Set your wayback machine for the era of the original Microsoft® XBOX™. Back then there was
a game released by the folks over at Oddworld called Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath.
In the game, you played a bounty hunter named "Stranger". Using a crossbow mounted to your
forearm that fired insects and rodents, you would hunt down villians
for the townsfolk — which were chickens, by the way — and collect the bounties.
Among the "live ammo" are chipmunks, bees, and skunks. Each have names in Oddworld pretty close
to their actual ("stunkz" instead of "skunks"). The chipmunks lure the bad guys to them; bees
fire stingers at targets; skunks sort of bomb the whole area with a nasty smell that makes the targets
vomit uncontrollably. The game is way too silly to not enjoy.
I, for one, did some "squawking" about this game to Microsoft back when it released the 360... alas,
a patch to play it on the upgraded system never materialized, and I lost hope of playing the game again.
I'd feared not many played the original release... but I'm tickled pink that the studio to re-released
it for modern gaming platforms and PC just a few years ago!
My favorite thing about this game: I had a specific save spot where Stranger was standing in the
middle of a town, armed and surrounded by "cluckers" (chickens). Some days when I came home
from work, I'd boot up, load the save spot, and start blasting the cluckers with stunkz until they got
mad enough they'd go hide and start shooting back. Hilarious!
At this point, it should be pretty clear that I adore this game. It's available on Steam. You may have
to mess with the controls a little bit to get it to run consistently on a Windows 10 laptop. What works
for me:
- Set the resolution to 1280 x 720
- Uncheck the Full Screen checkbox
- Set Anti-Aliasing dropdown value to None
- Use a mouse or a game controller.
That last list item might seem dumb, but my pointing device of choice is a trackball. Mapping the trackball
to the game controls was arduous enough that I actually bought a standard mouse for the game. In retrospect,
I sort of wish I'd bought the game controller, because I have difficulty jumping using my space bar.
One other thing - I use my laptop with an external monitor. The game always loads onto the laptop screen.
Sometimes I can drag the window (because it's not full screen) up onto my external monitor, but I haven't
yet figured out how to do this consistently.