I played "Odyssey: The Compleat Apventure" as a grade school kid. Looking back on it, I think the guy at the Pittsburgh computer store was thinking "sucker!" when my dad was checking out with it. It was done using Apple "shape tables" instead of proper sprites, so getting caught in a whirlpool would cause you to "spin" with the very flashy animation consisting of 8 frames. And the ones at 45 degrees were ~sqrt(2) times too large because of how shape table "rotation" worked. (Or didn't work)
