13-Aug-2001 Since Paul Presley habitually spells Wizard with two 'Z's, who better to take a look at the sequel to the best-selling adventure game of last year?
I have to be careful what i say about Discworld II. The last person to unjustly criticise a Terry Pratchett project found himself being quoted on the dust jacket of his next book where his comments made the man seem like a fool (to be exact, Tom Paulin, Irish Poet, said on BBC2's The Late Review: 'The man's a complete amateur. He doesn't even write in chapters. Hasn't a clue'.
An amateur that's sold more books than God nonetheless - well, nearly). Luckily, I've got nothing but good things to say about Discworld II as it's one of the best adventures to come along since, well, Discworld I.
Rory, Rory, tell us a story
The plot has been penned by the folks at Perfect Entertainment rather than Pratchett himself, although it's based upon two or three of the books and the author did spend time going over the script to make sure it retained the right flavour. Combining Reaper Man, Mort and Moving Pictures, the tale is about what happens when Death goes missing. Having been caught in a Lethal Weapon 3-style explosive intro, the Grim Reaper has been blown to the distant continent of xxxx (pronounced Four x - it's the Discworld equivalent of Australia) and it's up to you as Rincewind to sort out the mess as without Death, no one's dying.
The game is split into four acts, each with a separate goal. The first is to try and summon Death to find out what's going on. The second is to travel to xxxx and persuade him to return to work. The third sees Rincewind becoming Death and the final act is where it all comes together and Rincewind has to save Death's life.
To give too much away would spoil things, suffice to say it captures the Discworld genre perfectly, as well as appealing to a wider audience thanks to a liberal dose of Monty Python about the place. The opening song is penned and sung by Eric Idle (who plays Rincewind again) and to say that it sets the tone for the rest of the game is something of an understatement.
The game really scores in the way it's constructed. My personal benchmark for cartoon-style adventures has always been the original Monkey Island game and Discworld II surpasses it easily. The game consists of four acts, each with dozens of tasks to perform, packed with the kind of sarcastic humour that made tv shows like Blackadder so popular.
Is it stupidly difficult again?
Unlike the first game, the challenge has been toned down slightly in response to all the feedback received. That's not to say it's perfect, rather that it's better structurally. A lot of the first game was spent wandering around with about two dozen objects and with no clue as to what you should be doing. This time you always know what it is you have to do, just not how to do it. Plus, the puzzles are less illogical and more fitting to the continuation of the story, eliminating the high frustration-factor that was associated with the first game, but without losing any of the challenge.
Monkey Island's strength was that it piled puzzle on top of puzzle so that every time you took one step towards a goal, the goal would suddenly move off to the side and force you to turn around. Most of today's adventures don't seem to bother with this much depth, opting for a single-layering effect. There is a locked door. To open it you need a key. The key is in a jar on the table. As simple as that. Monkey Island's approach, which is exactly the approach Discworld II has taken, is to say, there is a locked door. To open it you need a key. On the table are seven keys and you can only pick one of them. The table is surrounded by a moat. The moat is too wide to cross, and so on. And then, once you'd got hold of the key, the door would do something annoying like hide the lock.
What this does is increase the challenge level of the game tenfold. Of course, it's easy to let this become more frustrating than challenging, so the key is to present these problems in a way that keeps the player's interest.
This is where the rich presentation of Discworld II scores out. You simply can't fault it. The animations are superb, almost Disney-like in quality, and they far exceed those of the first game (in fact, there's a scene involving time-travel that will show you exactly how improved they are). The audio quality is also superb, with brilliant voice overs mixing with wonderfully atmospheric musical scores - always a much neglected area of game design in my book.
The curse of competition
Anyway, we've now reached the part of the proceedings where I have to dust off the giant Score-O-Tron machine, feed in all the data regarding the game and press the green flashing button marked evaluate!
Before I assign a numerical value to the score box, I have to take you back, back in time, back to the misty bygone era that was 1995.
The world was a younger, more innocent place back then. Noel's House Party was at the peak of its popularity, the horrors of the Spice Girls were still just a gleam in a pervy record producer's eye, and Newcastle were a prominent force in British Premier League football.
In the January 1995 issue (issue number 22 for all those issue number junkies out there), we were treated to the original Discworld game and came away suitably impressed, awarding it a score of 96. A trifle generous, you think? Well, at the time there were very few quality adventure games about and we were perhaps a little grateful for one to have appeared. There's no denying that it was indeed a class game.
It was challenging, entertaining and funny - the best adventure since Monkey Island some might have said.
Now, as you have read, I'm suitably impressed with the game. I'd say it's better than the original simply because it uses all the same formulae and manages to improve the quality all round. However, I'm not going to award it an even higher score. Aside from the fact that a score of 97 would make it one of the highest rated games in the history of PC Zone, there is also far more in the way of competition about at the moment and what it doesn't do is separate itself from the pack in any major way. Broken Sword is a similar-looking game and is also quite playable, as is The Gene Machine. Zork Nemesis provides an interactive atmosphere second to none and The Pandora Directive has just as much humour to it. Of course, this is not meant as a criticism, you understand. I'm just saying that it's part of a larger crowd now and this affects the way you view things. Plus there's the forthcoming Curse Of Monkey Island from LucasArts and who knows how good that will be?
But in and of itself, Discworld II really is superb. Fans and non-fans of Pratchett should all find something to enjoy, the former being able to revel in the elements of the author's world made real, the latter being attracted by the other more mainstream Python-esque side of things.
Of course, if you're not a fan of either then you're still left with a challenging adventure game to play with. What more could you want? Z
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