Out of this World (SNES) Playthrough

A playthrough of Interplay's 1992 cinematic action-platformer for the Super Nintendo, Out of this World.

French developer Delphine Software made quite a splash when they released Another World (retitled "Out of this World" for North America and "Outer World" for Japan), on the Amiga and Atari ST in 1991, and it continued to impress as ports made their way to the PC and 16-bit consoles over the following year.

It's a narrative-driven, sci-fi action-adventure that blended Prince of Persia's fluid platforming action with a level of spectacle that was typically found only in interactive movies. Instead of relying on text boxes and digitized speech, Out of this World told its story through the graphics and the gameplay.

To pull this off on consumer-level hardware in 1991, the developers took a novel approach with the presentation. All of the animation is rotoscoped, and the 3D character and object models - all drawn with pre-calculated vectors - are superimposed over bitmapped background images. These techniques resulted in an unprecedented level of speed and quality for 3D graphics on home computers, and the game is still striking to look at today, thanks in large part to the strength and consistency of the art design.

It plays well too. The controls are similar to Prince of Persia in that they're smooth, weighty, and well articulated. The game is difficult - I spent weeks as a kid learning the nuances of the control scheme and figuring out the puzzles - but I loved every second of it.

Out of this World was critically acclaimed when it was new, and it has seen a number of releases and rereleases over the years, but the original game endures pretty well. The same goes for the quality of the 16-bit console ports. The SNES version suffers from regular bouts of intense slowdown, some minor animations were cut, and the game frequently stops to load between scenes, but it remains surprisingly faithfully for a conversion to a system that lacked the raw power of the 68000 CPUs that the Amiga, ST, and Genesis were built around.

Overall, Out of this World is an artistic and technological marvel that everyone would do well to experience at least once.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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