Wednesday 4 May 2005

Another World



Beautifully cinematic, impressively coherent, challenging and elegant; Another World (known as Out of this World in the States) is a stellar example of nineties game design and was the brainchild of one Eric Chahi and his team at Delphine Software.

"You play Lester, the young physics professor, who suddenly finds himself in a strange alien world after lightning striked his particle experiment."

In 1991 Another World became the poster child of Gallic gaming and adoring magazine editorials in C&VG and the official Nintendo magazine elevated it to blockbuster status.

I first played this on the superlative Super Nintendo, which was, somewhat astonishingly, eclipsed by Sega's Mega Drive console port. Too late, I'd already sold the latter to a College friend who was trying to kick the console habit to no avail.

Its stylistic cousin, Flashback, arrived in 1992 but never distilled the mood of its predecessor nor its downbeat ending. The Macintosh version was ported by Mac Play and requires Classic to run or there's the Windows version that runs in DOSBox.

The look and feel of Another World is unique to this day. Oddworld's developers clearly derived inspiration from Delphine. The game's creator, Eric Chahi, has made the Game Boy Advance (GBA) ROM legally available here.

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