Discworld - TWG, RRP œ44.99
          (Graphic adventure on floppy or CD-ROM)

           Reviewed on CD-ROM by Colin Campbell

Well, the much hyped Discworld game has arrived but does it live
up to the hype and, more importantly, the price? Let's find out...
The game comes with some decent packaging for a change. Inside the
outside box is a carton (which tells us that it is made from
recyclable material) containing a glossy instruction booklet with
a history of the Disc and some of its institutions and
personalities for those 5 people in the world who haven't read any
of Terry's books. Along with a couple of photocopied sheets is the
CD and, oddly, an installation disk. So far so good.  System
requirements are basic: a 4 meg machine and a double-speed CD
drive.  A soundcard is a must too, unless you don't want to hear
the speech etc and the catchy music.

After a very entertaining introduction sequence we find our hero,
Rincewind - the Disc's most stupidly incompetent wizard, being
woken up and ordered into the ArchChancellor's room immediately.
Apparently there's a dragon loose in the City and it's up to
Rincewind to get rid of it.

The game uses a system which is vaguely similar to that of Monkey
Island.  But not as good. You point where you want to go and the
character goes there. The number of actions you can perform is
severely limited. You can left click to move around, right click
to examine something or double click to either speak to somebody,
use an object or open/close doors.

Fans will be pleased to know that the luggage plays a role in the
game - after you've woken it up, that is. It is basically a big
inventory store, since Rincewind can't carry more than 2 objects
in his robe at one time.

Other characters making an appearance are the librarian (ook!), a
whole bunch of mad wizards, the senior wrangler, CMOT, the
Patrician, Death, some Hublanders, the entire City Watch (all 3 of
them) and a whole forest of other characters. I've yet to leave
the City so there are quite a few characters I've not met.  The
background graphics are excellent - they really portray the City
very well indeed. Lots of incidental animation happens too to
liven up the screen. Each location has multiple scrolling screens.
For example, the City Square is about 3 or 4 screens wide.

The characters are blockier than the background, which is a shame
really as if everything was as well drawn as the background then
the game would be really stunning to look at. This isn't to say
that the characters look bad, far from it: they are fun to look at
and are animated quite well - apart from synching to the speech.

The sound effects are average in places and excellent in others.
One of the problems I've been having is that there is quite a lot
of crackle in certain areas. The introduction bit where the TWG
logo appears is particularly bad.  It could be that I've got
something set up wrongly but my basic setup seems to work okay
with every other CD game I've got...  Music accompanies our
hapless hero everywhere (you can turn it off should it irritate

you too much) - the tunes being quite jolly and fitting each scene
well.

The biggest plus point in the game must be the the speech. You've
all no doubt heard the hype about Tony Robinson (aka Baldrick),
Eric Idle, Kate Robbins, Jon Pertwee and others that provide the
myriad of voices. In general they are excellent. I think every
Discworld fan will love the Hublanders. They are an absolute
scream as they ask you if they can "squish your guts, just a
little.."

For me, the biggest vocal disappointment must be Death. In the
game he just sounds like some bloke with a deep voice stuck in an
echo chamber. Not what I imagined at all. I suppose getting James
Earl Jones to do the voice would be a little expensive. :)

Anyway, the conversations you can have with each of the characters
is quite limited. You have the choice of 4 conversation types:
normal, sarcastic, questioning and angry. Additional topics you
discover appear in the same box so you can ask about those too.
You can swap between being sarcastic and angry at any point and
the conversation starts afresh - which is a little bit
disappointing really. I hoped that if you annoyed a character
enough then he'd tell you to go suck eggs. But, with so many
characters there probably wasn't enough space left on the CD for
multiple conversation threading.

Apparently there are hundreds of puzzles in the game. Having only
played for a few hours (but more than most magazine reviewers no
doubt..) the puzzledness I'm having seems to stem from the fact
that I know what I want to do but the game interface won't allow
me to do it. It really harks back to the days of a 2 word parser
where you had to hit your ideas with a brick until they came out
as 2 words. However, that said, the puzzles are humorous and
interesting and are accompanied by wacky animation and, in
general, will make you chuckle.

There are a number of "glitches" with the game too. A few of these
are linked to the speech system: the subtitles appear but no
speech does. This, to me, suggests that they put this part of the
game in after they'd finished with the actors. Occasionally the
graphics go a little strange - usually erroneous masking of the
background. However these little things don't detract too much
from the game.

In summary, the game is very funny, superb to look at and has some
really excellent dialogue between the characters - albeit along
limited lines.  The clumsy interface, the sound breakup and the
small "glitches" shave a mark or so from the final rating.

Graphics:               *********.   9/10
Sound:                  *****.....   5/10
Atmosphere:             *********.   8/10
Difficulty:             *******...   7/10
Puzzles:                ********..   8/10
Long Term Interest:     ********..  8/10

Overall:                ********..   8/10

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