Today is one of those days when I have free time and there’s very little I have to do, plenty I could or ought to do but not much I really want to do, so I end up feeling restless.

I think they call them Sundays.

So in lieu of anything actually useful or interesting I thought I’d write in my blog. You lucky, lucky people!

Discworld II

I spent a fair amount of yesterday and today playing Discworld II. It’s a game from 1996 that in order to play I had to install an emulator called scummvm. In fact I own the game, used to play it on my first PC[*], but I still have to play it through the emulator.

It’s a point-and-click adventure game of the kind I’m not sure they make any more. If they do they’ll be web-based these days.

It still holds up well. Mostly I think because it’s well written and acted. It’s got Eric Idle playing Rincewind and Rob Brydon doing most of the other male voices with Kate Robbins most of the female ones. The basic gameplay is that you have to collect a series of items in order to fulfil quests. Getting the items usually involves using other items in combination and interacting with the game characters in a few predefined ways. When you complete a task there’s often a little “cut-scene” where the action plays out as a little movie.That makes it sound dull but it’s the humour in the dialog, in the scenarios and the cut-scenes that makes it entertaining for me. The puzzle element less so. Sometimes it feels like you have to “use” an item with every other possible item in every location before you figure out what to do. Of course there are clues in the dialog if you spot them, and there is a sort of logic to most of it. It also helps if you’ve read the books.

I did cheat a little towards the end. There are four acts an an epilogue and I used a walkthrough for one item in act four and for the epilogue (which only consists of about 3 or 4 actions in any case)

Anyway it was fun. How much of that is nostalgia and how much the game I don’t know.

And since this has sort of turned into a review –

8/10 – this non-gamer enjoyed this retro game.

(goes back to change title of post)

[*]Sort of. I played Discworld on my first PC. It was one of the first things I did with it. Later when Discworld II came out I needed a higher-spec PC to play it. I ended up upgrading mine more or less sucessfully (though I did blow up my flatmate’s CPU along the way).