Retrospective: Discworld Article

Exactly my thoughts on the game at the time! I havent dared try to replay it, mainly because of the terrible frustrations inherent in the game design, but I still remember much of the dialogue and scenarios quite vividly- which to me is proof that the game worked on some level. It perfectly captured the Discworld look and feel, was genuinely hilarious, had some of the best voice acting in a game ever, but let itself down with the inane logic required to solve some of the puzzles.

But remember, its not little trinkets and paperwork that really count in life. I've got... got... well, I've got a really pointy hat. That's a start.

Heh! Nicely written!

I never bothered to play this when it was first out. Kept hearing that it was a lovely game that made you want to stab you own eyes out with a spoon. So pretty close to the article :o)

hmm, tempted - i love mental torture (in fact add it to my That's What I call Guantanamo Bay gaming-compilation)

I remember the octopus toilet puzzle - didn't you also have to add custard into the toilet for it to work? It just made no sense. I can understand the prunes - makes the guy go to the toilet - and I can understand the octopus - attacks the guy in the toilet - but the string and the custard? Absurd.

The second Discworld game was much better, and also had this as an opening.

Enjoyed the article. The fraps numbers on the screenshots are a bit bad though!

I did this one without a walkthough back in the day, but I think it took about six months.

And I had forgotten 'That Doesn't Work' until just now. Thanks for that.

Wanted to replay the game until I read the "That Doesn't work"-part. It WAS horrible. A friend and I completed the 16 floppydisk version with no speach, but only with a walkthrough. Having read tons and tons of Prachett-books since then, I have discovered that a lot of the puzzles can be found in one form or the other in his books.

/ On a sidenote, have anyone noticed how much Rowling ripps-off Pratchett? So many blatant comparisons.

This article just brings to light that we need a new Discworld game.

"(has Eric Idle ever done anything that hasn't been 100 per cent super-great after all?)"

So Haunt Me

Very simlier to how i remember it, althourgh i dont know alot about terry prattchet work my uncle loved it all and he tried to show me this game i thought that the puzzles were so off the rails that how could logic solve the game.

For completeness' sake, the first book (at least) was also turned into a text adventure back in the day. I seem to recall from reading Adventure Gamer that the second book was also planned but text advetures died.

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseeki...

Bought Discworld 2 for PS1 a while ago...havent dared to play it yet. Oh the memmory's :)

Can we have a retrospective on Discworld II and Discworld Noir as well please? I never got beyond the first third of Discworld Noir as I was forced to upgrade to Windows 2000 back in the day and it wouldn't run on that OS :(

I absolutely loved Discworld 2. I think at the time, the original Discworld for me was just way too complicated to get a grip on.

Lol remember it well. Got frustrated and bought a mag with a guide in it. Then spent the next six months amazing my little sister who was also playing it, by immediately solving the bizzare puzzle she had been stuck on for weeks. She didn't speak to me for ages when she found the mag in my room :)

Coincidentally picked this (and the sequel) up cheap a couple of weeks ago and, yep, pretty much everything you say.

Does anyone remember Discworld Noir?

Discworld: Noir was all kinds of awesome. The clues scratched in your notepad as inventory items was a great idea ("Mundy was upside-down") and the nods to just about every Bogart movie under the sun leave me grinning ear to ear every time I play it.

Discworld Noir was a properly decent adventure game, and unlike the first two, funny.

Never read a Discworld novel before I played this, but gave it a go as I'm a massive Monkey Island fan. Loved it to bits - although my glasses may be rose-tinted. I also completed it without a guide!

I always preferred the look of the second game. It felt like I was playing an interactive cartoon.

Discworld made me read Pratchet. I mean that as a good thing!
Subsequently I played the sequel, which in my recollection fared a bit better puzzlewise.
But the real deal was the already mentioned Discworld Noir, one of the finest and most atmospheric comedic point-and-clickies out there together with MI1 and Grim Fandango.

It should also be mentioned that the Discworlds were some of the few adventures ported to Playstation (cursor controlled by controller-ports).

I'm still not sure quite what some of you ever really saw in these games. I'm a big fan of both Pratchett and LucasArts point and click adventures and so playing this should be one of my favourite memories of the time...but the fact of the matter is that it just doesn't stand up to Monkey Island on any level at all.

