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Discworld II

"Discworld II" learned from the mistakes of it's precursor. The puzzles are far less convoluted, and apparently I wasn't the only person who was annoyed that once you were given a quest the assignment would never be repeated, because now someone in the game will say "you need this and this and this," when asked, and that in itself is a great blessing. The puzzles in the first of the four "acts" that the game is divided into were particularly sensible, fairly free of stupid stuff that makes no sense and useless busywork. I only cheated once in the first act, and that was because I missed putting my mouse over an area of the screen that would have allowed me to discover a useful object (even after I read the cheat and knew where it was, I still couldn't find it, although it's not that small). Oh, and I cheated on the puzzle immediately after that because I was feeling impatient.

After that the game gets more difficult. This is not necessarily because the puzzles were more clever, in my opinion, they just involved a better memory. Also there were elements that seemed to be designed simply to throw the game player off (I mean, why would you show a map of an area, and then have one locale that's not shown on the map? Isn't that just a cheap way to drag out the game?). I cheated off and on through the rest of the game, and didn't feel like I'd lost out on any real fun puzzles because of it. There is nothing half as bad as anything in Discworld.

But in terms of dialogue, of which, like it's predecessor, this game is overbrimming with, "Discworld II" is pretty mediocre. Eric Idle still voices the wizard Rincewind (he also wrote the cute theme song), and he still says his lines as though they are funny, and sometimes they are, as when he posits that the reason demons so frequently take up law is because wizards are always asking them to do their will, but many of the lines fall flat. Even worse, there are several painfully annoying characters, including the most annoying character from the first game, Chucky. But Chucky is only mildly annoying compared with the guy with the constant hacking cough or the trio of deadhead wizards whose unfunny dialogue is the first interactive part of the game.

The story is a perfectly decent one. Death has disappeared, no one is dying and they're put off about it, and Rincewind must find Death and get him back where he belongs. This involves a series of quests for ridiculous objects. Much of Rincewind's dialogue consists of self-referential adventure game humor ("Just once I'd like an adventure game where I lay in bed while everyone else runs around finding things"), and some of that's quite amusing, but there's a lot of it and it gets old. The game is also so full of references to the first game that I think you might be a bit confused if you haven't played it. I played enough of the first one to know most of the characters, but there were references I didn't get at all.

Still, the dialogue is fitfully amusing -- we're not talking about something painful, like Toonstruck -- the puzzles are good, and Idle and Kate Robbins, who does the female voices, give the lines their all (the less said about whoever does the voice of the guy with the hacking cough the better). And the animation is a little slicker, although I actually preferred the look of the first game, unlike every review I've read (I don't like Rincewind hunched over like that, he had better posture in Discworld). So all-in-all it's a pretty decent game.

If only one could put the dialogue from the first game into this one. Then you'd have a masterpiece.

-- Charles Herold -1999