Building a Retro Linux Gaming Computer Part 29: The Odyssey

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Continued from Part 28: Losing My Marbles

It was one of my regular readers, Grzegorz Budny, that let me know about the driving simulation Odyssey by Car first released by the German independent developer Oliver Hamann back in 2001. The website for the game was taken down not long after, but a demo contained in the odysscar.zip archive can still be found online from places such as the Internet Archive. Apart from having to provide executable privileges to the "odysscar" and "res/uslproc" files this launched without issue.

Included was the first of six maps found in the full version of the game, with it showing decent performance for me in OpenGL or even software rendering with a drawing distance of up to about 200 metres or so. This was more than enough to pique my interest in the game, and with further help from Grzegorz Budny, I was able to get in contact with Oliver Hamann himself who very kindly agreed to send me a copy of the full version of Odyssey by Car to cover.

I was a touch concerned that it was the later 1.04 version from 2008 I was sent, but it does still work just fine for me on Red Hat Linux 7.3 Valhalla. The only issue I encountered is that Odyssey by Car now looks for the libXxf86vm.so.1 legacy library from Xorg when starting full screen, and I am running XFree86 still, but I was able to work around this by pulling the library from an RPM package for Fedora Core 2 and just preloading that to pass the library check.

The goal of the game is to navigate a car through a three dimensional environment, collecting all of the waymarkers in a level before the timer runs out. This is complicated by the game's intensive simulation of real world driving mechanics and physics, requiring a greater degree of finesse to control than is the case in most arcade styled racers. I would still hesitate to describe the simulation as fully realistic, as based on my showing here, I should never be allowed on a public highway again.

Odyssey by Car defaults to using a manual transmission, with automatic being offered as an option for us neophytes, but this concession did little to help stop me from oversteering off cliffs or going headlong into barriers. I did wrestle more control once I learned to pump the accelerator and apply more brake on turns, but I still found myself spinning out whenever I went much past what would be an actual posted speed limit, always keeping me just short of the timer even on the first level.

Thankfully the level timers remain fixed even in two player games, meaning I could share the workload. As such, I waited until my brother was off work during his spring vacation to see if we could tackle our way through Odyssey by Car together. He got to grips with the controls far faster than I did, which I suspect is due to him operating forklifts for a living. Doing this we managed to reach all the way to the penultimate level, before hitting another roadblock.

It is from here that basic driving and navigation proves to no longer be sufficient, with the levels now expecting you to perform stunts in order to collect all of the waymarkers, just as the worlds become more fantastic. Odyssey by Car starts rural with the grandest feature being a castle, before giving way to more dense urban environments, and then to space age locales such as a shuttle port and the Martian surface. The final map even has you racing on top of rainbows.

To accommodate two players and to lean further into the simulation, I was able to attach a Logitech Driving Force E-UC2 racing wheel originally designed as a PlayStation 2 controller; being a USB device, it was as simple as ensuring the joystick package was installed and then running "modprobe joydev" to get the wheel recognized under Linux. Further configuration can then be handled from within the game itself, with your status kept in the hidden .odysscar.sav file in your home directory.

While playing my brother and I even discovered a few tricks of our own. Since you can crash your car in multiplayer without the game resetting the level, you can use this to jump back to the start of the map, cutting down on transit times. One grievance we did have is that the level timer does not show in two player split screen, nor does the map built into the heads-up display; the full map can still be toggled, but this only shows the position of one of the cars.

Oliver Hamann still sells a version of the game for Android from Google Play under the title 3D Turbo Car Driving Odyssey, but given that Odyssey by Car still runs great on my main Arch Linux computer apart from full screen, it seems to me that even the original game would be a fantastic fit for a platform like itch.io with just a bit of modernization work. The stylized vector looking graphics lend a timeless quality, leaving it a shame that more players will not get to experience the odyssey.

Carrying on in Part 30: Imperial Purple

Return to Part 1: Dumpster Diving