OUTCAST: SECOND CONTACT
Dimensional rift opens to world of right angles
SEQUELS AND REMAKES are the backbone of the modern game industry, the boughs from which the fruits of original creative endeavors can hang. And they have another important function—making great games from the past accessible to those who don’t have Windows 98 installed, or even a CD drive in their PC anymore.
Seventeen or so years ago, Outcast was cutting-edge. You needed 128MB of RAM to run it, and a beefy CPU (Pentium IIIs were available), thanks to its eschewal of GPU tech (the first GeForce card would come along in October 1999) to run an engine that flitted between raycasting for the ground and textured polygons for objects.
An enhanced version, Outcast1.1, was released in 2014, but it stuck with the CPU rendering of the original, and was on the blurry side, which is an accusation you can’t make of SecondContact. It looks superb, every texture beautifully displayed, every face animating in time to its spoken lines, and the swirling snowflakes of the opening sequence looking soft and featherlike. However, from this fidelity comes the sense that you’re playing an old game—everything is very square, the ground very flat, even where it’s built up in layers. Mountains jut suddenly out of the surface, nestling plants and crystals at their base, as though trying to hide the joins. It’s all very 1999.
Not that it should matter, as there’s a solid game beneath the shiny new polygons. Outcast is a third-person freeroaming adventure game, although the amount of free roaming you can actually do is curtailed by monsters, enemies, and quicksand. Humanity has wrenched open a portal to another dimension, and sent through a probe, but it’s all gone wrong, and a dimensional vortex now threatens to destroy our world if you, Commander Manly (sorry, Cutter Slade), don’t go through the breach and reclaim Earth’s litter. Of course, you get separated from your team, and wake up in a square house, surrounded by beings whose baldness and two-fingered hands must cut down on rendering time nicely. They speak perfect English.
It’s full of charmingly clunky touches, such as the Gaamsaav device you carry in your backpack and use to saav your gaam. We’re not sure if the fact the Gaamsaav makes a noise that enemies can hear and will investigate is a stroke of genius or sadism, but it’s certainly effective at racking up the tension. Your character looks like an idiot with his gun drawn, as if he’s holding it in the very tips of his fingers, which possibly explains why the auto-aim is a bit wobbly, and his reluctance to turn around means running backward is an effective method of withdrawal from suboptimal situations. Modern touches include autosaving, and switching rechargeable health on or off.
Outcast’s John Carter meets Jack O’Neill nature is spread thinly over its structure, the workings of the world are on display, and as you mess with them—disrupting enemy supply lines, for example—you can see its influence on games such as Assassin’s Creed.SecondContact is interesting as a historical document, sure, but it’s still a great game in its own right. Especially now anyone can play it.
Outcast: Second Contact
OUTCAST Huge adventure; top-notch remake; fine score.
OUTHOUSE Clunky ’90s plot and lead character; showing its age elsewhere, too.
RECOMMENDED SPECS Intel i7/AMD Ryzen 5; 8GB RAM; GeForce GTX 780/AMD Radeon 290.
$35, http://outcastthegame.com, ESRB: T