Review:
This covers the history of video games in 70 games - that's a lot for only 153 pages, so I went into this knowing it'd feel skimpy at times. The title is also a bit misleading, since some of the games mentioned, although influential or likely the first examples of particular aspects of video game history, weren't necessarily enjoyed by audiences when they were released and didn't sound like they'd be much more enjoyable now.
This was an easy read that I gobbled up in pretty much one sitting. I loved the various anecdotes and game descriptions.
There was no bibliography, which would have been nice considering all the quotes and specific anecedotes - if some of the info came from other books, I'd have loved to know, because I'd be interested in reading them. There were also no pictures, one of my biggest issues with the book. I ended up googling some of the games in order to see screenshots.
For the most part, I enjoyed the content, as brief as it was (each game only had about 2 pages devoted to it), although a little bit more work could have been done to ensure that all the specific games mentioned had their own sections. One particular game, "Sweet Home," was mentioned several times in the sections for other games but never got its own page/section.
I picked this up primarily because I saw that it mentioned Myst. The "Death of the Adventure Game" section brought back memories of some of the truly bad Myst-like games I played in an effort to find something that scratched the same itch.
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