[STM]

In a traditional tragedy following Socrates tradition (Shakespeare took a lot of note from Socrates when devising his version of Bandello/ Romeus and Juliet when writing Romeo and Juliet) there is always comedy to keep the audience entertained and unexpecting of the final end, but also to make the protagonists fall that much more painful. In AO and AE, there is a fair amount of comical notation (for example, when Abe falls off the cliff in AO and there those bouncy noises when we must remember he has actually broken his head and died,) yet at the same time, especially in AO as BM noted with the harsher pallets of colour, there is this underlying darkness and unrelenting foreshadowing of death that chiefly hangs over every character.

In MO there is a change in gameplay, the switch to 3D is automatically going to alter our perception of the game's cartoonyness, we expect, in 2011, to be amazed by stunning graphics and to a lesser extent for some reason, intriguing plots. MO only offered one of these factors and even then, the plot was comparably shallow when paralleled against AO/AE. Also, Munch, is a character that is so mis-proportioned and with such a funny voice one can only assume that there is a lighter tone in MO.

Perhaps therefore MO is Oddworld's Act 2 in comparison with Romeo and Juliet. SW returns a degree of the initial fear and darkness with a shadowy character, a fiendish parasitic, corporate enemy and seemingly more isolated areas. However, again there are the Clakkerz and while I like them personally, they are walkin' talkin' Texan chickens. Also, while there is constant battle as you would expect from a FPS/TPS, there is incentive to capture enemies alive, also watching an enemy being stung by a wasp is pretty funny. But the bosses, especially the early game outlaw bosses, are quite stupid looking and derpy which again, alters how dark we feel SW is. Especially when the initial cut scene sees Stranger apparently end that outlaws life in cold blood, once the game starts however, we release he's just in jail, 'killed' by non-lethal weaponry.