[theme music]
[fizz, sip]
Aahhh!
Have you ever wanted to be a fish?
Please don't answer that question.
If the rhetorical answer to the rhetorical question is yes,
then Odell Down Under may just be the game for you.
Odell Down Under by
MECC
came out in 1996 for the Macintosh,
as well as Windows 3.1.
It was billed as an educational or
perhaps "edutainment" game,
geared mostly at elementary or
primary school kids.
Pretty simplistic but it's got its own values,
so let's get right to it.
[MIDI calypso music]
Oh, that music is so cheery, it's disgusting.
Presented with a few game options:
Challenge, Tournament, Create-A-Fish and Practice.
Click on the instructions here.
And that pretty much just tells you how to play the game.
Challenge is where you pick a fish,
start with a smallish fish and... get bigger.
Tournament is basically the same thing,
except that it goes longer.
Create-A-Fish is where you create your own fish,
much like in Maxis' game El-Fish.
And Practice is just that. You pick a fish
and live in the ocean for a while.
The entire game is played with the mouse.
You click things to interact with the environment
and move the mouse to move. Simple enough.
It doesn't really give you much more information than that.
I'm gonna go straight into the Practice here.
The entire point of the game is sort of as a science experiment type of thing
where you go around
after picking your fish from a rather extensive list here.
And then try to decide what they need to eat,
what they can't eat, which enemies it has,
what its astrological sign is, what its favorite color is, that kind of thing.
You can be everything from a lion fish up to a great white
or even a cuddle fish,
which is a squid, basically, so...
Some of them have special abilities like the electric eel's
ability to electrify things.
So you can pick a fish.
I've picked the nastiest fish I can find here.
And you pretty much just go around the screen,
clicking on things, seeing if you can eat it.
Yay! Shrimp is one of my favorite foods.
In case you couldn't tell from the title,
the game does in fact take place in the Great Barrier Reef,
or somewhere around such parts.
In Australia.
There's a lot of subtle
little things about the game too, which are really entertaining.
Like the fact that when you eat something or something gets eaten, you see a little "Arrgh!"
animation pop up from where the fish or creature died.
That's a nice touch.
Could have used some blood-curdling screams, though.
Quite a bit of animated wildlife all around.
The colors and graphic detail in the game are
rather impressive, too.
Both on the PC and the Mac.
Again, this is Practice Mode–
SOULFUL VOICE: Practice mode...
LGR: So there's not much really to do except practice.
You have an energy bar at the bottom.
Try to keep that from getting too low or your fish'll
slow to a...
slower rate.
And your health bar, which you will of course need to keep up,
or else your fish will die.
There's also day and night cycles,
but it doesn't really seem to affect the look of the game,
only when your fish is active and when other fish are active,
so you'll need to match that up with your fish and your prey.
There's an interesting Metroid-style map system
at the very bottom-left of the screen, too,
showing where in the reef you are.
It's all fun and games.
No real harm done, except when you happen to come across
something that will kill you,
like those darn lyretail coral trouts.
Most of the time, it'll come out of nowhere
and you really won't know what happened,
except that you can't play anymore.
Let's go into Create-A-Fish here. I really like this mode.
It's a little less in-depth than
the create-a-fish mode in El-Fish,
but in a way, it's even more detailed because you can really
see how these things apply to a fish
in real life, in a way.
You can name the fish anything you want. You can give it special abilities.
You could change the size of it.
This is all done sort of in a role- playing points system type of way.
You can choose when it's active– day or night–as well as the color of the fish.
And then these little sliders at the top, Speed, Endurance and Agility,
affect the shape of your fish.
So that's really interesting, I think,
to see how that works.
Depending on whether you have a fast fish or a not-so-fast fish.
You'll get some very, very different variations.
This is actually quite entertaining to play around with.
You could effectively make a superfish that can eat anything except sharks.
Oh, and watch out for those cluster anemones.
There's a lot of fish that can't eat those.
A strange aspect of the game is getting points.
You wouldn't think a game like this would have a point system necessarily,
but is rather welcome and does add
a little bit of challenge and spices things up here and there,
especially in the first two game modes.
You start out as a smaller fish and work your way up the food chain.
Your score goes up the longer you stay alive
and in order to stay alive you have to keep your health up,
as well as avoid getting eaten
and eat the right things.
It's actually a lot harder than it sounds.
Often times you'll have a fish that can only eat things like plankton,
and because of the sharp
detailed graphics of the game,
you can't see them very well.
Especially if you have a smaller monitor
or something very high resolution
on a bigger monitor,
which makes the game tiny.
Little things like worms and
tiny shrimp and stuff too are a little bit harder to see.
So that's really my only complaint as far as the graphics go.
It's just that sometimes things are too small
It runs in a very small window in Windows 3.1,
so that's kind of the problem there.
In this mode here, once you get enough points,
you progress to the next level with the next fish.
And it just keeps on going on and on until you've
quote-unquote "beat" the game.
Once you've gotten the hang of the things to avoid
and the things to eat, you can really
breeze through this in probably 15 or 20 minutes at the most.
I don't really know why I enjoy this game at all,
because really, it's so shallow.
Pun not intended.
There really isn't a whole lot to do, and even though there are a lot of fish,
they all basically feel the same.
I mean, they're fish.
Some are a little faster than others, yes, but...
it really just leaves a little bit of something to be desired.
And even the Create-A-Fish mode
is still lacking because
you can only really create about six different looks of fish.
Even though the attributes can change a good bit,
eh, it's just kind of there as...
sort of a sideshow attraction.
Unlike El-Fish, where that was basically the entire point of the game
was to make these incredibly varied, crazy-looking fish.
Eventually, one you get tired of this, you'll just
choose the great white shark as the fish to be and
go around eating everything,
even other great white sharks.
[munching sounds]
You can even eat the plants, the sponges, the other fish that you can't eat.
It doesn't matter, you can pretty much just inhale and ingest
and digest everything.
And there's really no negative aspects to it.
So the great white shark is just... like a cheat.
Odell Down Under is
an enjoyable game for
maybe 30 minutes at best, if you've never played it before.
It's not exactly easy to find, either, especially the disk version.
I've only seen one of these show up on eBay in years.
The CD-ROM version that was released later is a little more common,
and you can still find it on Amazon.com for under $10,
but it's really not incredibly worth that
and you can find it on a lot of old game download sites like C-DOS
or even the Macintosh Garden, I think.
So if you're in the mood for a few minutes of something very different
from almost any other game out there,
might wanna look at Odell Down Under.
It's incredibly simple,
and that is its attraction as well as its downfall.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going back to playing Dragon Age: Origins.