Discworld II: Missing Presumed … !? Review

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Discworld II: Missing Presumed … !?

Review by ScoutFebruary 2004

There’s a saying that goes, “A child is talkative, a lively woman is loquacious, an old man in his dotage is garrulous.”  Having just completed Discworld II: Missing Presumed … !?, I’m left wondering if an adjective exists to describe a really, really, really verbose adventure game that still manages to be funny, witty and profoundly entertaining. Probably not. The two are usually considered mutually exclusive. Most gamers balk at too much dialogue.  They want their gameplay meat-and-potatoes simple, and I see their point, I really do. Still, with talent like Terry Pratchett and Eric Idle listed in the opening credits, perhaps it’s time to set preconceptions aside and let the masters of yakkity-yak have their say.

Adapting story lines, locations and characters from several of Pratchett’s Discworld novels, now-defunct Perfect Entertainment, helmed at the time by the very funny writer and director Greg Barnett, managed to develop one of the best games no one ever talks about.  Released by Psygnosis in 1996, Discworld II was subtitled Missing Presumed … !? in the UK and Mortality Bytes in the US and served as Barnett and Co.’s followup to their 1995 Discworld release.

The game starts off with a beautifully animated cutscene. Rincewind, the inept and cowardly wizard who starred in the first game, is back. He and his buddy, the ape librarian for Unseen University, are stumbling through the streets of Ankh-Morpork after a night of drunken debauchery when they happen upon a donkey cart rigged with explosives. Rincewind, always quick with a bad idea, insists on disarming the bomb.

The voice acting here, by the above-mentioned Eric Idle of Monty Python fame (he does Rincewind’s dialogue in both games) is wonderful and sets the tone for the rest of the game. When the librarian ape is hesitant to agree to Rincewind’s plan, the wizard quips, “It’s not dangerous. It’s the start of the game. They can’t kill us off yet.” I mention this because it’s an important element of Discworld II, this self-referential thing. At one point, further on, when saddled with yet another mind-boggling complex object quest, Rincewind grumbles, “Take axe, open door, kill dragon … why wasn’t I born in the days of text adventures?” There’s a lot of this throughout the game.

Rincewind’s drunken meddling has an unexpected result. Though Death arrives on schedule to whisk off the victim of the coming explosion, the bony one is inadvertently caught in the premature blast and propelled offscreen in a cloud of smoke and debris. Opening credits roll over a song-and-dance number, “That’s Death,” written and performed by Eric Idle with an animated skeleton in top hat and cane dancing on a small stage.

From here, the game unfolds in four acts and wraps up with a short epilogue. As each act is basically a smaller game within the larger game, each with a dramatic arc of its own but connected to the whole by a single, strong plot line, I thought I’d structure my review thusly.

Act I: The Rite Stuff

As the act begins, the Arch Chancellor, head wizard of Unseen University, the wizard college in the city of Ankh-Morpork, is overseeing one of his wizard’s funerals. Unfortunately, the event is derailed by the fact that the wizard corpse-to-be is still alive. Well, not alive but not dead either … technically, that is. Dead but undead, if you get my drift. In other words, he’s snuffed it properly, but his spirit won’t leave his now-dead body. All because Death is AWOL.  What else to do but perform the rite of AsheKent? This, of course, involves the use of certain objects, none of which the Arch Chancellor has on hand. Rincewind is summoned and given the task of gathering the required items and returning posthaste. It’s not pertinent to this review what or where the objects are or what they are to be used for because the fun, i.e., the whole point, is to traipse around Ankh-Morpork, to meet interesting people and take them for everything they own in the hopes that someone, somewhere, will give up the goods. (If you must know, the needed items are three sticks, some dribbly candles, glitter dust, a vile smell, and four ccs of mouse blood. Happy now?)

