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January 22nd 2005

Nothing much has happened on the Discworld game front. I've updated some of the details in the faq to reflect the problems people are having with Discworld and Windows XP. But to recap the Discworld situation:

You cannot legitimately get hold of Discworld 1 or 2 on any format unless you buy it second hand. E-Bay is your best bet.

Discworld 1, 2 and Noir have big problems running under Windows 2000 or later.

Perfect have gone bust a while back and hence there are no new Discworld games in the pipeline. Nor will any of the bugs in Noir be fixed.

I'm not really updating this page often as I've kind of lost interest in Discworld but given that graphical adventures are dead these days I'd be surprised if a new Discworld game was ever released.

There have been a couple of developments since the last update. The former, which isn't much of a surprise, is that the budget version of Noir being sold by Infogrames for a tenner is just as buggy as the GT Interactive release.

The second is that while Perfect may be dead and gone, the whereabouts of at least two former Perfect members are known (the rest presumably working somewhere or other), having recovered from the doom of Perfect like the flying head of Dr Hill in Bride of Re-Animator. Chris Bateman has his own software troubleshooting company called International Hobo - a sort of A-Team for the games industry although they obviously do charge cash for this. He is also assisted periodically in this venture by Gregg Barnett, former head of Perfect who also has his own games company, Sick Puppy Games, though he has denied rumours that he ain't getting on no damn plane.

Discworld Noir is now out on budget and can be bought for around a tenner - although whether or not any bug fixing has been done remains to be seen.

Well, it's been a while since the last update and still very little has happened on the Discworld front. Perfect have now definitely gone bankrupt, GT Interactive have been taken over by Infogrames, and there's zero chance of a patch for Noir ever appearing. I've updated the game faq with a section on Noir and the fact that Discworld 1 and 2 are almost impossible to get hold of .

Not all that much happened on the Noir PC front - Perfect / Teeny Weeny have disappeared from view, possibly bankrupt altogether, and GT have yet to produce any kind of patch. A couple of calls to GT's tech support in the UK solicited the response that there was nothing wrong with the game at all - which is clearly cobblers given the amount of hassle people are happening. Further more, when asked about the Windows 95 installation problem, the tech stated there was a patch for this - and handed out a URL to this selfsame page - hmm. Noir should be hitting the Playstation around now - though whether or not it's as buggy as the PC version remains to be seen.

I've updated the Noir Fix which can be found here or in the files section of the main Discworld Game pages (I'll add a files section to the Noir bit when I get time). Just unzip it using PKZIP or WinZip and follow the instructions - to cater for Windows 95a users who want to use Noir's minimum install (it doesn't fix anything else so unless you have Win95a and have found you can't install the game, you needn't download it)..

And on another note, Perfect Entertainment are now bankrupt - this happened a while ago, but I've only just got round to putting this up - possibly as a result of their legal shenanigans with Psygnosis a while back. On the upside, many of the staff and a lot of the company's resources have been transferred to a 'new' company, operating under Perfect's previous name of Teeny Weeny Games, although about half of Perfect's staff have been dropped or gone to seek employment elsewhere (apparently Gregg Barnett and Luci Black, the chief people behind Noir may well have left). Good luck to both those still with TWG and those who have left - although it does seem slightly unfair that a company that has produced several good games can go under while a company like Ion Storm who have produced nothing of any merit to date are still having cash thrown at them (last time I heard) by Eidos Interactive. Hmmmm...

Just a quick update - the Discworld Noir / Josh Kirby Poster offer has now finished, so I've taken the banner down..

Just a quickie update - I've fixed the hint file which had a bit missing at the end of Act II - whoops.

And now for some good news and bad news. The bad news - if you're one of the many people who own the original version of Windows 95, not OSR 2 or anything like that - the original unrevised version, you won't be able to install Noir using the setup program - there is a patch apparently on the way for this but it's not out yet.

The good news is that I've knocked up a fix for this that will let you install Noir as a medium install - and you can find out how to do this here. Give me a mail if you have any problems with this.

There's now a walkthrough in the hints section of the Disworld Noir pages, again one which will get tidied up a bit later when I have the time. Also, as you may well have noticed, there's a special offer banner at the top of the pages, through which you can order a copy of Discworld Noir and get a free Josh Kirby poster into the bargain. The offer itself only applies to UK buyers of Noir as is, however, there is an email address to which enquiries about ordering Noir overseas can be sent, and given that the company involved, Software First, does ship software overseas, it seems likely that you will be able to get US copies of the game. As yet, GT Interactive US seem to have made no moves to sell or promote the game in the States.

