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I shall be looking out for this. I've been working my way through the whole of Star Wars - one episode/half-a-film during dinner! - in a close approximation of in-world chronological order and I've just finished the first two Bad Batch seasons. After a movie interlude of Solo, I'm now on with Obi-Wan Kenobi.

I find that web usability in general has sort of fallen of a cliff and been eaten by scavengers. But then I'm still using a PC, so am one of the few. I will fade into the darkness, along with keyboards, and everything will be replaced by "Siri - tell the AI to make me a song that I want to listen to!"

There's a silent army of us determined obstinate old-skool desktop, keyboard & mouse users out there. You can't do anything significant on a phone - it's only for the social media-obsessed layabouts. And yet there are websites that cater for only phone users. "It'll work fine on desktop" they say, and it works, but like crap with a massive waste of screen real-estate. Bah. etc
There's a new world out there and not all of it is good. My newest PC doesn't have an optical drive. Doesn't even have a bay for one. 

Within the metal scene (possibly other music scenes too?) there's been a swing towards putting stuff on cassette again. As far as I can see it's a mix of nostalgia and elitism: backlash against digital music and CDs that fetishises a format thats crap and we moved on from for good reason. Cassettes don't even have the nice bits that vinyl does (giant artwork, lovely smell, weird ritualistic nature of having to go to the effort of putting one on) and their only benefit is that they're very small and portable, which doesn't stack against modern music formats, so for me its very much regression for the sake of regression.

I buy a lot of electronic music and there there's certainly a revival in cassettes that has been getting gradually stronger for a few years now. I tend to buy CDs when I can because I like to get a physical format. I'll also get a different physical format if there's something I want that's not available in CD or lossless download. I use bandcamp a lot so almost everything comes as digital download, and mostly I'm happy with that. I get the physical for collectability too, if I fancy it. For certain artists.
I bought this on preorder. No download version, so I had to get the tape, plus it's a nice package (not cheap, plus postage!). Then bloody qobuz went and sold a download version for a few quid. Bastards.

It could be playable with some modding, but the whole book feels like an unplaytested, botched attempt to update FF and it wasn't fun to play.

Sounds like I may decide to play Blood of the Zombies with d20 where it expects d6. Either when rolling stats or in combat. Or both!

I'm terrible with dates, but I reckon I'd have been about to start college. Although I never got or read Crisis, or even heard about it til much later. I wasn't reading comics any more by then. I'd put my Eagles in boxes, and decided I'd grown out of it all.

Just that it doesn't resize based on browser windows size, it has a scrollable frame inside the scrollable main page making mousewheel scrolling a pain, the menu is transparent so you can't clearly see the options. It's very rudimentary. And there's a goddamn pop up asking to sign up to something you have no idea whether you want or not because you've only been there 8 seconds! A trivial complaint, but as a former web developer I can't help but get annoyed

I never tried the Grailquest books. I heard both good things about them and bad - that they're fun, humorous, and tolerant of game-play "shortcuts", but also badly constructed and full of errors.

I do have Maelstrom, but never really played it as the rules take up most of the book and I couldn't be bothered to read them all to even find out what type of gamebook it is.

Troika!

That's a bad website.

They look nice from a distance, but some of them are in pretty poor condition. This was one of the requirements for them to be a reading copy. Given how collectable they have become I didn't want to play with a near perfect one. Some of them are still too good a condition really - it's really hard to find a copy of Sky Lord or Daggers of Darkness in crap enough condition, and I just can't deliberately allow myself to damage a book.

The puffin fell off my Warlock (not a sentence I'd thought I'd be writing when I woke up this morning). I damaged it taking the books out of their cubby hole and I had to glue it back on before taking the photo. Despite this level of care I still forgot that I'd taken Blood of the Zombies out for the aforementioned quick skim through and forgot to put it back.

I've now printed out my adventure sheets for the first 42 books (A4 so I've lots of space). Doing the rest as I type.

Now I have no excuse not to do playthoughs!

Well, I can only stand for so long in the onslaught of such entertaining playthroughs! I dug out my reading copies. I could only get to the first one by getting all of them out, so bugger it, I'll get them all out and then work out where I want to start.

Dug out an old shelf and found a corner to stand it in.

_{There is supposed to be an image here. First time trying an image, so we'll see if it works.}

Sad to say I would avoid this one like the plague (no pun intended). It's frustratingly difficult (it's actually impossible without cheating), lacks variety (you only fight zombies) and abandons the SKILL / LUCK stats in favour of a new type of combat that is frankly awful.

Shame about this. I had a bit of a read-up on its quirks just after you posted.
The one place I found that mentions anything relevant seems to suggest that the number of zombies you kill depends on the roll of the dice. Seems like a poor idea, but I guess I'll have to play it to find out.
A quick skim through the book shows that you're told how many zombies there are in any given fight, and the last section indicates that the number of zombies killed determines your success, so I'd assumed that the winning route is just wherever you encounter the correct number of zombies. But you suggest there's some other bug?

It does have some very cool art from Kev Crossley however.

And I like Greg Staples's cover too!

my new copy of Nightshift arrived today, so I'll check that out first!

