On the mean streets of Discworld

Discworld Noir

*****

Perfect Entertainment

PC

$99.95

Review: Peter Eley

Terry Pratchett's novels have a huge, fanatical audience who obsess over the most minute details of the fantasy world he's created around Ankh-Morpork, capital of the incredibly strange Discworld.

That's fertile ground for computer games and Discworld Noir is the third, and best, of those based on Pratchett's books.

Of late, his work has developed a darker, even grim, humour. When he took the idea for another computer game to publishers GT Interactive, they suggested he base it on the film noir genre.

These films grew out of the bleak postwar 50s and featured monochrome, whisky-soaked, anti-hero characters. The best known is Raymond Chandler's down-at-heel detective Sam Spade, played in the movies by Humphrey Bogart.

Discworld Noir picks up on that with a Bogart lookalike, Lewton the Private Eye, a character created specifically for the game.

Diehard fans may feel their hackles rising here but there are plenty of Pratchett favourites in Discworld Noir.

It features 70 interactive characters, including Corporal Nobbs, Death and the Grim Squeaker. There's a full complement, too, of those races that make Discworld so cosmopolitan: vampires, dwarves, werewolves and the like.

Pratchett's novels paint a big and complex picture of Discworld and the game mirrors that depth. It comes on three CD-Roms and is very, very tough, but not in that illogical, almost unplayable way of many adventure games a few years back (some of the Zork titles spring to mind).

The game starts with a scene straight from Chandler. A hungover, soul-searching Lewton is approached by the beautiful Carlotta, who vamps across his desk and persuades him to try to find her lost friend, Mundy.

If you think it all sounds like a take on Chandler's The Big Sleep, you ain't far wrong. Right from the start Discworld Noir creates the right, dark atmosphere.

The sound is excellent, with moody string music and blackly comic voiceovers from Red Dwarf's Robert Llewelyn and The Young Ones' Nigel Planer.

The graphics are good, too, depicting atmospheric locations peopled by some bizarre characters.

One minor annoyance is that the game is literally very dark and you may want to use your monitor controls to lighten things up a bit.

It plays much like any adventure game. You talk to characters by selecting a question from an on-screen choice, pick on objects and try to find somewhere to use them, and so on.

Lewton also has a notebook and you have to jot down what you find out, all the while piecing together the big picture.

The European rating is 11+ but the difficulty level and the dark humour may be too much for pre-teens.

Required: Pentium 166, 32Mb Ram.

* Send your comments e-mail to peter_eley@herald. co.nz