Wow! What a comprehensive book. The book consists of several sections covering the history of computer RPGs. It starts with the origins, and goes into the bronze age, silver age, early golden age, golden age and onward into the platinum age and the modern era.
The Dark Age concerns itself with the pre home computer works on university mainframes, progresses into the Bronze Age with titles like Apshai and Akalbeth. The Silver Age brings us Wizardry and the early Ultima's I to III. and so on.
The book gives reviews of hundreds of games across many platforms. Often accompanying with a screenshot. This is one of the books weaker moments. The screenshots (apart from a couple of colour slides in the middle) are black and.. black. They are very very dark, often to the point of useless. Some are not too bad to look at and you can make them out.
The book does have a comprehensive index at the back, letting you quickly look up your favourite titles.
On first getting the book, I scanned my favourites and they were all there. Some of the more obscure titles like Legends on the TI99 were not present.
Gamasutra featured several articles by the author, which gives you an insight into the books contents, of which they are greatly expanded opon.
Most games get several paragraphs but I would have liked to see a little more critical thought in the reviews, but understanding that early games often had the 'Kill the big Foozle' plot, makes things hard to expand opon after the first time.
More notable games get much bigger coverage, like the classic SSI Gold Box games (Pool of Radiance, Azure Bonds, Champions of Krynn etc).
The book ends with discussion on recent titles like Dungeons and Dragons Online, Guild Wars and its ilk.
You can tell the author has quite a love for the genre, and if you grew up in the 80's or 90's, this book is just filled with info that provokes nostalgic memories.
If you bought a lot of computer magazines, you may feel a bit cheated, just remember the book is a collection of reviews. Probably the most complete and comprehensive you'll ever find.
Fans of CRPG's really should buy this book. (Hey, just like the gold box games, we even have Clyde Caldwell cover art, pretty cool stuff)
The reason for not giving 5 stars, is down to the dark screen captures. Everything else in the book is top notch.