworld – Abe’s Oddysee (1997) ・・・ It’s an Odd, Odd World

January 24, 2015 — 1 Comment

It was 1998. I was in year 4, and I was at the height of my tomboy phase. My family lived in a street where every house had kids roughly my age, and we were all pretty keen gamers. Our street was a pretty even split of N64 and Playstation owners, with the exception of a poorer family who ‘only owned a Mega Drive’ (probably because they had about eight kids) that led to my only childhood encounter with Sonic the Hedgehog. We didn’t even have a console. It wasn’t that my younger brother and I didn’t want one, we were nuts for them. But we had our PC, and I was right into X-Wing VS TIE-Fighter at the time, and there was no way something that cool could be on a console, right? So my parents had agreed it wasn’t really necessary, even if we nagged them time to time.

So one day, my brother and I are playing with Hot Wheels cars in the dirt in front of our mailbox (like I said, tomboy) when my dad pulls up in the driveway home from work. ‘I’ve got a surprise for you’, he says, carrying a giant plastic bag. My brother drops his cars in excitement and proclaims ‘it’s a NINTENDO 64!’ We abandon the dirt mound and run inside to the living room. Only it’s not a Nintendo 64. It’s a Playstation. More specifically, it’s the $199 bundle with Gran Turismo and the DualShock controller. My brother immediately chucks a tantrum, kicking and screaming about how he wanted a N64. But I couldn’t care less, we’d won our parents over and could finally feel like we belonged with the local kids.

It turned out that I was awful at Gran Turismo. It took me several months to even pass the first test on the basic license – the one where you accelerate for 1 km and stop in a designated box. But as a result, I’ll never forget the intro to Ash’s ‘Lose Control’, that soundtrack was way ahead of its time. What actually drew me into the Playstation was the Demo 1 disc (sampler 9, if my memory serves me correctly). You’d know this one, it had the T-Rex and Manta Ray interactive tech demos. I spent countless hours alone on the T-Rex demo, zooming in and out on details trying to work out how something so complicated could be rendered in 3D. I was pretty easily impressed, but what nine year old wasn’t at the time? Of course, the games on this demo disc were the real draw card, and led me to some of my lifelong favourites. One particular demo had me from the get go. That game was Abe’s Oddysee. Continue reading