When I reviewed the first Discworld game based upon the Terry Pratchett series of bestselling novels, the role of Rincewind, the bungling apprentice wizard, was played by Eric Idle of the Monty Python comedy troop. Other notable comedic talents included "Tony Robinson a.k.a. Baldric, of Black Adder infamy and Jon Pertwee who, needless to say, is known to many fantasy fans as the definitive Dr. Who." It does not appear that Psygnosis is bringing back these excellent voice talents in the next installment.

Well all of us have wondered and even speculated on what would happen if death took a holiday, but most of you are probably not prepared for Terry Pratchett’s version of this event. In Diskworld where the world really is flat, and in fact circular shaped like a pizza. The water drops off the edges of the pizza along with anyone foolish enough to bungle into this area. The gods live on Mount Olympus, and everything is not right with the world. Well perhaps this time we can cheat death in new and different ways while he is having his pint on holiday.

Terry Pratchett wrote the entire dialogue over after a professional writer did an excellent job. We feel that they both have mucked it up, and have asked Eric Idle to look into it. But ever since Idle moved to Hollywood, he is spending all night out at parties and such and he is such an awful mess of fun. But we really wish they would have left in the sheep jokes, puns, and nasty bits, but this is a children’s game for adults. Now are you confused? (We do have psychiatrists standing by on the psychic-sex-psychiatry hot line. 1-800-14-MERDE - Ed.)

Characterization: Character design was performed by Greg Barnett and an animation character designer, who will remain nameless due to restrictions on our contract, who has worked with Amblin and Disney and some others we will not mention.

Animation: Story boards lead to layout, which went into the animators who drew the animation cells. The cells were scanned into and then colored (used to be the Ink and Paint department) on SGIs using the TOONZ program. Three dimensional cartoon sequences used in cut scenes were developed on the SGI with SofImage.

Voice actors: Eric Idle is Rincewind and he is also the voice of the theme song under the name Bone Idle. Nigel Planar, from the Young Ones, provides 20 voices, including Neil and Vilest, a pretty nasty guy. Kate Robins, United Kingdoms leading female voice actor, does many of the animal voices, the female voices, and some high pitched males. Rob Brydon, one of Brittains hardest working voice actors, does the rest of the lot.

Like an animated film, the voice actors do their stuff early in the process giving the artists and story writers inspiration to change already etched in stone scripts and written characterizations. They have fun with the filming, getting the creative juices flowing and really messing up the floor, which is the reason why the last game voices turned out so well. But next time they should put drains in the sound booths.

Musical composition: When using full digital sampled music, you want to set the ambient atmosphere and temperature with well orchestrated little bits of synchronized music, and swimming, (Please lets have a little swimming - Ed.). Three dimensional Q-sound may put you in the mood with sounds coming from behind and all, but I can’t wait for smell-a-game, on second though, Rincewind honestly got his name from his ripe odor, which I think I will pass. The theme written and sang by Eric Idle, who is known for such works as "Its Fun to Charter and Accountant" and other Python tunes. The music was arranged and orchestrated by Tom Scott, a very good jazz arranger, into a chorus line number, which Idle is quite familiar with, having been a chorus girl for many years.

Multiplayer: Extensive work on the multiplayer game has as yet yielded no fruit, or vegetables for that matter. And we believe that the designers of the game have just become exhausted and do not want to hear anymore of this nonsense for quite a while. Reporters are attempting to locate them in Koala Lumpur and other locations without luck or even sufficient budget. We will keep you posted.

Preview references:
www.psygnosis.com/E3/discw2.html
www.psygnosis.com/games/discworld.html