Up for a holiday Oddysee?

While perusing some holiday deals on PC downloads, I came across two titles that I positively loved that you can own for a combined total of $6. These are Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee and Oddworld: Abe's Exodus.

If you love a good platformer, and enjoy a good mix of comic relief, these games are definitely for you. Maybe it was my age when I played them, but I feel like I really connected with Abe's world more so than I often do with others in the fantasy genre. He's this funny chump with no special powers that stumbles on a plot and gets sucked into a much more significant fate. Long before the "morality" genre hit its stride, his fellow Mudokons are both fun to help.... and fun to punish. Whether you decide to be a good guy or a bad guy, you'll quickly get sucked into the engaging story line. Like any platformer, there are occasional difficulty roadblocks that may get you frustrated - but if you are like me you'll keep powering through until you make the perfect sequence of "impossible" jumps and find out how the story ends.

I was not such a big fan of the third game (Munch's Oddysee), although I did play a good bit of it. My wife enjoyed watching it, which makes it part of a very short list, and to this day the "Meenomu!" exclamations of the Fuzzles from that game are still sometimes heard in our house. Still I feel like it lost some of the charm of the previous installments.

It is unfortunate that it appears the complete Oddworld pentology will likely never come to pass. Even still - at these prices, it is really worth getting to know the lovable Abe. In the unlikely event you hate them, it is still great fun to repeatedly feed Abe and his buddies to the Scrabs, Slogs, Sligs, Paramites.... you get the idea.

Electric B