If you’ve played the first Discworld game, you will know already what you are in for, and you will be right. And wrong. Right in that, yes, there is a lot of “fill the hat with salted corn to feed to the donkey to make it thirsty so it will drink the puddle dry and reveal the ruby that the barber wants before he will give you the scissors you need to cut the ribbon …” Multiply that premise tenfold, bury any possible hints in acres of game world or discard clues altogether, and you more or less have the first Discworld game.

Not so in the sequel.

In Discworld II, there are lots of verbal hints and at times some downright hand-holding. The result: Puzzles that delight and entertain instead of simply torment. Of course, this assumes that, like every good adventurer, you’ll steal everything that isn’t nailed down and will religiously click on said item once it’s in inventory.  Do that and you’ll receive a witty description and complementary hint.

One final word on the first Discworld, and then I promise to shut up. It was brain-numbingly hard, far and away the most difficult adventure game I have ever played. Part of this was because of the tortured, twisted illogic required to solve the puzzles, and part due to the lack of coherent in-game clues needed to solve said puzzles.  Even one of the developers admitted as much in a 1997 Usenet post and indicated that had Perfect Entertainment not already wrapped the voice work, they would have indeed added dialogued hints in an attempt to balance the game. In my book, there is nothing classier than an outfit that sees its mistakes and admits them. Even better would have been to do something about them, but, hey, you can’t have everything.

Luckily, these lessons had been learned when it came time to make Discworld II. The developers delivered an easier game with fair and balanced puzzles and hints scattered liberally about. In fact, other than a single low-level UHS hint, I didn’t once have to resort to a walkthrough. And even then it was only because I overlooked part of a room. Be sure to exhaustively explore the edges of your screen when you come upon a new area, and you should be fine. If you are reading this and thinking the first Discworld game sounds like your cup of tea, what can I say? Go beat yourself on the head with a hammer. You’ll get approximately the same results with a thousandth of the effort.

Act II: Come Die with Me

After Rincewind gathers the required articles and after the rite of AsheKent is performed, Death appears before the gathered wizards.  They state their case, asking that he return, but to their surprise he has a problem with that. A really big problem. See, Death is tired of the scythe and the robe, tired of being the heavy. All he wants is to lay on the beach, wear hats with corks dangling from the brim and drink fancy cocktails. With that he disappears back to wherever he was hiding. Rincewind (who else?) is dispatched to bring Death back. After more object quests, Rincewind tracks Death down and makes his argument. Death agrees to return but only if Rincewind can arrange to get his poll numbers up. Rincewind immediately comes up with a plan to remake Death’s image, which necessitates drafting “Cut Me Own Throat” Dibbler, the sleazy, slimy salesman from Discworld I, to assist. Dibbler, big surprise, asks for three items, and so off Rincewind goes, ranging from squalid Ankh-Morpork to exotic Djelibeybi, from the kingdom of the Elven Queen to Bonedead Beach and back.

As I crisscrossed the game world, hunting and gathering, I was struck by how easily I fell into the rhythm of the game, how fluidly I moved from puzzle to puzzle, drawn along by the unfolding story.  It was a perfect balance. When confronted with the task of speeding up time a millionfold, I knew just what I had to do. When I needed to fool a coroner in order to get a death certificate, I saw all the steps in a single “aha” moment. This game is a prime example of how puzzle and story should each reinforce the other, and for that reason alone it serves as a precursor to and model of the way adventure games are being made today—simpler puzzles, more story. Regardless of what you think of the trend, it seems to be the way things are developing, and Discworld II was doing this back in the mid-90s. There was nothing particularly groundbreaking or stunningly creative in the puzzle design, and neither was the story anything to write home about. The thing here was the dynamic between the two. This was where the brainpower and the sweat were expended, and the results were worth the effort.

The graphics were just as superlative. My best guess is that, at the very least, the cutscenes were farmed out to an animation house.  The colors are rich and saturated, the figures sharp and crisp.  Watching a swarm of bees rise from a hive and buzz across the extreme foreground, tiny beads of sweat breaking out on their beaks, or the bitchy Elf Queen regally slouched on her throne, her hair rippling like golden wheat, or Death’s niece Susan in her little pink dress on her swing set in Death’s back yard, you’d think this was a Disney animated feature.

