 |
Take a trip—a very long trip—down memory lane with this impressive history of the role-playing game industry (with some forays into related game forms like customizable card games). Shannon Applecline has done gaming enthusiasts a remarkable service here. For players like me who grew up with this history (I was born in 1967, and got my first exposure to D&D in 1978–79), many of the “names and faces” will be familiar, and yet there’s still so much to learn! The book is organized by date and company, so it’s easy to follow the narrative flow.
On the production side, the layout is spare and uncluttered. The “grayness” of most pages gets interrupted by full-color product covers—some readers will enjoy this, and others will find it jarring. In a 442-page document, some typographic errors and outright misspellings are pretty much inevitable; witness, for example, the indecision about whether Adamant Entertainment’s superhero games is “Icons” (p. 77) or “ICONS” (p. 426). Occasionally, reliance on “auto-correct” features results in single quotation marks (inverted commas) facing the wrong way. But these little glitches are minor, as well as few and far between.
Such a large book may wear down readers who try to read cover to cover, and the RPG industry can appear as a tangled web with many interconnections. Thus, in a stroke of brilliance, either Applecline or editor Charlotte Law included wonderful bullet lists of “What to Read Next” at the end of each chapter. Unfortunately, Mongoose didn’t bother to hyperlink these lists in the PDF edition, nor even to provide bookmarks to the chapter headings (much less subheadings)—a glaring oversight in a digital product of this magnitude.
Unless Dungeons & Dragons is your favorite RPG, you’ll probably come away a little disappointed that your favorite game didn’t get more press in the book, especially if your favorite game is a more recent publication with a fairly short history. If you start to feel that such-and-such a game was unduly neglected, set that aside and remember the huge scope of this work.
Puntuación: [4 de 5 Estrellas!] |
|
|
Iniciar sesión 