Not to say that at the time I thought it was bad, I liked it a lot its just not the game some people remember it as and it never was.

Could I just point out that when I was writing this Discworld retro thingummie the reference to the super awesomeness of Eric Idle was meant to be dripping with a modicum of heavy irony and/or sarcasm? He's certainly no Palin. Or, indeed, Jones, Cleese or Chapman. Better than Carol Cleveland though.

This article doesn't work for me. I mean, it's OK, I just don't agree at all with Discworld's game design critique.

Well, I agree that the octopus in the toilet was pretty difficult to figure out and the butterfly puzzles were insane, but this game is HUGE, people - it was bound to have a couple of completely crazy ones in it. You can't judge a game by its 0,01% and most of the puzzles in Discworld are truly superb. And yes, they can be solved without ever looking into a walkthrough. I've beaten the game as a kid who barely understood English. It has introduced me to Pratchett and became one of my favorite adventure games.

In fact, the adventure game I just released a demo for - Frantic Franko - is heavily inspired by the first Discworld game. Try and criticize the puzzles in that one... Ha! You can't - they're perfect :)

"I've beaten the game as a kid who barely understood English."

Well it doesn't take language skills to be able to "try every item on every thing" until the puzzle is solved.

Well, I'd never have the patience to play like that. In an adventure game as huge as Discworld it's practically impossible.

Someone needs to work out how to link in their own article methinks.

i hope that's a legal copy of fraps!

Having played all three, I'd say Discworld 2 remains the best. It's the only one I'd ever bother to play again. I'm not enough of a masochist to even attempt Disworld 1 again, and I felt Noir was mediocre at best...

Back when I didn't have gamefaqs and the internet, I remember it took me ages to figure out the backwards conversation puzzle with Mrs. Cake in Discworld 2...

I wrote to the makers of this game complaining about all the bugs in the original release (it was fairly easy to entirely break the game) and they sent me a limited edition T-shirt. A few years ago I sold that T-shirt for nearly £50. Score!

I agree entirely with the article - some of the puzzles were way too obscure and could only really be solved through random combining of objects until something happened. 'That doesn't work' is still a household joke in my family to this day! It was a brilliant interpretation of the Discworld, but the design of the game was way too obscure for anyone but the most stubborn of players.

Nice article, great game - having been a massive Pratchett fan AND a massive point and click / Monkey Island fan, this was the perfect game for me. It's great playing games like Overlord these days as the thread of humour is often similar, for obvious reasons.

I finished Discworld 1 and 2 without help. Strangely though I don't remember it being that difficult. Perhaps I too blanked the frustrations out. I used to love point and clicks and adventure games. I remember playing the 1st Space Quest!

I have a disc of lucasarts classics and another with alone in the dark on it! The original and only scary one! What I really want the old sierra collections and Ecstatica. Though that wasn't really a point and click.

Remember giving up on the 1st one, but the 2nd and Noir were genius.

Was a huge Pratchett fan before the games, and still am, buying every book on the day of release!
Hope someone makes another game.

Nac Mac Feegle MMO anyone? :P Bigjobs!!

Nah, I love the crazy logic, and I love the Discworld setting. More than everything though, I love Eric Idle's voicework. Every time I read a Rincewind novel after that, that's exactly what he sounds like to me. I just wish he'd played him the Sky production A Colour of Magic. It would have been perfect.

Nice article. I'm a massive Prattchet fan, and have attemted to play this via Dosbox, as it was a bit before my time. Unfortunately, dosbox hurts my brain, can spend all day messing with settings, and stil get no voices. Didn't think it was worth playing without the apparerntly excellent acting, so have given up for now. Can anybody help?

I remember seeing a tv documentary in which Pratchett himself admitted how hard the game was. At a book signing a kid asks him for help with a particular puzzle and Pratchett has to give him a ridiculously convoluted solution.

I wrote to the makers of this game complaining about all the bugs in the original release (it was fairly easy to entirely break the game) and they sent me a limited edition T-shirt. A few years ago I sold that T-shirt for nearly £50. Score!

Ooh! I did that, and got the t-shirt too. A couple of years later, I got Terry to sign it. I must look it out for ebaying purposes.

I do remember playing and completing this on release for the PS1. And replaying it a couple of years ago. And giving up in frustration very quickly. Although a psn release might make me revisit it if I found a good guide.

