Abes' Mission - Escape
First appeared in ZXF issue 6 (Christmas 2003)
Authors: Brothers/Sweet Factory of C15/zOOm/Wixet
Download: http://tcg.speccy.cz/
So how cool is this? A PlayStation game converted to run on a Spectrum. Yes. Well, sort of. Abe's Mission - Escape is based on the Abe games (Abe's Oddysee and Abe's Exoddus) by G T Interactive for the PS One (as it's now called) and was originaly an entry for the Russian 'Your Game' competition in ABZAC Magazine (http://cobrasoft.narod.ru; en route, you might also like to visit http://babelfish.altavista.com) in 2002. Now it's been translated into Czech and English by Total Computer Gang (TCG) programmers Wixet and zOOm in collaboration with Sweet Factory of C15 and released in MB-02, D40/80 and good old .TAP formats. A fairly impressive piece of joint working, then.
To get Abe's Mission to work, you'll need to run your (128K) Spectrum - real or emulated, of course - in USR 0 mode, which is a simple matter of entering 128 BASIC and typing 'USR 0' (and ENTER, obviously): the Spectrum will appear to reset into 48K mode; just type LOAD "" and start your tape. Select English language from the intro page and you're away.
In Abe's Mission - Escape, our hero, floor-waxing employee of the year at the Oddworld RaptureFarms meat processing plant, overhears a conversation in which the true ingredients of New'n'tasty Scrab Cakes and Paramite Pies are revelaed. That's right folks, with profits at the plant tumbling, mean old boss Molluck has come up with the perfect plan for reducing costs and workforce overheads at the same time - and let's just say we're not talking voluntary redundancies here.
Rather unsurprisingly, perhaps, Abe decides that now might be a good time for a change of career and legs it. Companies that measure the performance of their emplopyees in kilograms, however, aren't the sort to respond positively to such action and to get free Abe will have to get past the corporate machine- gun armed robots on the way. There's also the small matter of his fellow Madokan workers at RaptureFarms, who he can't exactly leave to become next week's main course without feeling just a tad guilty, so Abe's mission becomes to get all 40 of his colleagues out of the plant and away, helped only by his distant pal Owen (who communicates with him via the plant's various computer terminals).
Abe is a beautifully animated game, with particular attention given to the movement of its hero in a manner reminiscent of Prince of Persia. Abe can walk, run, jump, tiptoe and even roll his way around the processing plant, and you'll need to use all of these movements if you want to achieve your goal. He also can communicate with his fellow workers with a number of simple commands, such as "wait" and "follow me" (luckily, they're very obliging). It's quite a compliacted game to control, then, but it's worth sticking with - and you just know it will be as soon as it starts.
Abe would have cost a fortune in the 80s and the hype would probably have been significant too. As it is, it's free and so your duty is to play it and tell others. Go away, go play and go say.
