oddworld-strangers-wrath posts

Just Add Water, the UK-based development team in charge of adapting Oddworld Stranger's Wrath to the PC platform late in 2010, is getting ready to do some more work in the long time action-adventure game franchise. In a post on Just Add Water's official web site it announces that it is currently hiring for various positions in the company.

The site states that the people who will be hired will be "working on various Oddworld Inhabitants based projects with 4 to be released THIS year, and more coming over the next few years." It's likely that at least one, if not more of the new games will be for the PC platform.

[Via VG247.com]

The re-release of all four games in Oddworld Inhabitants' Oddworld series last December has so far been restricted just to the Steam service. Today the Oddworld web site announced that starting the week of March 7 the four games ( Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee , Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus and the all new PC ports of Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee and Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath) will be released on other PC game download sites like Direct2Drive, Impulse, GamersGate and others.

During that week the Oddboxx games will also have a 50 percent price cut which includes the Steam releases. Finally two of the games will be getting some updates. Munch's Oddysee will add new achievements, widescreen support and more while Stranger's Wrath will add Xbox 360 controller support and other features.

Last December PC gamers finally got the chance to play Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath, the last game in the Oddworld series from developer Oddworld Inhabitants. However players soon discovered that the port of the Xbox game, released as part of the Oddboxx collection of all four games in the series, had lots of performances and other bugs in its new PC version.

A few days ago, the development team in charge of the Stranger's Wrath port released a new update via Steam. The patch supposedly fixes some of the performance issues and bugs and adds a few new features such as a screen resolution selection, v-sync option and joystick selection to the game's launcher. It also adds customizable controls to the game, widescreen support and more. So if you have been on the fence on getting the PC version after all the previous bug reports, perhaps this new patch will help out with that decision.

The recent release of the PC ports of the Xbox action games Oddworld Munch's Oddysee and Oddworld Stranger's Wrath has been met with some tech issues, as we reported earlier this month. The official Oddworld web site has posted up word that the main issues with Munch's Oddysee with the game crashing early on has been fixed for most users.

The other issue is performance and speed while running Stranger's Wrath on an ATI Radeon card. The web site states, "We are working with ATI to discover the root cause of the issue, and will hopefully be able to update you all on this as soon as we can." In related news, a post on the Steam message board forums indicates that the development team is thinking about putting in the graphical improvements for the PS3 version of the game in a future update for the PC port.

[Thanks to Joystiq for that hookup]

Yesterday Steam owners got a chance to purchase and download The Oddboxx, the new four game bundle pack of all the Oddworld games from developer Oddworld Inhabitants. However the Steam message boards are full of posts from frustrated Oddboxx owners who have experienced issues with playing the two games that are new to the PC platform, Oddworld; Munch's Oddysee and Oddworld Stranger's Wrath.

In response the Oddworld web site has posted up a response stating, "We had these games extensively tested and they both came back clean, so this has come as quite the shock to us. We ARE working on solving these problems THIS VERY SECOND, and hope to have a patch out to nail all these problems as soon as possible."

Oddworld Inhabitants' plan to release all four games in the Oddworld series under the Oddboxx bundle for the PC via download is still on. However let's say you already own the first two games in the series (Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee and Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus) that have been available to purchase and download for the PC. Wouldn't you want to just get the two games that are finally being ported to our platform (Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee and Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath) ?

Sure you would. Which is while in addition to the $24.99 pricing for the Oddboxx four game bundle you can get Munch's Oddysee seperately for $9.99 and Stranger's Wrath for $14.99 when the games are released sometime this "holiday". Abe's Oddysee and Abe's Exoddus will be priced seperately at $4.99 each, by the way.

Earlier this week Oddworld Inhabitants announced that the long awaited Oddboxx bundle of all four Oddworld games for the PC would be released sometime this holiday season. Today the developer revealed that the Oddboxx bundle of games ( Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee and Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus and the all new PC ports of Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee and Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath) will be priced at $24.99.

The bundle will be made available via download on several download sites including Steam, Direct2Drive, Impulse and Amazon.com. However the Steam versions will also add new Steam achievements to the Munch's Oddysee and Stranger's Wrath PC ports.

It's been a while since this project was first announced but today Oddworld Inhabitants announced that its PC collection of all four previously released games in the Oddworld action-adventure game series will indeed be released sometime in the 2010 "holiday" time period.

The Oddboxx bundle will have both Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee and Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus (both previously released for the PC) as well as Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee (shown above) and Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath which were first released for the Xbox consoles and will be ported to the PC for the first time in this new collection. Oddworld Inhabitants states that these games will also be getting "a few new additions and enhancements" but specifics were not mentioned. Pricing for The Oddboxx bundle has not been announced

Oddworld Inhabitants' founder Lorne Lanning loves Steam and is not afraid to say it. The creator behind four of the most unusual mainstream games of all time chats with Game Informer in a new interview where he talks about the impact of releasing the first two Oddworld games on Steam a while ago.

He states, "I've got to tell you, we were blown away. For the first time, we're able to tell where our sales were coming from, how many dollars we were making per day. What territories sold better last night than the night before – was it Eastern Europe, was it Southeast Asia? We're able to see it all. We never got to know who our customer was before." Over a year ago Lanning stated in another interview that the other two Oddworld games that had not been released for the PC would be ported and released via download with the first two games in a collection called the Oddbox. Sadly we have yet to hear any more about those plans.

Most of the interview concerns The Brutal Ballad of Fangus Klot, the fifth Oddworld game that was announced just one month before Oddworld Inhabitants decided to close its main development studio in 2005. The game was supposed to be published by Majesco. Lanning stated, "Sometimes developers get fired by publishers and sometimes developers fire publishers – and that's probably all I should say about it." He also talks about Oddworld's future plans, including perhaps releasing free-to-play games with micro-transaction support. Lanning states, "It's a whole different chemistry coming. And that's what we're interested in."

Last October it was revealed that the final two games in the Oddworld action game series, Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee and Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath, would finally be released for the PC after being Xbox exclusives. Since then there's been no word on the status of that conversion project but a recent post on the fan message board Oddworldforums.net has an update from Oddworld Inhabitants founder Lorne Lanning.

Lanning stated that porting the games to the PC has taken longer than they had hoped, especially for Stranger's Wrath. He states, "Stranger has proven much more difficult as we really pushed some rendering aspects on the Xbox and bringing that over to DirectX is a bit of voodoo." He did say that the two titles, along with the first Oddworld two games in the series which were released for the PC, will still come out sometime in 2010 via Steam. He also added that all four games will have added support for Steam achievements.