1000 Game Heroes

Lara Croft © Eidos Interactive

Another fat and self-explanatory book from Taschen. If you like games, you’ll like this. A bit, anyway. Unimaginative layout and multi-language text make it seem like a user manual, to be ploughed through when necessary rather than browsed for fun. And the categories don’t really work; a more useful division would have been Game Characters You Actually Remember vs Odd Japanese Stuff You’ve Never Heard Of.

And another thing: the author, David Choquet, was born in 1972, so he could have had an Atari 2600 and a Spectrum and a Commodore 64 and played the arcades while Defender was still there, but evidently he didn’t, because all the games featured seem to date from the 90s. He chucks in PacMan, Mario and Sonic – even whippersnappers have heard of those – but leaves out so many others. Q-Bert! Snake! Manic Miner! The brave little chevron in Space Invaders! No more than a few dots they may have been, but were these not heroes too? They also serve who only pixellate.

First published in ‘Twenty/20’, MacUser, 29 November 2002

Tagged as: Books, Games, MacUser, Reviews