On the bug front, there have been reports of a bug in Noir. I've yet to run into these myself on either of the two PCs I've played Noir on, but evidently a few people have encountered it. Apparently, sometimes changing the page in Lewton's notebook causes a crash, and having recieved lists of the specifications from a couple of people with these problems, there appears to be no obvious reason why this is happening. If you do run into this, I suggest you contact GT Interactive technical support for now.

Some people may also have noticed that the storyline page in the Noir section has question marks where the pictures of characters should be. This is because.. er, I haven't actually got round to putting pictures of the characters in yet. But I will. Honest *cough*.

I've now created a hint file for Discworld Noir - click here to get it. It's in rough text format and will be tidied up, and a walkthrough added, when I've got the time (I'm kind of busy at the moment, holding down a full-time job and doing other bits and bats).

Noir has at last been released - in the UK at least - I'm working on some hints, containing solutions to specific problems, which are nearly completed and should be up this Monday. A walkthrough will follow about a week later.

In a strange deja vu moment, the release of Noir has been put back a week (or two, depending upon which shops you ask) to July 2nd or July the 9th. But it has mastered. Honest.

And on another note, when Noir finally does surface, I'm planning on putting up hints in both hint-o-matic and text format on the pages, with a walkthrough to follow a week or so later. I'd appreciated if people read these before mailing me as I now have a full time paying job and other things to do so I have less time to spend answering game questions.

Discworld Noir has finally mastered.. it should be released on the PC on the 25th of June in the US and UK, and probably at the same time in the rest of the world. A Playstation version should be released in September. I've got my hands on a copy and I'm pretty impressed - it's very dark, very playable, and well, very Noir.

The release date for Discworld Noir has been put back... some shops have the release date as June 25th, though a GT PR person said they don't yet have a concrete release date for it. I'd expect it to be released some time at the end of June or the beginning of July.

I've managed to get a Discworld Game forum set up for free, thanks to Netbabbler - although it does have a banner ad at the top. The forum can be found here (I'll add some proper buttons and graphics to link to this later, and also add a proper background to the forum).

I've also added a of links to the Noir links pages (I did have a link to a C-Net or Ziff Davis review but I lost the URL - can the person who sent me that send it again? ) and updated the release date for Noir which now looks to be May.

The release date for Noir has changed a little - it's now late April to early May 1999 for the PC version with the Playstation version hitting shelves a month or so later.

On another note, I'm looking to set up a Discworld Game message board - but due to the way the L-Space pages are mirrored, I don't have a single web area, with a cgi-bin which I can put scripts in, and be used to store the messages. If anyone has some free web space, with access to a cgi-bin so I can plop a perl script in there, or a blank noticeboard which can be used, preferably with no advertising banners, and are prepared to let me use it for the message board and nothing else, I'd be grateful if you could contact me. Hopefully this message board should serve as an area for people to get game hints, and discuss various things about the Discworld games, post queries, that sort of thing. I'm not planning, I should point out, to make it a general Discworld discussion board - just for game related stuff.

I've removed the links to the Perfect Entertainment, or some of them at least, since the site is currently under construction and is out of action for a while. I've also updated the Q&A section with some more information about Noir - such as the release date which is now set to be some time in April.

There's another page up with details about Discworld Noir - this time, at Games Central - they have some rather rather funky pictures of the conceptual art used in the design stages of Noir, and the author of the pages also states that Discworld Noir may (but don't take this as concrete) now be released in the Spring - which, covering three months as it does, could potentially be later than the March release Perfect originally planned. But having said that, I'd rather the game be delayed than be released chock full of bugs or blatantly unfinished as seems to be the industry trend these days. Not that I'm mentioning any names of course.. *cough*Blood 2*cough*Sin*cough*etc

I've had a couple of people asking when Discworld Noir will be released. Currently, the game is due to hit the streets some time in March 1999.

After fiddling about with HTML and Netscape for a while, the Discworld Noir pages are finally up. Within these pages you can find information about the forthcoming third and somewhat darker Discworld game, Discworld Noir, featuring Lewton, the Discworld's first private investigator. Here you can find information about the game's storyline and characters (though I've tried to avoid including anything that would spoil the game), how the game will play, a good few screenshots, and a not particularly well hidden sound sample, as well as the lowdown on Perfect Entertainment, the people behind Discworld Noir.

I'll add a hints section after the game is released, tidy up the HTML a bit and probably change the structure of the pages about to include new sections later on. For now you should find pretty much everything you could want to know about Discworld Noir within these pages, and if you do want to know more, then you're probably really strange and abnormal. But nevertheless, if you do have any comments or questions that aren't answered on this site then you can mail me.