Rating: 
Summary: Fantastic! A must-have for video games enthusiasts!
Review: This is the best book on computer games that I have seen so far. An amazing lot of work and love has gone into it and it is a real masterpiece - pure joy to read and look at.300 pages, densely packed with thousands of illustrations, photos, screenshots, cover & concept art -- and the layout is just amazing. For most popular games series, e.g. Ultima, you get screenshots and covers for every single title! But the book is not mere eyecandy. There's tons of exquisite information too, like interviews with major game designers. Even if you already have a lot of insider knowledge of computer games, I guarantee you'll find lots of new and interesting stuff here. The book is well structured and very detailled, yet at the same time great fun to read. It starts of with the pre-Pong era, going back as early as the 19th century with the foundation of companies that later became Nintendo and Philips. Further on, it focusses majorly on arcade games, consoles and the PC. The only shortcoming is that the book is rather USA-centric. The european games scene, which moved more around homecomputers like the Commodore 64, Amiga and Atari ST isn't covered. Same goes for most european productions, like the games from Bullfrog (Populous), Bitmap Brothers (Speedball), Graftgold (Uridium), Factor-5 (Turrican, Rogue Squadron) and the likes. However this is not a real drawback as the book is an unmatched treasure chest nonetheless. You will certainly not regret buying it. Did I mention the entire book is in full color and the print quality is excellent? Get it *now*!
Rating:
Summary: What I was looking for.....a sum of my youth.....
Review: Well...that's what I was looking for...a complete sum of history of videogames in a cool book..without the need to buy a 3000 pages encyclopedia.
I'm a 36 year old guy..I had a VCS 2600 , Intellivision and other consoles..and was a teenage arcades fan, and I found in this book all the glittering past that I still recall. Many photos, many particulars, stories, adds and much more materials than I could believe. The book is the right size, it's HEAVY and it has a great "touch" feeling..
You cannot miss this book if you were mad for arcades and consoles. And if you still recall it...you still are mad for that ! :-)
Recommended for nostalgics like me...and keep it aside your pac man original arcade in the living room..to astonish better your friends :-)
Rating: 
Summary: Great book, but wish more console/arcade coverage
Review: While my gaming platform of choice is firmly the PC, and even that this book does evoke wonderful nostalgia for my old Apple II and those old PC games I used to play, I wish there was better coverage for console and arcade games, especially those ones after the Atari 2600 crash, such as the NES, Genesis, and the SNES.. Even the mighty Playstation only received a few pages, while much more detailed coverage was given to PC game companies with (arguably) less impact on the general scheme of things such as Trilobyte (7th Guest). I wished that they had more to say about the newer consoles than a quarter-page of text and two pages full of screenshots. Perhaps this is understandable given the background of the writers, and don't get me wrong, I loved the book anyway, I just wish that I could read as much about the creation of Street Fighter II as I could about the creation of the King's Quest series or the Cinemaware computer games. But by all means, if you're in your 30s and are nostalgic about playing Pitfall ! on your Atari 2600 and Ultima II on your Apple II+ like me, get this book !!
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