Act III: The Grim Rincewind

In Rincewind’s universe, no good deed goes unpunished. His plan has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, and now Death is at the top of everyone’s A list. And like any nouveau celeb, he intends to take full advantage, partying like there’s no tomorrow. Poor Rincewind is left with no choice but to go to Death’s estate and take up the mantle until Mr. D decides to return. Henry, Death’s butler, is not impressed and insists that Rincewind prove he can fill Death’s shoes.

This part of the game takes place in a single location comprised of three areas: Death’s house, Death’s stable and Death’s garden.  And it was here that an underlying theme of the game surfaced in full force, that of mirroring. I mentioned at the outset of the review that there was a self-referential tone to Discworld II.  It was made in the mid-90s, when irony ruled. In hindsight, it all seems a little self-indulgent, but at the time it was important to a lot of people, including, apparently, the good folks at Perfect Entertainment. In this game, Barnett, and possibly through him, Pratchett, held up a mirror to the player, to the game and to the whole concept of what an adventure game is. Here’s a sample.

Rincewind: “Collect a babe, a jingle and some novelties.  I don’t suppose you’d consider collecting them yourself?”

Dibbler: “No, mate. What sort of fool would waste his valuable leisure time voluntarily going off on annoying little quests set by stupid and ungrateful people, eh?”

Rincewind: “Ha. Ha. Ha. Yes! He’d have to be some sort of idiot, wouldn’t he?”

The obvious joke, of course, is that adventure gamers are a rather masochistic lot. The not-so-obvious joke is that the annoying little quests are not annoying at all but the very heart, the very meat of the game.

This self-mockery was funny enough in its own right, but then in the third act Barnett and his team did something entirely novel, something that deepened and enriched the entire game for me. You are required to almost exactly duplicate a puzzle from the first act, except instead of being in Unseen University you are now in Death’s garden. Otherwise, everything is identical, both the methodology and outcome. As in the light of day, so in the dark of night. As in life, so in death. Or something like that. There was a lot of this twisting and turning around the game on itself. Even the epilogue turned a well-loved movie trope on its head, not exactly mirroring it but inverting it. Active minds at work here is what I’m getting at, and that makes for a good game, regardless of the seemingly endless chatter.

Act IV: Till Death Do Us Part

This is where my bright idea about a review in four acts breaks down, as I really can’t reveal much more of the plot without doing the game and the reader a disservice. Suffice it to say, after delivering four-fifths of a perfect game, in the very short Act IV and the even shorter epilogue, Perfect Entertainment lost their focus and stumbled, slapping on a hurried, tacked-on ending. In fact, this game could have easily been structured in three acts and would have, I suspect, benefitted from the cutting.

There were a few other problems, nothing seriously damning. I experienced an error message once and had to reboot, but otherwise the game ran smoothly. I played in DOS 7.0 under Windows 95 on an older computer with an overly slow CD-ROM player, and because of that I had to copy quite a few graphics files to my hard drive, but that was my fault. Newer CD-ROM drives should do just fine. There are both Windows and DOS installs, so you have your choice. I played it in DOS, and other than the above-mentioned bug, I had no problems. I did read about a patch that was required for the Windows version.

Despite the stumble at the end, as Discworld II wound down, I was smiling and nodding and wishing there were more games like this. It was sly and satirical, dry and witty, gorgeous, smart and fun. I loved the constant banter, finding it by turns eloquent, penetrating and crass but never boring. I never felt I was being condescended to or hoodwinked or offered up the same old, same old in a slightly new version. It’s classic point-and-click 2D, no dying, cartoony adventure gaming with lots of funny-looking guys in pointy hats. What more could you want? The End

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: Perfect Entertainment Publisher: Psygnosis Release Date: 1996 (PC); 1997 (PS)

Available for: DOS PlayStation Windows

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System Requirements

486 DX4-100 or better DOS 5.0 or Windows 95 and DirectX 3 or higher SVGA card with 512 KB or more RAM 16 MB RAM (Win95), 8 MB (DOS) 4X CD-ROM drive Mouse

Where to Find It

Links provided for informational purposes only.  FFC makes no warranty with regard to any transaction entered into by any party(ies).

