Though Stranger usually keeps a low profile, lately he’s been taking on more bounties in an effort to raise enough money for a mysterious operation that he needs to survive. In the game you take the role of a mysterious bounty hunter known only as Stranger as he hunts outlaws in a wild west style setting. Hell, it takes place in a completely different part of Oddworld, which by the way, is HUGE. So no Abe, no Munch, no Mudokons and no Glukens. Now Stranger’s Wrath isn’t an entry in the Oddworld Pentalogy like Abe’s Oddysee and Munch’s Oddysee but instead a spin off that happens to take place in the same universe. How is Stranger’s Wrath? It’s f***king awesome!!! Story But enough about bulls*** business practices. Since then, no Oddworld games have been released on the Xbox and I do not blame Oddworld Inhabitants for doing so. I expect this kind of crap from Activision given how they’d rather rape the name of Call of Duty than do something original but this is unacceptable from Microsoft, especially after Lanning gave a big endorsement to the system leading up to the release of Munch’s Oddysee. So what exactly happened? Well according to Lorne Lanning, it was the result of the nonexistent advertising on the part of Activision, who published the game, and Microsoft, who simply had no interest in the game. Needless to say, it was a huge commercial flop. I don’t recall it getting reviewed on X-Play or Attack of the Show, I never saw ads and I never met anyone who played it. However, that was the only place I saw Stranger’s Wrath on G4, which is weird because they had always sung praise for the series. To promote the release of Stranger’s Wrath, they did a whole episode dedicated to it. The show saw the host give tips and tricks as well as cheat codes in order to complete games. Me and my brothers were watching a show called Cheat! on G4. I remember when I first saw Stranger’s Wrath. The result was Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath. In other words, he wanted to ditch the puzzle oriented style and make the game a more action oriented experience. Because of this and the fact that a good deal of their fanbase had abandoned the series when it moved to Xbox, Lorne Lanning decided that the next game needed to do something different in order to appeal to a new market. Granted, we didn’t spend weeks trying to figure it out, so if you find a way, let us know.Though Munch’s Oddysee was a big hit a retail, mostly due to it’s status as a launch title for the Xbox, the game wasn’t the critical success that Abe’s Games were. Any attempt forced the game out of fullscreen and into windowed mode, where only a tiny portion of the screen was visible. We had no luck with downsampling using GeDoSaTo or by editing the game’s configuration files. The only way we were able to achieve this was by playing the game on an actual 4K monitor. If your monitor’s resolution isn’t available, try editing the config.txt file the game creates in Documents/Oddworld/Stranger’s Wrath HD. On a 4K monitor, all we had to do was select our monitor’s native resolution. Granted, we didn’t spend weeks trying to figure it out, so if you find a way, let us know. We had no luck with downsampling using GeDoSaTo (opens in new tab) or by editing the game’s configuration files. Unfortunately, the environments’ low res textures look terrible in 4K, but are easy enough to ignore thanks to the game’s overwhelming charm. The fidelity of the animation on these buggers shows well at this resolution, but those eyes will haunt me for a long time yet. Also of note are the haunting glass eyeballs on the critter ammo. In 4K, the Stranger character’s detail comes to the fore. The game was unique for its character design and animation, which both remain in tact. So, as a way to cope with our own wrath, we played some of the PC version in 4K resolution. That’s ten years without a new Oddworld game. Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath came out in 2005. Pixel Boost is our weekly series devoted to the artistry of games, and the techniques required to run them at high resolutions.
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