News You Can Bruise for 2009 March 16 (entry 0)

(4) Mon Mar 16 2009 21:09: My recent burst of game-related reading has come to a close as I finished Matt Barton's Dungeons and Desktops, a history of computer role-playing games. This is a really straightforward book that mostly describes games in chronological order without doing a bunch of theory or rehashing a lot of things I already knew. Very recommended. I especially enjoyed the chapters describing the late 80s to the late 90s, roughly the times when I wasn't paying attention and that aren't covered by other books. Minor downsides: the prose doesn't glisten, and screenshots were not previewed in black-and-white before printing, so the fact that they're practically unreadable in the book was not caught.

Comments:

Posted by rachel at Tue Mar 17 2009 13:18

glad you liked it!

Posted by kirkjerk at Wed Mar 18 2009 09:48

Heh, not to be confused with Dungeons and Dreamers, which covers... err, largely the same stuff

Posted by Leonard at Wed Mar 18 2009 12:21

I didn't find Dungeons and Dreamers nearly as interesting. It focuses more on personalities and less on the games, and it goes into way more detail about the early FPS culture than I could ever care about.

Posted by kirkjerk at Wed Mar 18 2009 15:50

Ah.
Just found an excerpt at Gamsutra.

Funny, it mentions "Escape from Mt. Drash", something I read about for the first time in GameInformer (a special on some of the "holy grails" of collectors.)