Discworld 2  -  Missing Presumed...!?
                    A Graphic Adventure
                            from
                         Psygnosis

                Reviewed By Keeks on a P166

This is the second Discworld game and Death has gone missing.  A
hero is needed to bring him back, but there is only Rincewind,
incompetent wizard and highly trained coward. You won't catch
Rincewind running away, he's too fast. Unfortunately he is all
that stands between people and the horrible prospect of
immortality. No one wants that, do they?

I know I wouldn't let Rincewind go to the shop to get a packet of
crisps for me, but anyway this is the second of the Discworld
games based on the hugely hilarious books by Terry Pratchett. The
story opens with our hero (?) Rincewind and his librarian
orangutan friend walking and singing drunkenly down a street in
Ankh-Morpork when out of the corner of his eye Rincewind spots
something from the cart-park. Here he finds a bomb on one of the
carts and believes he can dismantle it despite the pleas from the
orangutan. This is reminiscent of the opening scene from the film
Lethal Weapon 3. Needless to say, Rincewind doesn't succeed in
disarming the bomb and the fools' guild blows up. At the same time
Death just happens to be riding his horse, Binky, overhead as the
bomb goes off and sends him flying off into the sky and ends up
going missing.

Since Death has gone missing, nobody is dying. Or more correctly,
they are dying but their souls aren't being reaped, and they end
up being undead or just plain old walking, talking corpses.
Zombies to you and me. This problem begins to get serious when at
Windle Poons's death party (there exists a special relationship
between wizards and Death on Discworld, as they can not only see
him but know the exact time of their death) when nothing seems to
happen even though Windle feels himself die. The Arch-Chancellor
begins to see that something is wrong when Windle dies but yet
doesn't actually die, if you know what I mean, and calls for

Rincewind to find several objects to perform an incantation to
summon Death. And so the game begins.

This game is now re-released on the budget Argentum Collection
label from Psygnosis.  You don't need to have played the previous
game or read any of the books either. The game is not really a
power hungry game.  It comes on two CDs and will run on a 486 dx4
100Mhz but a Pentium 90 or better is recommended. It also needs a
double speed CD-Rom drive, 8Mbs of memory for Ms-Dos version or
16Mbs for the Windows 95 version, a sound card, and a graphic card
capable of a displaying 640x480 256 colour SVGA display.  Also
recommended but not entirely necessary is a twin-hemisphere
electro-collodial brain with cognitive functions.

You control Rincewind, an inept and cowardly wizard. I use the
word 'control' loosely as he still has a life of his own. It would
be extremely hard to get him to do anything life threatening
without good reason or in fact, get him to do anything that would
exert himself at all.  You will be glad to know that Rincewind is
not alone in his quest. His only companion is the Luggage, a large
metal bound chest which has a large number of legs which allow it
to follow you around. It appears to have unlimited storage space
and a such acts as your inventory, since Rincewind himself can
carry only two items in his robe, not that he even wants to carry
anything at all. (It also has set a record for the most number of
charges of grievous bodily harm ever made against a semi-inanimate
object).

The game is split into 4 parts. The first sees you finding the
objects for the incantation. Having found them and performed the
incantation, you find Death doesn't want to come back to work as
he is having a too good a time relaxing. And so the second part,
the largest part, has you looking for Death. It's not hard to find
him, but on finding him he says he will only come back to work if
he gets some respect.  You suggest he star in a clickie (a movie)
and so you have to set out and try and make a film for Death.
Needles to say when you do make the film (after hours and hours of
wandering around screaming and pulling your hair out at your own
stupidity for not solving the seemingly simple puzzles sooner)
Death becomes a megastar and doesn't want to go back to work at
all. But someone has to become Death i.e. You.  And so for the
third part of the game you have to become The Grim Rincewind by
passing a couple of quests (never) set by Death's Butler Albert.
Having completed that you come to the final and smallest part but
I'll let you find that out for yourselves.

Playing the game is fairly easy as the puzzles are fairly logical
and even without any help you should be able to sort out the
answers to most of them. There are a couple of things though which
you will only, as usual with these games, solve only by trial and
error. At lest that's what I did as I am hopeless at lateral
thinking. Rincewind is more than helpful at pointing out fairly
obvious hints at some points and makes it known that there are
hints, but yet doesn't give anything away or spoil the game.

You control him with the cursor, which is a star with a group of
smaller trailing stars for a tail. A novel idea which I found a
little confusing at first but soon got used to it and prefer it
now to the normal pointer as it doesn't hide anything behind it.
Controlling him is simplicity itself. Left click on the mouse to
move him around, right click to examine something and double click
on something to talk to someone or use an object. If you are of
the impatient type you can double click on an exit to immediately
cut to the next location. I have one gripe though. On entering
some locations Rincewind or the Luggage stood in front of some
objects and hid them from view. It took me ages to find the brick
in the fools' guild because of this. The locations range from the
small single screens ones to larger ones, up to five screens in
length, so the game is quite large with about 40 or so different
locations.

There are plenty of objects about but I found a lot of red
herrings.  I still can't open or find any use what so ever for the
cupboard in the morgue, only that Rincewind feels it hides
something horrible. Also what is the vampire mouse for? There are
several other pointless objects that don't even bring a humorous
remark from Rincewind.

Ah yes! The humour. To say that this game was not funny or well
written would be like saying that the tabloids printed true
stories. It would be a huge lie. This is the funniest game I have
ever seen. From the opening animation to the end one it is a non
stop roller coaster of fun with a lot of parodies on film sketches
such as already mentioned Lethal Weapon 3, the stoning sketch from
Monty Python's Life of Brian and King Kong to name a few. My
favourite Monty Python stoning scene.

Even the usual credits at the start are interesting. What you get
is a singing, dancing skeleton singing a song, in a Sinatra type
way, called That's Death. While not being extremely funny it is
still enjoyable and much more appealing than credits scrolling up
the screen. The song was written and sung by Eric Idle who also
did the voice of Rincewind for the game.

So I completely enjoyed this game, even if it was on the easy
side, and would recommend it to anyone to get it, especially not
it is on budget. If it was a full priced game it might be
different.  Rating:  90%

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