Apple II Bits

When I first encountered Out of This World for the Super Nintendo, I was absolutely fascinated. I’d never played Prince of Persia before, so the realistic art enabled by rotoscoping was new and amazing to me. The puzzles were also nearly inscrutable: playing as a human transported to an alien world, I had a language barrier that left me with few clues, countless deaths, endless experimentation, and victorious jubilation. My only disappointment was that the game was too short: a speedrun takes only 10–15 minutes.

Since the Super NES and the Apple IIGS share the same processor, the game eventually made its way to the IIGS, largely because the developer was told it wasn’t possible:

And to think I did the port because I was told “it couldn’t be done”. I proved them wrong.

— Rebecca Heineman (@burgerbecky) January 31, 2019

If a conversion to a 16-bit Apple II seemed impossible, Vince Weaver, aka "deater", has kicked it up (or down?) a notch with his 8-bit demake:

Like his previous ports of Portal and Kerbal Space Program, Weaver’s version of Out of This World is incomplete, consisting of only the first two levels and deaths. But even this limited proof of concept is fun and and impressive, which you can see for yourself by downloading the disk image and source code from his website. The game runs on any Apple II with at least 16K of RAM.

Out of This World, under its original title of Another World, has been ported to many other platforms and is now enjoying historic re-releases. The 20th anniversary edition first appeared on consoles in 2014; in 2018, it landed on the current generation, that being the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch, available as downloads only.

Despite having the original SNES cartridge, I’ve nonetheless plunked down USD$29.99 + S&H on the upcoming physical, retail copy of the Switch edition, courtesy Limited Run Games. It was just too good an opportunity to own this game again — be it on floppy disk, disk image, or cartridge. After more than two decades, I’m sure its puzzles will again take me longer than 15 minutes to solve!

UPDATE (March 2, 2019):: Weaver has now ported the introductory cinematic movie as well:

I don’t mean for this to be "iOS Gaming Week" here on Apple II Bits — the impressive Touch Arcade already has the corner on that market. But I do want to follow up on a post from last March, in which I eagerly anticipated Out of this World (OotW) coming to iOS. I greatly enjoyed this creative (albeit brief) game on the Super NES, which shared the same processor as the IIGS, making a port to the Apple II a no-brainer. A more accessible rendition of this classic game would be welcome.

Since I don’t actually own an iOS device, the port fell off my radar, replaced by news and reviews of From Dust, an Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA) game released this past July by OotW creator Éric Chahi. Great, I thought — has he been so swamped with this new title that he’s forgotten his roots?

Nope! Out of this World for iOS was released last month under the name Another World for $4.99.

Can you bring scientist Lester Knight Chaykin home?

If Out of this World leaves you hungry for more, there’s no news on a similar port of the much rarer sequel, Heart of the Alien. But you can play OotW’s spiritual successor, Flashback, on iOS for $1.99.

(Hat tip to Carrington Vanston of the Retro Computing Roundtable)

In the latest episode of Open Apple, Mike and I noted both that the 25th Game Developers Conference was held last week in San Francisco, and that iOS is becoming a great platform for retrogaming. I didn’t realize at the time that there was a recent intersection of those two topics: Out of this World, a classic Apple IIGS game, is coming to iOS.

As reported by Touch Arcade, Éric Chahi, the game’s original developer, made the announcement at GDC that Out of this World, known overseas as Another World, will arrive on the iPad and iPhone at an unspecified future date.

At the time of its 1991 release, when 16-bit graphics weren’t quite realistic enough, this puzzle-platform game from Interplay used rotoscoping techniques to transport the earthly scientist Lester Knight Chaykin to an alien planet. Each non-scrolling screen presented a different puzzle and a part of the narrative of his adventure to return home. Surrounded by foreign technology and unintelligible lifeforms, Lester’s journey is one of beauty and inscrutability.

I enjoyed OotW on the Super Nintendo but found it a relatively short game once mastered. In my recent attempts to replay it, I found it rather obtuse and far from what modern gamers would expect from what is ostensibly an action game. In my former career as a high school teacher of technical writing, I thought OotW would be a perfect case study: give it to students without instruction, and have them write the documentation from scratch. Trying to decipher the game in both internal and external contexts would’ve been fascinating. Unfortunately, such an assignment was impossible due to predating the game’s many freeware ports.

I did eventually beat this game on the SNES but was dismayed to find its cliffhanger of an ending unresolved; the squel, Heart of the Alien, was released only for the ill-fated Sega CD console system, limiting its accessibility. But maybe, if the series’ first half sells well on iOS, it won’t be long before we finally see the resolution of Lester’s quest.

UPDATE: The video, audio, and slides from this GDC presentation are now available.

(Hat tip to Blake Patterson and Jason Scott)