What is Otto Matic?

Otto Matic sees you controlling a robot, tasked with saving humanity from an alien invasion.

This 3D action platformer dons a 1960s sci-fi theme, boasting visually varied levels that blend third person shooting and rocket jumping together into a fun, memorable game.

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Games that inspire terms like good clean fun and cute usually get old fast. However, Otto Matic's easy-but-not-too-easy gameplay, fun cartoon graphics, and general wackiness make it yet another Pangea game that’s so cute we’re almost embarrassed to play it, but so fun we can’t stop. If you’ve bought a Mac in the last few years, you know what we’re talking about — like Pangea’s past cute hits (Nanosaur, Bugdom, and Cro-Mag Rally), Otto Matic comes preloaded on the latest consumer Macs.

What do we mean by cute? The first level. Planet Earth: The Bentley Farm, sets the tone with an overdose of pure 1950s Americana — the red barn and silo, the beehive hairdo, the flying-saucer UFO, and of course you, the noble Otto Matic, humanity’s last hope — all in bold, bright, cartoony graphics. Add a soundtrack of madcap, melodramatic music (a la Twilight Zone and old sci-fi movies), and we’re hooked. And that’s just the game’s opening scene. Later in level one, we encounter friendly veggies gone bad (supersize corn, onions, and tomatoes that have gone psycho after the aliens irradiated them), and a possessed tractor with a taste for robot — all formidable foes, but easy enough to beat with the generous supply of weapons you can pickup along the way. The next nine levels take you to faraway planets with strange and wondrous beings — all of whom want a piece of Otto.

In concept and gameplay, Otto Matic is as easy as it gets — you scurry through alien worlds collecting wayward humans and battling evil aliens and their minions, often while performing difficult feats of robodexterity (such as water-skiing, cloudhopping, and negotiating a dizzying — and not terribly fun — procession of spinning gears and platforms in the fourth level). Controlling Otto requires only the arrow keys for basic movement; you use Option, Command, and the spacebar to punch or to pick up a power-up, to fire a weapon, and to jump, respectively. Yes, that’s punch or pick up with the same key; ordinarily, we’d change the game’s controls and assign punch and pick up to different keys, which we did in Mac OS 9. However you can’t do that in Mac 05 X (where InputSprocket drivers don’t work). As a result, on occasion we inadvertently collected power-ups when we meant to smackdown an alien.

Of course, many of the power-ups are weapons — the basic ray gun, freeze ray, flamethrower, darts, and flare gun — which are generally more effective than punching (unless you try the flamethrower on the Flame Creatures of level 8 — duh!).

Another control we used a lot during the game is the camera-view adjustment. Otto Matic employs the same over-the-shoulder view as other Pangea games, and like Rollie (the star of Bugdom), Otto often disappears from your view when he gets too close to environmental obstacles like trees and walls. The angle-bracket keys (< and >) rotate the camera view, and the Tab key swings it all the way back to the default position behind Otto.

Apart from its unconfigurable player controls, Otto Matic 1.0.2 runs well in Mac OS 8.6 to 9.x and in Mac OS X. The key word here is 1.0.2. Without this upgrade..., the game’s beautiful graphics give way to a mass of flickering triangles in every level after the first one if you’re playing under OS X with a PCI Rage 128 video card. The update fixes other minor bugs, so get it regardless of what video card or OS version you have.

Hard-core gamers and Unreal Tournament fiends might scoff, but Otto Matic offers just the right mix of nongory violence, killer graphics, and both repetitive and non repetitive gameplay. We wholeheartedly recommend it for almost anyone.

Coucouvani, Niko. (May 2002). Otto Matic. MacAddict. (pg. 63).

Download Otto Matic for Mac

Architecture

IBM PowerPC

System Requirements

From Mac OS 8.6

Compatibility notes

Minimum Requirements

• PowerPC G3 @ 266 MHz
• 96 MB RAM
• ATI Rage 128
• Mac OS 8.6
• OpenGL 1.2.1

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver