Main Menu

Gamebooks

Started by Funt Solo, 19 October, 2021, 02:40:32 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

Barrington Boots

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.
You're a dark horse, Boots.

Dark Jimbo

The sci-fi books have never really appealed, and to be honest I've yet to read a review that convinces me otherwise! The car chase sounds intriguing, though - how did that work?
@jamesfeistdraws

Barrington Boots

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?
You're a dark horse, Boots.

Dark Jimbo

Quote from: Barrington Boots on 27 July, 2022, 05:48:16 PM
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?

I think Scorpion Swamp is the first (three different victory endings depending on who you were working for). Still pretty rare at this stage of the series, though.
@jamesfeistdraws

Richard

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, since I remember the book well as I replayed it and then mapped it last year. (I didn't keep the map though, I just wanted to understand its structure. There are several self-contained sections (each a location) where, assuming you survive, you then move on to another location, usually with a choice of where to go. There is usually more than one way of getting to each location, so there is no one true path, although I did manage to work out the shortest route.)

I'm glad you got to the car chase on your first go, it would have been a shame to miss it -- I think it's great fun! It's more than 60 paragraphs altogether, which is an enormous chunk of the book, but worth it.

There are a few auto-death / -fail paragraphs. There is at least one in the car chase, where you can crash and die. There's another one where you were captured by the goons and escaped, where if you don't escape they shoot you dead. There's also one where you just run out of clues and your investigation stalls, which is very anti-climactic, but it's your own fault if you get there because, as you say, it is a very forgiving book. You pretty much have clues handed to you, and if you run out of clues the baddies try and kidnap you anyway, giving you more clues, and there are several routes through the book. I don't consider that a fault though, because (1) it was written for children, and by book 15 the publishers had probably begun to receive reader feedback that some of the books were too hard, e.g. Deathtrap Dungeon, and (2) it is fun to replay and explore bits you missed the first time round. Unusually for an FF book, both of the two main boss baddies turn up in other parts of the book, not just at the end.

You seem to have found a pretty good route on your first go though. The set-up with Clive Torus and his wife gives (to me anyway) the illusion that there is an actual plot, and that you (the detective) have stumbled into someone else's story; like a gamebook novel instead of a dungeon crawl that just goes from room to room.

I presume your shot Zera Gross instead of wrestling with her, because if you beat her to death then with her dying breath she gives you a clue to get through the cubic rooms to Blaster Babbet. Or you can just blow up his asteroid, but I prefer the face to face showdown ending as it is more dramatic.

Glad you liked it!

Funt Solo

I felt a need to defeat the first ten originals, so by hook or by crook, that's what I did - which involved utilizing save points (basically taking a snap-shot of my character sheet) at key points. I found this necessary with Caverns of the Snow Witch and House of Hell, because surviving requires some optimal choices. (Quite funny that [spoiler]spending any treasure in Caverns results in loss, damage or[/spoiler] is just pointless. You're better off leaving it behind.)

Anyway, here's my chart of the first ten books - the "How to win" sections, naturally, are entirely spoilerific - so fair warning! SPOILERS AHOY!

++ A-Z ++  coma ++

Barrington Boots

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!

Quote from: Richard on 28 July, 2022, 01:28:23 PM
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!
You're a dark horse, Boots.

Richard

"Definitely not a car mechanic!"   :lol:

Blue Cactus

Quote from: Barrington Boots on 22 July, 2022, 10:04:41 AM
Quote from: Barrington Boots on 21 July, 2022, 04:16:17 PM
You mentioning not owning some books reminds me I've got a handful of spare FF books from job lots that I've picked up. I should offer them to others here.

So at the moment I have spare copies of:

Forest of Doom
Island of the Lizard King
Scorpion Swamp
Rebel Planet
Demons of the Deep
Sword of the Samurai

Trade or free (pay postage) to anyone who wants them on this thread.

They're all puffin originals, with the green stripe (no Wizard / Scholastic rubbish here!) from cheap job lots I've picked up. All a bit tatty, faded spines etc as you'd expect, and not played by me.
I was hanging onto them till I had another couple and then thinking of ebaying them as a lot myself, but I'd much rather someone here had them if they're wanted.

Bit cheeky of me to ask this but I'd be happy to pay some postage for these unless they've been snapped up. I'm an occasional lurker on this thread because I love a bit of FF but usually only play with an old school friend of mine. We've been playing them together off and on for 20 years or more but not systematically so we barely ever complete any of them. In fact I think we've literally completed one, Keep of the Liche Lord, last year! And City if Thieves, although that one I completed on my own and went all-in on map making and multiple play throughs. We have played all the FF books at least once though, and lots of them multiple times. Usually take turns on who will do the initial dice rolls meaning we can blame each other for any crappy scores and when we get our asses handed to us in combat. Decision making is made together and we swap up reading/rolling every wee while. Perfectly normal pastime for two 42-year olds!

He's the one with the complete collection, I just have ten or twelve of them. The last couple of years we've had to play them over Zoom/Teams online though so we're kind of stuck with the ones we both have copies of. He's sent me a few doubles but it would be cool to expand our options a little bit if you still have these going spare. I already have Rebel Planet though, in fact I think it was my first one. I often went for the sci-fi ones when I was a kid, which I've come to realise was a mistake on the whole because the Fantasy ones tend to be much better!

Blue Cactus

Also thanks all for a lovely and very entertaining thread! Interesting too - there's a lot of FF knowledge here!

Barrington Boots

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.
You're a dark horse, Boots.

Richard

There's also FF's duo gamebooks Clash of the Princes: The Warrior's Way and The Warlock's Way.

Blue Cactus

We did try Clash of the Princes, don't think we got very far but that would be worth bother go. I haven't actually looked into the other Duel Masters books. I do seem to remember trying Way of the Tiger years ago, Cretan Chronicles and Lone Wolf too. From you guys' chat it sounds like the Tiger books might be worth another go. Somewhere or other I have an official Grail Quest pencil too...

Like you say I could no doubt pick some FF books up cheaply on eBay, just haven't got round to it what with other life stuff. I do much prefer the Puffin editions, all part of the aesthetics / nostalgia for me. But I saw your kind offer there Barrington and thought it was worth a shot! Definitely interested in the ones you have left. (Except Rebel Planet! I think the last time we played that we had the most pathetic death, we basically ran out of money and couldn't buy any food cubes, so presumably just starved to death in some apartment building having achieved nothing!)

Blue Cactus

My entire collection consists of, in no particular order:

Deathtrap Dungeon
Fangs of Fury
Caverns of the Snow Witch
City of Thieves
Armies of Death
Starship Traveller
Keep of them Lich-Lord
Sky Lord
House of Hell
Rings of Kether
Rebel Planet
Talisman of Death
Phantoms of Fear
Appointment with FEAR
Stealer of Souls
Island of the Undead
Legend of Zagor

and a couple of new ones:

Crystal of Storms
Assassins of Allansia

Actually more than I thought!

Richard

Stealer of Souls is a good one.

What is Assassins of Allansia like?