DISCWORLD 2 - Psygnosis

                    Review by Phil Darke

I have long been a fan of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series of
books and have read all that I can get my hands on and am always
looking forward to any new books in the series. When I first read
The Colour Of Magic I was creased up with laughter at the antics
of Rincewind and the Luggage. It should come as no surprise then,
when I say that I am equally impressed by the Discworld computer
games and have now completed all three. Yes three! Anyone remember
The Colour Of Magic?; a text adventure on the Spectrum back in
nineteen eighty something. This was extremely funny and at the
time was one of the best adventures on the market. Discworld set
new standards in Adventure gaming and I can say without doubt that
it was my favourite adventure of 1995.

@~I played Colour of Magic too - it was a four-parter by Fergus
@~MacNeil/Delta 4 ... Sue

When I heard about the forthcoming release of Discworld 2, I
thought that it would be difficult to follow Discworld, but
Psygnosis have not only done it, but surpassed the first game in
every respect.  Terry Pratchett's humour loses nothing in the
translation from paper to screen and Eric Idle simply IS
Rincewind.

One of the features which I think make the books are the
footnotes. The game has even re-created these in the shape of an
Alan Wicker sound-alike, giving comments on points of interest.

The game puzzles are fairly logical and even without a solution
you should be able to figure out the answers to most of them. This
is helped by Rincewind's fairly pointed hints at salient points.
While he does not actually tell you what to do he makes it obvious
that there is something to be done here and generally points you
in the right direction.

The game interface is fairly easy to follow with icons whose
functions are obvious and everything is mouse controlled.  The
music is good but not intrusive and the sound effects are
sometimes spectacular. The animation was smooth for most of the
game, although there were a couple of places where it was a bit
jerky and slowed down quite a lot. This however could have been
due to my machine which is a DX4-100 and I played in DOS mode.
Maybe the Win95 version is better, I don't know.

I did have a couple of minor criticisms, however. First I found
the mouse cursor, a tiny little white star, far too small and much
too sensitive. A very small movement of the mouse would sometimes
move the cursor from one side of the screen almost to the other.
Also the cursor could sometimes be difficult to see and got mixed
up with the background. The other and more serious problem was
that the game kept crashing with DOS/4GW errors. I spent a great
deal of time fiddling with my system files and even ran from a
boot disk, but despite having 16 Mbytes of RAM and 617k of free
base memory. I still could not overcome this problem. I phoned
Psygnosis's help line but got the distinct impression that the
person I spoke to knew even less than me (and that ain't much).
Admittedly this could have simply been a problem with my
particular system and perhaps I am being a bit unfair. But it is
annoying and I would be most interested to hear from anyone who
has had similar problems and would like to know if they managed to
solve it and if so how. I managed to complete the game by saving
at regular intervals, sometimes as little as every five minutes.

However despite the minor problems which I had I can not recommend
this game highly enough. If you like humorous games then beg,
borrow, scrounge or buy but GET IT. Well done, Psygnosis and Terry
Pratchett. Roll on Discworld 3!!









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