Review NaN of 39
Price Paid:
$5.00
from Ebay Summary:
About five years ago, I would occasionally eyeball a certain game when I was at the local computer store, but there was always something else I wanted more, and I never got around to buying it. Eventually, the game disappeared from the shelves, but never entirely from my thoughts. So, five years later, I found an original copy on Ebay, and decided to finally try the game time had left behind. The game is Outcast.
Developed by a small Belgian company called Appeal, Outcast came out early in 1999 after four years in the making. A third person action-adventure set on the mystical world of Adelpha, Outcast was going to be a groundbreaking game featuring enormous environments and gameplay elements from multiple genres. To facilitate the creation of such large, detailed environments, Appeal made a strategic decision to use a voxel-based engine. To understand what a voxel is, think of it as a cube, as opposed to a pixel, which is just a flat square. With pixels, you create things by making a wire frame and stretching a skin around it. With voxels, you create things by building them with bricks. Since processors could only handle large polygons back in 1999, your average boulder looked something like a trapezoid when done with pixels. But with voxels, it could be made round and smooth and incredibly natural.
Appeal wanted a realistic looking world that the player could fully immerse himself in, so the decision to go with voxels was an easy one...back in 1995. But over the next four years, these little gadgets called video cards started coming out, and you weren’t a serious gamer unless you had something called a Voodoo inside your pc. And the thing about voxels was that these new video cards couldn’t process them, so voxel-based engines ran entirely on the CPU. Appeal defended its decision to go with voxels based on the fact that these early generation video cards couldn’t perform 3D calculations, or do advanced rendering like bump mapping, and that the AGP bus wasn’t even available yet. You simply couldn’t create large detailed environments (think Morrowind) worth exploring unless you went with voxels.
It was a bold design decision, but a fatal one. By early 1999, kids large and small were firing up their computers with Voodoo 2s and TNT 2s, and game buying decisions were often dictated by which games could put these babies to work. You could hardly blame people. The idea of putting hundreds of dollars of upgrades into a computer you just spent over a thousand dollars on was pretty novel back in those days. So the idea of putting all this expensive hardware into your machine and then not utilizing it was pretty much unheard of. And so, Outcast debuted with much critical lauding, only to have many game buyers with their bleeding edge hardware turn up their noses at this technological dinosaur. While popular in Europe, Outcast faded from the shelves in the U.S., and eventually ended up in the dustbin of gaming history.
So here we are five years later, and this diamond has worked its way up to the surface. How does the gameplay hold up after all these years? And what about those voxel graphics? What would someone playing this game on a system that dwarfs those from 1999 have to say about a software graphics engine that was snubbed all those years ago? My own answers would surprise myself. Outcast is one of the truly unique games of all time. While the gameplay wasn’t revolutionary even for its day, all of the elements – graphics, music, dialogue, and overall style – come together to create a game that just doesn’t look or feel like anything you’ve ever played. It is a Picasso amidst an endless wave of Thomas Kinkades. It is a game you should play if you are a fan of pc games in general, and if you want to own a slice of gaming history. Outcast isn’t a perfect game, and there are a couple of issues when playing the game on newer systems and OS’ (like Windows XP), but it is fun, entertaining, engaging – and most of all – different. It is a game I wholeheartedly recommend. Report this review >>
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