      Copyright © Electric Eye Productions.  All rights reserved.  No reproduction in whole or in part without express written permission.

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16 Responses to Screw the Internet

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    God damn, Scout, I’d never heard of this Lanier fellow, but that’s pretty profound.

    Information is not a manufacturable item… as you said, we are making less and less. This is either indicative of a larger-scale societal transformation, or a bad thing. I’m afraid I’m inclined to assumed the latter.

    Thanks!

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Steerpike, that was exactly the argument Lanier was having with callers on the BBC. Lanier was all fatalistic about society’s drop in real productivity while his opponents claimed that this was a huge transformation and that he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all. If you notice, the web address of that first Lanier link is well.com. I mean, that is old! The Well?

    Lanier’s thoughts were pretty much echoed by David Simon, one of the creators of The Wire. Here he speaks with Bill Moyers about the fate of paid journalism in the face of the web.

  • Spike

    I’ve read many criticisms of Facebook et. al.  I’ve also read contradictions of those criticisms, namely, that social sites are making people more connected than ever.  I think that that connectedness is an illusion.

    For several months at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 my daughter badgered me to join FB.  I could connect with her and some of her friends that I know as well as renew old acquaintances with some of her friend’s mothers.  I finally signed up so she’d quit the badgering. I used to check in every day to see what daughter and friends were saying because if I didn’t she’d ask if I saw her post, or a friend’s post. 

    What I’ve learned is this:

    1.  “Karen Likes John’s photo (or post)” IS NOT communication.

    2.  The reason I lost contact with some of these “friends” in the first place is that we no longer had anything in common.

    3.  I am bombarded with so many ads in so many places that I can do without more.  My policy is to never click on ads on FB or on many other sites. 

    4.  While FB’s original mission was connectedness/communication, I think it has become “Let’s make as much money from these fools as we can.”  “Wanna have gobs of fun playing a free game on FB?”  That game is gonna cost ya big, folks. 

    5.  Social sites are just more places where your personal info can be stolen.  There’s enough risk out there as it is.  Additional risk is not providing any valuable payoff for me.

    6.  Why do I want to “friend” a certain handbag manufacturer?  Why do I want to take a quiz that tells me what my personality is?  FB content providers tell you up front that if you click the link to take their quiz (goes for other types of content as well) you are giving them permission to access your profile info.  That’s ok.  I’ll also give you my SSN, bank account number and the key to my front door.  Not.

    7.  Don’t even get me started on the number of people who start an account in a pet’s name, and even have the pets making friends and posting.

    “…he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all.”

    No, it’s just that most of us get to the age when we demand a bit of wheat with our chaff.

    At 38 my daughter is older than the average demographic of social sites although I know that that demographic is skewing up.  She seems to be cooling on FB.  Some of her 221 friends are as well.  Many of them do want some wheat.  When more cooling has taken place I will unjoin.

    I wonder, though, what new fad will come along when FB, Twitter and others run their course?  MySpace, anyone?

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    My favorite line from the BBC interview was when Lanier was comparing MySpace and Facebook. He admitted that MySpace had some eye gougingly bad pages but said that he liked the “strangeness” of personalities that you get with it. With Facebook, he claimed that it was like looking at a tax form. A boring, watered down, bland presentation of people.

    I joined Facebook almost exactly a year ago. Apart from sparking up a new friendship with a very dear buddy, I’ve gotten about zero back from it. I sort of read with bemusement the activities of people I hardly know and could care less about. And when you consider how much information the devs harvest there…it’s scary. Lanier claims that the information is so far worthless to the investors and that the whole thing has become a sort useless ritual serving no purpose. He claimed that Google’s ads on the other hand will probably turn out to be the greatest advertising model ever created. He also thinks Google should stop before it’s too late but says they probably won’t. Just a glance at the side bar reveals about 4 ads for advertising agencies. Heh.

