GamePlan - The Encyclopedia of Game Machines 1972-2005 Feature Discussion

[charlesr]

Please use this thread to discuss any thoughts you may have, prompted by the GamePlan - The Encyclopedia of Game Machines 1972-2005 Feature.

If you wish to give feedback, please PM Damien McFerran / Duddyroar or email [email protected]

You can buy this book from Play-Asia

[Sketcz]

A great write up for a good book. Well done Mr McFerran!


Though as it's in my pedantic nature, I would like to mention a personal criticism with the book. And that is the screenshots of actual gameplay. Nearly every single one of them had the most horrendous pixel distortion, some of the worst I've ever seen. It made some of the pages a real eyesore.

Clearly they were taken with emulators, and then resized incorrectly by the layout designer, who didn't maintain the aspect ratios.

This is a HUGE annoyance for me personally, since I feel that many of these old games have a wonderful visual charm, which is totally lost when the designers don't resize the images properly.

Plenty of magazines do it correctly, websites do it, hell, even I do it better than they did, and my formal digital art training goes no further than A-level art classes!

The fact that a commercial book can have so many poor in-game screens, is sloppy. Just sloppy.

Though I'd still recomended the book as a valuable resource for information.


EDIT:
Just check out the bike rider on the back cover.

[MonkeyWrench]

You can get it from Think Geek a few quid cheaper:

http://www.thinkgeek.com/books/nonfiction/7851/

It's an ok book. Brought back lots of memories of my Texas Instruments TI-99/4A.

[MikeRox]

you can buy the book already in the UK for about ?16.99 direct from the publisher (link is on the website) looks like an excellent book and definately one I plan to pick up just coz I love flicking through this sort of stuff. Already got 2 games/console books but 1 more won't hurt ^_^

[Uli]

i bought the german first edition a couple of years ago and it was badly full of mistakes. for instance a picture sub telling you Soul Calibur was from Capcom. also i generally found the book lacking in giving sufficient background information. no idea if this changed in the meanwhile.

[Ish]

I have a copy of this book and really enjoy it. I pick it up from time to time and just select a random page.

[eastyy]

Got the book yesterday quite a good read it was to

[eastyy]

i think they missed a system the sam coupe

[MonkeyWrench]

Yeah you're right. I just noticed there's nothing for the Spectrum +2 or +3. I would have thought they would have been mentioning as they came out after Amstrad took over.

[eastyy]

They did mention the +3 +2 very very briefly though they did put it into the spectrum 16k/48k section

Would have thought they would get there own section