Messages

Hey Blue Cactus! Not cheeky at all. A couple of them have been snapped up but I still have Forest of Doom,
Island of the Lizard King and Scorpion Swamp (and Rebel Planet) going if you want them?
If you don't mind not having the original Puffins, you can get a lot of the Wizard re-releases on ebay I think pretty cheaply!

I like the sound of the way you're playing. Have you played any of the Duelmaster books? They're designed for two players and written by the same guys and set in the same world as the Way of the Tiger series that we've been gushing over. They might work for you guys if they're still available - Arena of Death was always my favourite but I can recommend Blood Valley as well.

Another great read on this today. I've got the complete Marada and everything Alec says is spot on about it sadly, although the artwork really is lovely.

Couple of FF references as well. Can we get Alec Worley to do a playthrough on the gamebook thread?

I've been struggling a lot with bad dreams these last few months. I'm in a bit of a cycle where I fall asleep, exhausted, but awake 4 hours later having had a nightmare and then lie awake until the alarm goes, re-living it.

Usually these dreams are about death - sometimes my parents, but more often either my wife's or my own - and not about the actual event (where I get crushed by a fridge or something) but the terrible aftermath: wandering around a house bereft of its former occupant yet full of the things that made up their day to day lives. Another often recurring one I have is that my house catches on fire and I'm unable to rescue my cat: later I find him all burned black, hiding under something, just a little charred husk in his shape. I often wake up in tears.

I'm pretty sure I'm processing grief: my father-in-law passed away at the start of the year and my best friends Dad, who I'd known for decades, also died a few months later. I've done my best to support two people I really love and the effect the bereavement has had on them has been dreadful to watch. I do wonder if, in doing so I've swallowed my own feelings a bit and this is how things are coming out.

Anyway, I'm also pretty sure this will pass. I know I shouldn't, but I feel guilty just giving voice to this given these bereavements have impacted others more than me - but I just wanted to write this down somewhere and it's been helpful to do so.

Love that sheet Funt. Has everyone done the first ten now?

It's interesting looking at them as a list as there's a lot of variety in there and you see the authors playing around with the format. Given they're children's books, several of them are obscenely difficult: I think I prefer the 'find the path' difficulty of HoH over the 'loads of difficult fights' difficulty of CotSW (with DD combining both approaches) but I've definitely found myself most enjoying books that allow variation from a single determined path and reward a bit of thought rather than turn left or right decisions being key. Part of that, I suppose, is that I'm approaching it both as an adult and as someone who is trying to work their way through 30+ gamebooks so I find it satisfying to get through in three runs or less - as a boy I had no issue playing Deathtrap Dungeon hundreds of times and I wonder if that was the intent when they were written.

Also interesting to see how high Skill is essential for these books and that the claim that even the weakest stats can triumph is pretty much untrue. I now reroll my skill if it starts less than 9 rather than commit to a doomed playthrough!

I love this book, and it's easily the best of the SF ones. I enjoyed your write-up, and it was fun to see the choices you made...

Thanks Richard! I did really enjoy it: my critique of it was more based on it being a fairly atypical FF book, rather than it not being fun. I agree it's the strongest sci-fit one so far and there's not many to follow, I think.
I've had a little replay of it taking a different route through and it was fun to see that you can take quite a different path with regards the clues and the like and still get to the end- this is good writing I think and I really appreciate it. It is pretty easy if you think about your choices, but that shouldn't really be a complaint when compared to say, Space Assassin, which had too many options where pressing button A or opening door B just led to instant death with no foreshadowing at all. I didn't get the blow up the asteroid ending, so I might give it another go - it's light enough to go through and it does feel like there's a real plot there rather than a dungeon crawl.
Oh, and I did indeed shoot Zera Gross! I assumed she'd have some tough combat stats as her vast size was emphasised several times!

[Strontium DogS]

Strontium DogS for me
More of an anti-Ampney vote than any recognition of quality on Dogs part. Sorry!

[Low Life]

Get Sancho Panzer in the floppy though please Tharg!

