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| Source // Moby Games |
If there's a reason Oids seems rather familiar it's because it is rather familiar (have I used that line before? Even that line is familiar to me). You pilot a triangle through space, navigating the perilous landscape below you with deftly timed bursts of your thrust, firing your weapon with expert precision at the targets intent to stop you from rescuing enslaved droids.
Oooorrrr you enter a spin, slam into the side of a mountain and end up pulling off an accurate impression of an explosion. Good for you.
Will our 'skills' learned from the likes of Gravitar and Thrust come in handy, or will we be faced with yet another display of so close, yet so far away?
Will our 'skills' learned from the likes of Gravitar and Thrust come in handy, or will we be faced with yet another display of so close, yet so far away?
Frustrations
Unfortunately, I'm not yet in a position to know. I had high hopes for being able to play a Mac remake of Oids, but even on my aging and increasingly sluggish Mac the software is just too old to run. "Backwards compatibility? When are you ever going to need that..."
So at the moment I'm left with having a look at the Atari ST version on YouTube.
Fun Times
It's hard to say for sure whether I'm seeing an expert or an 'easy' game, but Oids has been described as more arcade-y than other games of this ilk. You'll still need to take care with your inputs but with a shield offering you a little bit of a buffer you've perhaps got some leeway with your attempts at rescuing all those droids.
There are fuel/energy constraints to concern yourself with however, so you can't just bounce around the levels hoping your shields will do the work for you, because they just won't. You descend from your mothership, get the job done, return and move on to the next world.
That may not seem like it has much life but Oids has an answer to any claims regarding replay value and longevity: User created levels. I'm not exactly sure how easy they are to make or share but if you like the base game and yearn for more then that's basically all you've got to keep you going, short of moving on to another similar title.
Final Word
With these as-yet-unplayable titles it's difficult to say a whole lot. The graphics and sound are simple but they do what's required of them. Likewise, the gameplay doesn't ask for too much on your part other than practice and persistence, and back in the past it seems we all had ample time for that. Wherever did that time go...?
I don't see too much here to really pull me in and get me hyped. Maybe it's too similar to what has come before it, I don't know - and wouldn't want to say for sure. If you're a fan of these gravity based games then I hope you've got better luck than me in being able to play Oids.
Fun Facts
The titular OIDS were created by 'the Evil Biocretes, rulers of the wealthiest parallel universe in the cosmos'. I'm still trying to wrap my head around that one, let alone why they gave their android slaves any kind of intelligence in the first place.
Oids, developed by FTL, first released in 1987.
Version watched: Atari ST, 1987 (Dogmeatman)