  • lokimotive

    Has anybody read Anti-Oedipus? I’m slogging my way through it (the third attempt I believe), and Deleuze and Gauttari’s ideas seem relevant to this in a way that I’m not sure I can articulate. This probably has something to do with a conversation I was eavesdropping on that, coincidentally, mentioned a lot of Deleuze and Gauttari’s theories. Someone was talking about another theorist (whose name I didn’t catch) who was defending “Generation Y” essentially. The argument went that Generation Y is an example of a “de-Oedipalized” cultural group (that’s Anti-Oedipus jargon, just stay with me). Apparently this meant that they made connections in a different manner than other generations, the idea of bricollage was brought up and things were generally mired in a lot of reasons why I don’t have my Masters in English. What I got from it was this Generation Y shoots out connections everywhere and attempts to make up a whole idea with them as opposed to relying on predefined pathways. In Deleuze and Guattari’s language: the schizo as opposed to Oedipus. In language that probably makes sense: Peer to Peer as opposed to client-server.

    So, of course, no one’s really right. I’m skeptical of the idea that Generation Y (full disclosure: I’m 29 so I’m part of that group) has enacted some sort of paradigm shift in how to operate in social systems, but facebook has changed how I connect with people. Then again, it’s not like I don’t value face to face communication.

    The future is somewhere in between. I’m really not cynical enough to believe that we are at the end times of civilized society because of Web 2.0. Instead society will change and stay the same because that’s what it does. Facebook is not the future; it’s probably a rung up the ladder though.

  • kaythomas

    To me, Facebook and Twitter are 0’s. They are not worth my time.  I do not care what someone I know or don’t know did a half hour ago or will do next.  I have met up with people on facebook I had lost contact with.  But, in truth, the reason I had lost contact was I was not that interested in staying in contact.

    I think for many people the Facebook/Twitter world is great.  For me it has nothing to offer. 
    kay

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    Tap has an automated device that twits… tweets… whatever whenever someone posts a new article. Just in case it draws some visitors.

    To be honest, though, I’m on Kay’s side of the fence, I don’t understand Twitter and I don’t understand why it’s so popular. I barely care what I’m doing from moment to moment, why should anyone else?

    I don’t get Facebook either, though I’m a member to keep track of all the girls who wouldn’t give me the time of day in high school.

  • Lewis B

    Tweets are great for giving me snippets of news.  If I like what I’ve read in the short paragraph tweets give, then I will visit the main page for that tweet. (Very good for following world news, favourite columnists, etc.)

    However, reading tweets from people such as “Just woke up, Madonna is giving me a massage while I shave my nuts” is not my idea of a good read.

  • Toger

    I use tweets the same way Lewis does. Of the people/things I follow, if the tweet is interesting I’ll follow the link to read the entire article. I follow fairly intelligent people, so I’m not subjected to the idiocy of “Just brushed my teeth while sitting on toilet”.

  • Gregg B

    @loki: I’m afraid I’ve not heard of them. I’m a couple of years below you so that puts me in the same Generation Y as well. I read through a few of those links Scout posted as well as a few more on Lanier’s new book “You Are Not a Gadget” and it took me a fair while to get to the crux of what he is saying and he has a lot to say, most of which I find very confusing.

    As a graphic designer the whole “everything is becoming advertising” thing has been bothering me for years. The incessant barrage of advertising is like fingernails on the chalkboard of my soul, which sort of makes me a hypocrite. After all the years of tuning my art and design skillz my creative abilities have amounted to nothing more than crafting pretty ads that sell things. Non of it speaks any truth or has any sort of ‘beauty’; it’s just stone cold mechanical capitalism. Granted there are ads out there that are beautiful, clever and visionary but the front line stuff is as dull as it gets. I’m sure this isn’t strictly what he’s getting at but it’s definitely something that irks me in relation to Scout’s last remark.