I second that

Thirded!

Fourthed!

I vote Low Life btw

Yeah, in fairness it's hard to recommend this one to anyone beyond the hardcore gamebook fan.

The car chase was an extended sequence of choices - speed up here, slow down here, sideswipe and so on. It was different, but again the fairly undescriptive style could have made it a lot better.
Flicking through it in search of auto-deaths (there are a handful) it seems there's also two possible victory paragraphs! Is this a first for a FF?

[The Rings of Kether]

The Rings of Kether

This was another brand new one for me. I assume the titlular rings refer to a drug ring, rather than Saturn-esque rings, as the plot places me as a space detective in the Narcotics division, trying to stop the flow of the drug Satophil-d from the planet of Kether itself.

I decide to start my investigations at Kether's starport. I draw a blank asking round the port itself so instead head to a seedy dive bar, where I bribe a barmaid (via her garter wallet) and she points out a couple of people I might like to investigate.
I settle on a dangerous, grotesque looking woman and tail her back to her apartment, then tail a second suspect who leaves her apartment - this guy spots me but instead of attacking, asks me to meet him in an hour. When I get to his hotel however he's been murdered!
A note on his body identifies him as Arthur Flange and that he'll be meeting his contact, Clive Torus, at a cafe the next day. I go to meet: no Clive, but I'm accosted by a gunman on the way out. A firefight ensues: with his dying breath he tells me Clive was taken to 'Sparks'. Although I think this means Clive must be dead I go to Sparks anyway where I am predictably captured by two obvious hired goons.
I give these guys the slip and eavesdrop to find out I was to be set up to meet the late Clive's wife and collect 'the documents'. Sounds useful! I decide to meet Mrs. Torus at the gardens, but do a little reconnoiter first which gives me my favorite line in the book:

'If you wish to take out the sniper turn to X, or if you assume he's harmless and meet Mrs. Torus anyway turn to Y'

Of course, I eliminate the sniper, but it's a double-double cross as poor Mrs Torus gets blown up by a bomb and some other guy nicks the documents. I steal a car and give chase - there follows a neat little car chase sequence, which is a first for me in FF: eventually I ram the other car off the road and recover the documents that show when & where the operation is underway.

First stop is a small island, where I steal a huge powerlift and ram through a door (crushing four guys) to gain access to the complex. Once within I totally guess a riddle before encountering and defeating Zera Gross (my first suspect, and one half of the operation)

From here my final stop is the drug production asteroid. The space around it is mined: I blast my way through (I'm informed thanks to the incompetent mine placement, shooting one makes them all go up) but must fight the asteroid defenses. This is my first ship to ship combat and my ships weapon strength is terrible and I am quickly in trouble - in desperation I fire all my missiles and then am able to limp through the fight with just 2 shields remaining. PHEW.
I elect to enter the asteroid via an emergency hatch rather than the main entrance, super sneakily. I evade a couple of hazards with little effort, find the drug lab and bust it up. I take some Satophil-d, which enables me to defeat an alien in an anticlimactic if hilarious way, then totally bluff my way through a cubed room and confront the nefarious Blaster Babbet, head of the operation. I easily see through his ruse - a fistfight ensues, but he's a pretty weak enemy and it's off to paragraph 400 with the drug ring smashed and Babbet behind bars. Victory!

This is a weird book and doesn't really feel like a Fighting Fantasy book at all. It's sci-fi so there's no fantasy, and there's very little fights - I had three, and I think at least two of them were avoidable, plus one ship to ship battle. I did however have to test my luck and especially my skill multiple times. This all feels quite on-point however for a book where I'm a detective, rather than a fighter.

It was however very easy - I finished it at first attempt. There were a few hazards and traps I fell foul of, but the damage wasn't too bad and I had plenty of pep pills (provisions) to get me through. At one point I was presented with 6 buttons and literally pressed the wrong one five times, but the damage was only 1 stamina point per go and I just healed it back up. In an Ian Livingstone book I would have been toast long before. There were no items to collect, and a lot of the choices I later found were false ones: quite often I've have three options but one would be a dead end, another might lead to a puzzle or fight and the third would be the true path, but crucially the first two would send me back to the correct one which made it all very forgiving. I'm not sure if there's any auto-death paragraphs in there at all.

