A great write up for a good book. Well done Mr McFerran!
Though as it's in my pedantic nature, I would like to mention a personal criticism with the book. And that is the screenshots of actual gameplay. Nearly every single one of them had the most horrendous pixel distortion, some of the worst I've ever seen. It made some of the pages a real eyesore.
Clearly they were taken with emulators, and then resized incorrectly by the layout designer, who didn't maintain the aspect ratios.
This is a HUGE annoyance for me personally, since I feel that many of these old games have a wonderful visual charm, which is totally lost when the designers don't resize the images properly.
Plenty of magazines do it correctly, websites do it, hell, even I do it better than they did, and my formal digital art training goes no further than A-level art classes!
The fact that a commercial book can have so many poor in-game screens, is sloppy. Just sloppy.
Though I'd still recomended the book as a valuable resource for information.
EDIT:
Just check out the bike rider on the back cover.
Linear Mode