    Anyway, I remember Twitter just exploding in what seemed like the space of a week and I still can’t fathom the allure of it aside from providing a direct stream of consciousness from famous folk to their ravenous fans. I wish I’d thought of it to be honest. I can see the creators sitting around a table staring at Facebook and then saying “I know! We make a website that’s just about status updates! You can even update them with your mobile phone!”.

    With regards to Twitter news snippets, unless it’s for a phone, I don’t see the point because RSS feeds do a great job. At present too great; I simply can’t keep up with my subscriptions. There’s too much information on this super highway.

  • Jen

    Twitter is officially the dumbest thing ever.

    That said, it looks like I will have to be the official “tweeter” for my day job before too long. I can’t wait! (roll eyes)

  • xtal

    I’m with everyone else here. I’m glad to say I’ve never signed up for Facebook; I fear that if I ever had I would have long ago died from loss of brain cells due to reading moronic status updates. It’s as Kay said: ninety-five per cent of people with whom you lose contact are probably no longer in your life because you have nothing left in common. And echoing Steerpike’s comment, me eating toast and jam on a Sunday morning watching Fawlty Towers is not interesting, not to me. Why the hell would anyone else give a shit?

    Twitter I signed up for about a year ago, not really understanding what it was. I now understand it…but don’t care to use it often. I have made 58 tweets over that year. I suspect for some that is a daily or weekly average. It’s just Facebook status updates without all the drunken photographs. I admit it can be mildly useful for following, say, a news site. Usually when I hop on my twitter (once every two weeks??) it reminds me that I should read The Onion more often. That’s about it.

    Let’s see… looking at the actual humans I follow, um… Wil Wheaton is happy that the LA Kings have won 9 games in a row, my sister-in-law thought our dinner tonight was “delicious,” and Kevin Smith’s batteries are recharged … or something.

    Wow, my life is already getting better!

    p.s.  <—– Gen Y'er (can we call ourselves that?) and proud that when I Google my own name a real estate company pops up.

  • Fraser

    Twitter is exactly as useless as the person who’s writing it. If someone is telling you boring shit over Twitter, it’s the person wasting your time, not the delivery channel.

    MySpace is the same, but it seems more intrinsically garbage because for some reason almost everyone who used it was an intellectual embryo with a fetish for unreadable hyperneon text on top of garish uninteresting photos. Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.

    That’s the argument against the whole of this post: the internet isn’t evil, but the people who use it might be. It’s people who make business models successful; people who make money flow to advertisers instead of artists, by buying into the advertising.

    This has been a pretty didactic post, so let me compensate by saying VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOOO!!!

  • Gregg B

    Good point about not blaming the delivery channel Fraser. I seem to recall Lanier saying that he preferred the personality that MySpace has over Facebook despite its Craptastic Pages of Illegibility. I’m trying to think of something intelligent to follow that up with but my brain is failing me at the moment, so…

    VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOO!!!

  • Jason Venter

    Fraser, I really loved your following comment:

    “Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.”

    I think that may just be one of the most hilariously true comments I’ve read in a comments area on any video game web site ever.  That sounds overly dramatic, I know, but I actually mean it.  Kudos to you!

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Yeah but don’t you miss all the ugliness of MySpace? All those hideous pages at least had personality or what Lanier called the “strangeness of the person” to them.

    I actually don’t agree with a lot of what Lanier says esp “the hive mind must die” stuff. But I do think he is right about the spirit shriveling blandness of Facebook.

    I also suspect that Twitter is going to be around for a while. It will be more and more influential. People are simply not as willing to ingest huge amounts of information in the form of pages of text anymore. The delivery systems that succeed will be those that can communicate a lot of information in a short amount of time. Most days we want “glimpses” or “snapshots” not total immersion. Lewis, Toger and Fraser are correct in that you get out of it what you decide to follow.

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