External Links

beebgames.zip *
This game requires an interpreter program - refer to the game's documentation for details.
adaminte.zip *
This game requires an interpreter program - refer to the game's documentation for details.
adamsinform.zip *
This game requires an interpreter program - refer to the game's documentation for details.
AdamsGames.zip *
This game requires an interpreter program - refer to the game's documentation for details.
zx.zip *
This game requires an interpreter program - refer to the game's documentation for details.
trs.zip *
This game requires an interpreter program - refer to the game's documentation for details.
atari8gm.zip *
This game requires an interpreter program - refer to the game's documentation for details.
SAhints.zip *
hint sheet and map in GUEmap format
AdamsHints.zip *
hint sheet
AdamsHints.tar.Z
hint sheet
(Compressed with the Unix-style .tar.Z "tarball" format. Free unpacking tools are available for most platforms.)
adamssol.zip *
solution
* Compressed with ZIP. Free Unzip tools are available for most systems at www.info-zip.org.

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Strange Odyssey

by Scott Adams

Episode 6 of Scott Adams Classic Adventures
Science Fiction
1979

Web Site

(based on 7 ratings)
2 reviews

About the Story

At the galaxy's rim, there are rewards aplenty to be harvested from a long-dead alien civilization, including fabulous treasures and advanced technologies far beyond human ken! Prepare yourself for the incredible!

(Note - The Inform conversion of this game does not reproduce an important screen effect present in the original 8-bit versions. It may be faulty in other areas.)


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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Opaque alien dangers make this one of Adams's best., March 6, 2013
by Wade Clarke (Sydney, Australia)
Related reviews: Scott Adams, science fiction, commercial

Strange Odyssey, released in 1979, was the sixth of Scott Adams's games in the series today referred to as the Scott Adams Classic Adventures. This game was a childhood favourite of mine and remains a favourite in adulthood. In plain mechanical terms, it's a treasure hunt in space, but its use of multiple alien settings gives it a sense of exploratory danger which feels unique in the series. This isn't to say that the perils in the likes of Adventureland or Pyramid of Doom aren't exciting – it is to say that those games are about exploring one dangerous world, while Strange Odyssey involves visiting a series of unrelated dangerous worlds, never knowing what to expect as you step into each one.

This is a dense game even for Adams, whose Classic series entries each had to fit into 16kb of RAM. Many objects have multiple uses and need to be carted back and forth between different worlds. Time pressure comes in the form of the finite air supply in your spacesuit, and working out how and where you can refill it is a significant puzzle. Odyssey also has more locations than most of its siblings, but the reason it feels more expansive than them is because of its intergalactic nature. Its little text strings have to act as seeds to help the player imagine whole environments at a time, rather than just one room or a corridor.

The fundamental puzzle in Strange Odyssey, the one which is most likely to cause players to stand around for awhile going "Hm," is the one involving working out how to move between worlds. It is quite an abstract puzzle (dare I say Zorkian) in a game canon that rarely supported abstract puzzles due to the simplicity of the game engine and the necessary briefness of all the prose. Another interesting element of this puzzle is the way it mobilises split-second glimpses of text. Unfortunately, this special effect only exists in the original Apple II, Atari and TRS-80 versions of the game. I recommend against playing versions of the game which are missing it (C64, Inform, Spectrum) since the game's quality and sense are hurt by its absence.

Dying and dead-ending are frequent occurrences in Odyssey, so it's wise to save frequently. Just stepping through a door can kill you if the gravity or air happen to be unfavourable on the other side. Several objects can run out of gas or power, it's possible to destroy crucial items with your phaser and most of the wildlife is aggressive. When I was a kid, I loved all of this unheralded danger because I always liked stories in which you never knew what bizarre thing might be on the other side of a door or teleporter. This quality of the game still speaks to me today, and while Adams's games have come in for a lot of criticism over the years, Strange Odyssey's alien dangerousness seems to coincide perfectly with the relatively hostile nature of adventure games from this era. A major reason that a lot of old school adventures are disliked today is that players find it too aggravating that they can mess up by taking actions they might reasonably expect to have inoffensive consequences within the world of a particular game – if that game had much logic about itself. In Strange Odyssey, all of the hardships make sense and thus does the form of the whole. Space is dangerous, the worlds you visit aren't explained and alien hardware doesn't come with instructions. In retrospect, I think Strange Odyssey was one of the designs which best fit Adams's minimalist game system.

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
A star-trek inspired mini game by Scott Adams, June 5, 2017

In this game, you have a phaser (initially set to stun) and you are on an alien planet, so the parallels with star trek are obvious.

The game has you work out an ingenious method of transportation, and then visit a number of alien locales, gathering strange and alien objects.

I found the initial part of this game absolutely fascinating, but by the end the transportation method became a bit annoying.

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Strange Odyssey on IFDB

Polls

The following polls include votes for Strange Odyssey:

Best sci-fi games by Ant-Fan
I'm looking for games from the sci-fi genre. I would prefer classic-style games, even if they're not classics (such as 'Across The Stars') because one of my all-time favorites is Planetfall, but really, anything goes.




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