Chessgame - Deadly Recruits

papersky's recent discussion of Anthony Price's novels on Tor.com and some discussion of the next book in autopope's Laundry series, which uses Price's general style, reminded me that I'd never seen the TV series Chessgame which is based on the first three novels.

When I mentioned it someone pointed out that it's available on Region 1 DVD (it's actually region free but NTSC so the picture quality isn't wonderful); two seem to be fairly expensive, but the third, Deadly Recruits, goes for £3.98 (but see below).

Arrived today, and on the whole it isn't entirely bad - it's a reasonably good dramatisation of Colonel Butler's Wolf; the main change is that the story now focuses more on David Audley, and Colonel Butler has been replaced by a younger character, Nick Hannah, who was apparently introduced so he could be in the entire series. A young Robin Sachs (Ethan Rayne in Buffy) plays Hugh Roskill, but since the character has a broken leg throughout the story he doesn't get to do much.

Faith Audley seems to have a more important role than I remember from the original book - but I haven't read it in several years so may be remembering it wrongly. She's involved in a subplot about some sort of guru I don't remember at all, but I can't seem to find my copy to check. The dynamic between Faith and David Audley seems a little off, though not too badly so. And the pacing is fairly slow. On the whole an interesting attempt, but I don't think I'll bother to get the other two, Cold War Killers (The Labyrinth Makers) and The Alamut Ambush, given this example.

Now the bad news - This kept stopping at one scene so I took it out of the player, intending to clean it, and suddenly realised that it wasn't a professionally manufactured disk; it's DVD-R or similar, with inkjet printed disk and inlay, so probably counterfeit. So now I'll have to complain to the supplier etc...