Game Review: Discworld Noir

Time for a geek post. I've held it in long enough.

Despite having booked flights to Alexandria, read Caitlin Moran's How to be a Woman and survived the carnage of an N-Dubz gig for the third time in a row whilst out of my metaphorical tree and resembling a mud-drenched bag lady at Guilfest, I still consider this last week's greatest achievement to have been the completion of Discworld Noir, one of my favourite games of all time. I remember being glued to this as a 10-year-old, unashamedly relaying instructions from a walkthrough while my best friend clicked away, until eventually the computer packed up and we lost it all. Now, as a 19-year-old, it's all over... the loss of slow-burning anticipation for both this and Harry Potter in the same week makes everything feel oddly empty. But worth it.

If you are not already familiar - or, indeed, just not familiar enough - with the works of Terry Pratchett the best site to visit is http://www.lspace.org/. Personally I have not read all of them. Not even close. Having played the games first, I picked up the books in a completely random order and have now given myself a year to get through them all... would be a little intimidated by the though if it wasn't akin to, say, spending a year eating a packet of Rowntree's Randoms a day, or spending each night in a ballpond, while expanding your vocabulary and wrestling with pertinent philosophical puzzles. It's going to be a joy, as the game has already proved.

Getting Discworld Noir to work proved to be a bit of a challenge in itself. Designed for Windows 98, I'd never successfully got it working on any version of XP (the title screen would open, you'd get a glimpse of the square-jawed main character and then the whole thing would crash) and so hopes for Windows 7 hadn't been high. Nevertheless this Easter I resolved to give it a go. After trawling nerd forums for what felt like days I managed to install a patch that, while a little jittery at the beginning, allowed you to play the game with virtually no problems at all. This alone was enough for me to bounce around in a self-congratulatory bubble for the following week.

The game, with its dystopian night-time setting and narrator who communicates almost entirely through hard-boiled monologue, is an excellent parody of the film noir genre - the Wikipedia page details a few of the not-so-subtle references. Having also been an avid Tomb Raider fan back when Pierre and Larson were the only humanoid baddies and Lara's breasts were still bigger than her head, I cackled at the appearance of 'Laredo Cronk - Tomb Evacuator' in the Guild of Archaeologists. 

In addition, as with the older games, a number of the characters and locations from the books appear in the game: Vimes and Nobby from the watch (again - the latter's put-upon Northernish accent seems to have changed since the older games), Death, the Patrician and Leonard da Quirm. The somewhat chunky graphics still managed to convey their distinct, slightly grotesque facial features but if I'd already had an image of what they should look like, it was far from ruined, as their in-game representations were spot on anyway. Everything about the settings was also perfect - the backing music, object design, the continual darkness and drizzle that characterise the game.

However, even if you haven't read a single Discworld it makes very little difference. When you're chasing a serial killer, searching for lost trolls, climbing walls, finding golden swords, blagging your way into wizard universities, turning undead (oops, spoiler.), gambling, clambering into sewers and saving the world, frankly whether or not your surroundings are familiar makes little difference. Interactions between characters, scripted by Pratchett himself, are fairly lengthy and so playing the game becomes less of an immersive, first-person experiece and more like reading a short story, at your own pace and to some extent in your own order. I very stupidly did not gather quotes as I was going, but the dialogue is as witty as the novels. You will laugh. Trust me.  

In conclusion: buy this game. Buy it now. And then with your grappling hook secure and your protective runes carefully drawn, and maybe some rubber gloves too, plunge into the world of internet geekdom and get hold of a game patch. You will not regret it.

Conspicuous consumption

I should stress before I begin that the inspiration for this post did not come from any weird repressed urges I have or have had, aside from the ones discussed below. Moreover it came from my lunch.

Happily munching on a cheese, Marmite and Tabasco roll, I considered my slightly weird food preferences. I take the lemon slice out of drinks in restaurants. This is relatively common. But I also love ketchup on my peas. I eat peanut butter by the spoonful. I once drunkenly made scrambled eggs in a wok and ate them with my £2.50 dirty Mexicano pizza, and it was delightful. As a child I liked nothing more than to be plonked in front of Mary Poppins - and yes it was always Mary Poppins - shovelling down endless bowlfuls of dry cereal until I either fell asleep or ran out of cornflakes. I considered these various eccentricities, failed to justify them, and then thought, well, at least I no longer eat paper.

Many people are aware of the delights of moderate paper-eating, and the times when it's actually worth doing - we're talking the curling, fawn-coloured corner of a musty copy of BOOK, not a shiny piece of A4. Many people grow out of it. But in the case of a few unfortunates, it's much more serious business. The absent-minded act of putting something in your mouth you instantly know you shouldn't have has become less of a furtive, quite rightly appalling act, more of a daily reality verging on addiction.

According to Wikipedia,

"Pica is a medical disorder characterized by an appetite for substances largely non-nutritive (e.g., metal, clay, coal, sand, dirt, soil, feces, chalk, pens and pencils, paper, batteries, spoons, toothbrushes, soap, mucus, ash, gum, lip balm, etc).
"The scant research that has been done on the causes of pica suggests that the disorder is a specific appetite caused by mineral deficiency... Often the substance eaten by someone with pica contains the mineral in which that individual is deficient.^"

But if the subject is especially interested in paper, which apparently they usually are, what are we to deduce from this? In this case does it cease to be merely about sustenance, more about, for want of a better phrase, intellectual nourishment?

"Did you enjoy War and Peace?"
"Why yes - I simply devoured it."

I wondered faintly if compulsive paper-eaters over a long period of time develop tastes. Aside from the quality of the paper and its vintage, does what is printed on it make a difference? Presumably more satisfaction could be gleaned from, say, Oscar Wilde than from 'bland' chick lit, or 'tasteless' dirty novels? Is there some kind of etiquette involved - do you eat from the outer edges in, or tactically, paragraph by paragraph? Is it polite to leave some of the narrative to show you're full?

A friend once told me about a man who ate a building.

I'm pretty sure this isn't true, and certainly couldn't find anything online to confirm it. But apparently he ground up the bricks and cement, bit by bit, and scattered them over meals, day by day - and in the end, I expect over the course of many years, had effectively consumed a house.

This method is intriguing and throws up a number of possibilities for those wishing to absorb more than simply nutrition from their daily bread (or whatever). Perhaps this is the logic behind cannibalism, or Keith Richards' allegedly snorting his father's ashes. My personal preference would be for a mummy - grated with generosity into my now relatively innocent-seeming sandwich, I would surely find myself charged with the power of the gods, or even get a glimpse into the afterlife - where, presumably, we can eat whatever we want, but which no doubt would have come a hell of a lot later if I hadn't just eaten Nesferenub's toe.

Or I'd turn to crime. Over a long, long period of time, and not without minor stomach pains and possible death, I feel sure it would be possible to tunnel one's way into a bank or a casino vault and make off with the contents. Of course the problem there is that having developed such a taste for non-comestibles the prize itself might then become irresistible. Money = paper. Nom.

Certainly though, it's an avenue worth exploring, though not by me because I do not as far as I know suffer from pica. Though are they really sufferers? I leave you with some wise and now famous words from Johnny Depp:

 "If someone were to harm my family or a friend or somebody I love, I would eat them. I might end up in jail for 500 years, but I would eat them."

NB. Obviously none of the above is to be taken seriously. The idea that I should be considered someone who glorifies mental illness, cannibalism or any kind of heisty behaviour is so loathsome it makes me want to bite my nails. Ohshi -