I remember that "I love my wife sir, but oh you octopus" became a bit of a catchphrase at school...

I'd love a new discworld game - a massive open-world GTA-style game based on the plot to Night Watch would be awesome. I really hope some enterprising developer gets on with it while TP can still make a contribution.

"Did you get the number of that donkey cart?"

that's the line i most remember!

i completed the first two without help, but the first one took a long time. thankfully i avoided doing things in such an order that i broke the game, but some of those puzzles....ack.

possibly my favorite game ever i now run it through scummVM and still go back to it on rainy days. the maddening nature of the 'THAT doesnt WORK' made it all the more fun!

'10 minutes in a room with a complete git' was my favorite line, and i still quote it;)

" Having read tons and tons of Prachett-books since then, I have discovered that a lot of the puzzles can be found in one form or the other in his books."

@MORZTAN which is why I think the article misses the point somewhat, scatty puzzles that make no sense, perfect Prachett material and if it can drive a gamer a little nutty trying to figure them out, then its done its job - the balance is lost at times, but thats due to it needing more testing and a slight rethink to make it more satisfying to solve rather than the idea being wrong.

I completed it either under my own steam, or with one assist. I don't remember whether I had to look up Use Butterfly on Lamp, but I don't think so. 1. Use Butterfly on Lamp makes no sense because butterflies aren't know for flying towards lights. 2. Use ****** on Tip of flagpole, fuck you! I got totally stuck on the dragon's breath despite knowing exactly what I had to do (for two independent reasons!) and where to do it. I must have tried Use ****** on Flagpole a hundred times and visited every location in the city for hours if not days. There is no excuse for having Flagpole not work. 3. I think I had some kind of difficulty with the donkey's tail. Other than those three things, everything pretty much made sense to me. Of course you need the custard, it's aphrodisiac custard. Of course you need to tie the octopus up, if you try to shove it down the privy you get an animated battle with Rincewind. Of course you use a frog, what else do you have that could fix a butterfly in place? And having locations change when you did stuff was one of the major things I liked about Discworld over Lucasarts pieces - it inspired a feeling of exploration and 'aliveness' for me.

'has Eric Idle ever done anything that hasn't been 100 per cent super-great after all?' - I get the irony, but among other things - Discworld II. I mean, he did a fine job of the acting, but the dialogue was mostly off, the story was off, the puzzles were off (do you do the beehive thing two times verbatim, or three? I forget.), many of the voices were off (Death in particular, and he's the major character), and I winced when they dragged in the Life of Brian stoning sketch (I read Idle objected pretty strongly to that but was overruled.) Arguably better graphics, but overall not a patch on the first game. I really need to get around to playing Noir - it's just such a pain to get running...

Discworld actually introduced me to Pratchett (I'm American), so I know I wasn't cheating from the books. I didn't even know the game had any relationship to books at the time. My brother and I played the demo on a PC Gamer CD, loved it, bought the game (that is, begged for it) and completed it. A couple of years later I saw Interesting Times in a bookstore and happened to read the subtitle 'A Novel of Discworld'. 'Wait. What? Discwhat? There's...Ohhhhhh.' Bought, and I was off to fandom. That's its testament to me - the game not only sold itself to me, not only inspired me to complete it which was uncommon even in those days, but left such an impression that I made the leap of faith into a fantasy series - a species I held in contempt at the time - solely on its good name. It's that good.

Edit: PS, 'Ooooooh! Sparklies!' from the Archchancellor's office became a catchphrase for having seen something neat among me, my brother and our friends for a while, and humming the 'first' couple bars of the catchy, looping City Watch Theme was a common act of semi-mock-cruelty.

Edit edit: I missed this the first readthrough, but steady there MORZTAN. Pratchett's a parodist, you know; please be sure that it's him she's 'ripping off', right? And of course they don't feel alike to me at all. Among other things, there's little actual witch/wizard spellcasting in Discworld - about one magic spell per book - while HP dives into whole plot-critical magic ecosystems.

This game was so fucking hard.

Hint to the reviewer:

When taking screenshots using fraps - turn the frame rate indicator to "off"

Smelly: I did, but DOSbox just wasn't having any of it. It was either ugly yellow numbers or nowt, sadly. Have since been informed of a work-around, so shouldn't be an issue next time.