This is the twenty ninth Discworld book, and it features the Ankh-Morpork city watch. Mostly though it features Sam Vimes, as he is sent back in time with a criminal called Carcer due to a lightning storm over the Unseen University. They arrive a few days before a revolution that Vimes was a part of when he was a young recruit to the watch. In the new timeline Carcer kills young Sam’s mentor John Keel, and Vimes ends up taking his place.
I have read this before, but I could remember almost nothing about it. After having finished it again I can see why. It’s fine, but it feels like it doesn’t have a lot to say after the excellent original book.
I actually have a physical UK copy of this game, I think it’s supposed to be one of the rarest ever made. It was released after the Saturn was already effectively dead. I bought it second hand I think off of eBay when that site was new and you had to post cheques in the mail. It only cost me £30 I think.
I’ve read this several times before, but it’s this months pick for the book club. I figured I should read it again to have it fresh in my mind. I remembered almost all of it, the only thing I think I didn’t was the Soul Scrolls shop where unmanned printers are printing out prayers which get shredded straight away.
This is an RPG on the PlayStation made by Hironobu Sakaguchi, the man that created the Final Fantasy series. It’s set in modern day New York, and you play a cop that is dealing with horrific incidents caused by mitochondria coming alive and trying to take over the Earth.
This is the story of a morbidly obese man that is addicted to food. He has become trapped in his apartment due to his weight, and at the start of the book is going to be removed by crane to go to the hospital and have his foot amputated. This goes wrong however when everyone else seems to turn into rage filled zombies.
This is a GameBoy Advance game where you play a series of “microgames” one after the other. Each one lasts a handful of seconds, and you have to figure out what you have to do, and what the controls are before you run out of time. The aim in each section is to finish a certain amount of them without losing all your lives. Each level is themed around a different character, and has it’s own intro and ending cutscene.
I was obsessed with this game before release, I was reading up on Internet forums about it when it was going to be on the Nintendo 64. The director of the game was on a lot of forums answering questions and doing interviews. It released for the GameCube in the end, after being delayed several times.
This is the second Mario platformer for the GameBoy. The graphics are significantly improved, it looks quite a bit like Super Mario World on the SNES, although it is obviously in greyscale and much lower resolution. It also has a world map where you select levels like the SNES game too.
I picked this game at random as something to play with my youngest son, Joe. I’d never played this version before, and we managed to get all of the retro achievements within about twenty minutes. It only has two of the original games four levels, and is obviously very simple graphically. We both had a lot of fun playing through it though, it definitely has a lot of the feel of the arcade game.
I bought this with the Dreamcast at the UK launch of the machine. I was absolutely amazed with the graphics and speed. The first level with a section where a killer whale is destroying a jetty behind you while you run into the screen was unlike anything I’d seen before.
I bought this with the PlayStation 1 on launch day in the UK, I went halves with my brother to be able to afford it. We both finished the game that day since it’s only really a single track. It has multiple difficulties, and on the higher one an extra section of the track opens up. You then have “extra” difficulties where you drive the track mirrored. We ended up playing the demo disk that came with the PlayStation quite a lot too, I was very impressed with one where you’re controlling a dinosaur.
This is the US NES version of the Famicom game Dragon Quest. It was never released over here in the UK, and I didn’t even hear about it at the time. I first encountered RPGs reading about them in Super Play magazine for the SNES.
This is a Game Boy Advance remake of the original Metroid for the NES. I’ve never finished the NES one since I always get lost, it lacks the map of Super Metroid and the graphics aren’t detailed enough to make the areas as distinct. I’ve finished this one a couple of times now, and it’s excellent. It’s a pretty short game like all Metroids, but the whole thing flows excellently and there is no padding.
I borrowed this from the library as an audio book. It’s written by the professor of AI at the University of New South Wales. Despite that, it’s not particularly technical or even all that in depth. It’s an overview of the current state of AI, the hype around it and the issues around it’s use.