Finally the writing is very terse and description quite sparse, but it's written in quite a jokey, lighthearted way - there's a feeling it's lightly poking fun at itself and the noir genre as a whole. This again makes it feel quite un-FF-ish, but also quite endearing.

Far from a classic but I enjoyed it more than the other sci-fi books to date (Starship Traveller, Space Assassin, Freeway Fighter). I'm quite tempted to play again with a load of different choices and see what happens as I suspect instead of a 'true path' there's several different routes one can take to arrive at the same point.

[Dredd]

Great cover this week, I love the placement of the logo.

Dredd I'm digging the way this is being told with what I assume is the very gradual reveal of plots within plots although part of me would prefer that we just got straight to the action. Art is terrific although I'm finding the depcition of Brit-cit to be a bit lacking in futuristic flair.
Skip Tracer This is pretty terrible. The [spoiler]little guys sacrifice[/spoiler] lacks any impact whatsoever - I know he's a long running character, but I know next to nothing about him. The dialogue feels very hackneyed and the story lacks any kind of tension.
Dexter Solid stuff, this has been one of the better Dexter solo tales. I suspect the real gun sharks will arrive soon and kick things up a notch.
Brink I've sort of flipped over from enjoying the slow build into finding this run too long and tbh am losing a bit of patience. I'm sure this will be excellent on a re-read.
Jaegir Although a little disappointed the battle happened off-screen, this is excellent, my top thrill this week. The story is running incredibly fast. Another special note for the art here which is glorious.

[Anderson]

As others have said Anderson has been wildly inconsistent over the years but it's a clear winner here for me.

[Shakara!]

Seems like for a lot of us there's a thrill that one absolutely cannot abide, yet is held in universally high regard by everyone else. For me that's Ichabod. I hated it.

Shakara rules however. Shakara!

Oh well, I suppose if it's ambiguous, it's up to me how I interpret it.

Definitely this, I think.

I've completed Temple of Terror at last - the desert / journey to Vatos bit feels epic, but it's by far the smallest part of the book as what follows is a full-on dungeon crawl. It took me a long time to finish until I worked out that to get one of the 5 dragon statues you need to have made what looks to be the wrong decision earlier in the book.

There's a couple of very hard fights in the book and the two villains are rather underdeveloped - old Malbordus at the end is pretty rubbish - as well as a few points where the book will say 'do you want to use item a, b or c if you have them' and there's no clue as to which will work and monsters being scared / depowered seemingly at random. There's also a point at the end where a dwarf shows up from Yaztromo and gives you an item and dies which is annoying - how did he get ahead of me? Why didn't the two of us start out together? This would have worked better if, say, Yaztromo had sent him via the route I didn't take at the start as insurance (this also offsets him basically saying 'the world will be destroyed if we don't stop Malbordus, I'll send one under-equipped guy'). I think overall it suffered a bit from going from the longer form WotT / Freeway Warrior books to this, which is a bit more basic.

On the flip side I really liked the 'reverse' scavenger hunt from the messenger of death and the deserty / tomb setting: this book was a lot of fun.

Thanks for the heads up guys! I've ordered a few of the volumes mentioned here.

That alternate cover especially looks fantastic.

I've occasionally given extra copies of the Prog to lapsed readers or receptive friends and sadly it has never resulted in them wanting to read more. Imagine getting the most recent Prog: Brink mid-run, not exactly straightforward episodes of Dredd or Jaegir, Skip Tracer...

For getting someone into Dredd, it's best pitched at the individual depending on what they'd enjoy art and storywise... I gave someone America and they loved it, but I don't think it's ideal entry-level Dredd. The Pit was another good one. I actually think the 80s classics are probably less attractive for non-Squaxx than we realise... I'd also go with Case Files, but carefully pitched around a 'big' story that might hook.