Discworld II

I'll give you fair warning right up front: this isn't a review as much
as a gushing testimonial for this game.


The second Discworld game is loosely based on Terry Pratchett's novel
called Moving Pictures, but the game plays fairly fast and loose with plot
elements.  I had previously read the novel, but this didn't reduce my
enjoyment of the game in any way.

Graphics:
	Hand drawn animation, very well done.
	Some of the artist's concepts were better than what I had
	mentally imagined after reading Pratchett's novel.

Controls:
	Mouse-based.  Right button is the "examine closely" command,
	and the left button is for motion (double click for action).
	Very easy to learn and get used to.  They even provide a game
	setting for double click speed.

Music:
	Nothing breathtaking, but no jarring notes anywhere in the game.
	Most notable is the song "That's Death" performed by Eric Idle.

Character animation:
	Hand drawn animation, almost perfect in all respects.

Plot:
	Rincewind has to find death and get him back to work.
	The plot thickens beyond belief after that innocent start, and
	never failed to keep me wondering what was going to come next.
	Even better was the fact that Rincewind would make pithy comments
	about plot elements periodically.

Voices:
	Eric Idle as Rincewind was absolutely wonderful.
	All of the voices were perfectly suited to the characters.

Characters:
	Eric Idle was allowed to turn Rincewind into a mixture of
	the original Pratchett character and some of Idle's Monty Python
	persona.  The mixture worked amazingly well, such that I found
	Rincewind to be better than either variation alone would allow.
	All of the game's characters were amusing, interesting, and
	outright funny in some cases.

Puzzles:
	Just right.  Extremely devious, but always fair.

Ugly puzzles:
	None.  There is one maze in the game, but I promise maze-haters
	that they will enjoy this one.

Puzzle difficulty:
	Just perfect for my wife and myself.

Bugs:
	The installation manual tells you to run INSTALL on the CD,
	but there is no program there by that name.  Turns out that
	the program is dw2.bat.

	We had fairly frequent sound stuttering problems, but this isn't
	the first game where we have encountered this.  Exiting the
	game and restarting fixed it most of the time, but several times
	I was forced to reload the sound font files onto the sound card.

	Sound stuttering because the game was waiting for data to be read
	off the CD.  Next time I am going to use a CD emulator program.

Pros:
	Absolutely everything, but mostly the Rincewind character as
	re-interpreted by Eric Idle.  Definitely not the Rincewind you
	will find in the Pratchett novels, but a wonderful character
	for enjoyable gameplay.  Hats off to Terry Pratchett for allowing
	Eric Idle to modify one of the characters, and hats off to
	Eric Idle for doing such a wonderful job of it.

Cons:
	None at all.  This game was as perfect as they come.
	Well, OK, the sound problems weren't nice...

Conclusion:
	When both you and your wife can't wait to get home from work
	in order to play a game, you know you have a winner.  This one
	is very high on my top ten list, and definitely will be played
	again.  People who don't like wordy games, or Monty Python may
	find the game less enthralling.  For my part, I found it
	to be very funny, with pithy comments by Rincewind adding
	to the humour at almost every point in the game.