Books on gaming: what lurks in your library?

[The Glider]

On my shelves, I have:
[...]
MASTERS OF DOOM

Could you elaborate on how you found that one, The Glider? 'Cause it's sorta on my shopping list.

I bought it from Amazon.com because Amazon.co.uk were giving a delivery date of 4-6 weeks & I didn't want to wait that long.

[chevkoch]

Thanks. I've strayed from my national amazon and gone the US route before also.

Did you like Masters of Doom, was it worth the buy? Edge's mini review of it didn't really leave me with much insight on how it would read.

[Magnakai]

Lucky wander boy sounds really intresting.
Thanks for posting that up.

[The Guppy]

No problem. If I could force you all to buy it, I would. At gunpoint of necessary. It's for your own good!

[killy]

My game related books:

Game Over
Trigger Happy
Joystick Nation
Revolutionaries at Sony
Computer Game Graphics
Arcade Fever
The Ultimate History of Video Games

[Papercut]

no one got the Dreamcast Internet guide?

HMV still have it in stock near me, dog eared and mangled. go on, its only 4 years out of date now

but seriously... the video game book I really want is Phoenix, the one I've most enjoyed is Game Over, and the one I come back to time and again is Techo Sculpture, which is purely photos of dedicated arcade cabs.

there is also a embarassing book I have called 'digital beauties', or something like that, by Taschen. The publisher should have registered. Opened the book, read an interesting piece on a vf modeller, bought it. Flicked though it later; full of badly rendered semi-nude tarts. arse.

I was going to slag off the Game On book, but thats been done now

[angel]

the prima turok 2 guide that contains completely innacurate maps cos they were changed.

the history of acclaim (i believe its called rumbled )

ps the free game over book is missing parts apparantly. (says the foreword).

[The Glider]

Thanks. I've strayed from my national amazon and gone the US route before also.

Did you like Masters of Doom, was it worth the buy? Edge's mini review of it didn't really leave me with much insight on how it would read.

I thought it was a highly entertaining read & well worth the money. I found it very easy to read & a real page turner.

[chevkoch]

Thanks again, I think I'll fork over the money and buy it. Like a friend of mine once said: "Not hard to teach a frog to swim" (or something equally relevant). Meaning: we tempted by what we love will easily fall for what the market has to offer. Anyway.

Wanted to mention ZAP! The Rise and Fall of Atari by Scott Cohen, which I read some time ago. At that time I was happy to find it rereleased, for it had been unavailable for quite a while. Then wasn't too fond of it after all.

I wrote a customer review on that one after being thru it back then and to make it bloody easy for me this time, will just paste that here:

[shameless self quote] The fact that it's a classic in video game history writing made me buy this book. My disappointment is great. The author falls short in almost every aspect of the project. Heavily relying on wild guesses to disguise his lack of real content, Cohen desperately simplifies, inflates small bits of information (some of which are false) to fill the pages and is history and probably the founder of Atari, Nolan Bushnell, not doing a favor by overglorifying him.

About two thirds of the book seem only to exist to portray the incompetence of the author, particularly when he writes about "related" subjects, and goes on to repeat statements over and over, which were not necessarily interesting ones in the first place, until one ponders the thought: With a skill like Cohen's, how else to accomplish volume?

I want to give you a quote here from chapter 14 where there's a lot of out of place talk about IBM and the stock market. At one point you can read: "It's a glamour stock. Or it was. It might have been - and still might become - a blue chip, but so far it hasn't." Now we know.

Not clueless enough, it seems, because a couple of paragraphs later, the author adds in his quest for written nonsense: "They designed a product that wasn't bad. It wasn't a breakthrough, but it was good; there was really nothing wrong with it." And ever so on.

If you're intrigued by video game history, rather consider getting (all of) these fine books: 'The Ultimate History of Videogames' by Steven Kent, 'Game Over - Press Start to Continue' by David Sheff and 'Phoenix - The Fall & Rise of Video Games' by Leonard Herman. [/shameless self quote]

[tssk]

Has Lucky Wander Boy been released in Australia yet?

[The Guppy]

I don't think so.