Interested to hear how you get on with it. The downside of being recommended something is that there's a danger of overhype.

Another excellent journey journal I'm not saving myself from spoilers, but I won't re-read any walkthroughs prior to commencing my own adventures once I've donned my hiking boots and worked up a thirst for ale.

As soon as I became clued in to the fact that they'd retconned the FF series into a single world of Titan (for the most part) I'd basically extended it in my own mind to presume that Titan was Earth of the far far future after a number of apocalyptic events, but with some remnants of our modern day lurking buried underground in random lost caches.

I yearn for the day Zagor's long forgotten extra-super-secret stash of treasure is found and reveals the marvels of an old electrical plug, an unopened can of sausages & beans, and a publicity photo of Barry Chuckle.

I must admit I thought Metaphysique was a superhero title in Malibu's short lived line

There is a 6-issue series by Breyfogle from Malibu Comics in 1995 which I don't have, and seems to be a superhero title.

The one I have is a 2-isssue series from Eclipse in 1992, which is an anthology. It's 'presented' by a character called Metaphysique (a la the Crypt Keeper from Creepshow) which may have been what was then developed into the 1995 series. I don't know :)

Never heard of Drywall, whose it by?

Drywall is by Rob Schrab, and its cover says it's "a Scud world spin-off". I had a look at the info on comic vine for Scud and it didn't seem very inspirational, but then neither did the blurb on Drywall: Unzipped, and I enjoyed that.

you are really peaking my interest

One good turn, and all that

[Face]

I have a strong suspicion that no-one is all that interested in my adventures in reading through some of this stuff, but, and in spite of obviously being a crap reviewer, here are some further thoughts on what else I've read.


Face
The third (well first, technically) of the Vertigo Voices trio.
This was also pretty good - certainly enjoyable. The plot was quite straight forward - I didn't spend the first half of the book wondering what the hell was going on as I sometimes have with other books I've read.

The dialogue is filled with such massively pretentious cheese that it's funny (possibly unintentionally) but very entertainingly executed nonetheless.

I've now read enough of Milligan to spot that identity and the sense of self are recurring themes of his, and this one has that in spades. I'd already guessed the broad strokes of the twist at the end the by the time that all the characters had entered the story, but it was carried out with some nice unexpected details. Well worth the hour it took to read, and probably worth re-reading at some point, too.


Metaphysique
Two-volume anthology by Norm Breyfogle. I picked up the one I was missing easily enough.
A selection of very enjoyable short stories drawn in a variety of different (and excellent) styles. A couple are just odd. Not really too much to say about it since most stories were too short to go into much depth on anything, but it was fun.


Drywall: Unzipped
Strange little story. I got the impression that I ought to have already read the related works in which the character debuted, but it worked on its own and had a very unique feel to it. Part fun cartoon, part bittersweet metaphor. I wonder if the other books are similarly off kilter. I'm very curious.


Angela
Simple, but enjoyable story. I mean, simple. There was really nothing to the story at all. It's basically an entertaining yarn, and if there was any subtext to it it was minimal. The art looked very good but I found that I had to look at it for longer than I thought I ought to work out what it was depicting. It started to make me feel like my eyes weren't working properly any more. Might have benefitted me to have read Spawn up 'til that point (I've read none), but it didn't feel like it was essential.


Shade (1977)
I thought I'd give the Ditko original a go before moving on to the 1990 Milligan volume at last, so I picked up the copies that I was missing.

Surprisingly enjoyable. The art was clean and clear, and the story, despite some seeming non-sequiturs and the lack of a proper ending, was moving along nice and fun. Although it did at several points really seem like he was making it up one issue at a time.

And what's with all the ads for instant muscles? The 70s in the US were clearly weirder than in the UK.


Shade (1990)
I'm now reading this. I'd been putting it off a bit because it's going to be a long read.

The first issue was a decent comprehensible intro. The next 3 or 4 were an odd mix of abstract and surreal metaphor for 75% of each issue juxtaposed with one or two pages of functional prosaic exposition at the end. As if Milligan had presented the script to an editor who'd said, "That's great Peter, but put some explanation in at the end so people know what the fuck is going on". It felt very jarring to go from the esoteric to the mundane in the space of one panel.

It's become obvious that there was absolutely no need to read the Ditko original, and in fact it would probably have been better if I hadn't. The names are reused, but the events and background given in the Ditko story have been almost entirely discarded and only get in the way of the comprehension of the new Shade. Even the vest that is the source of Shade's abilities is not the same device.

I should add that I have no knowledge of how the character was progressing in his appearances elsewhere between the two volumes, but since Ditko's Shade has a different past to this, I doubt it matters any.

I've just finished #11 and it feels like the first few were essentially Milligan trying to find his feet with the character; not yet settled on who or what Shade was, and trying to separate him from the dregs of the old-Shade he'd nearly tied him to. Issue 11 feels like the first one to have a more thought-out and even narrative.

Now I'm enjoying it, and the storytelling has got smoother and much easier to read. Not quite getting that unputdownable vibe. At least not yet.


In between all of this I've also read a bit more of the 2000 AD Dan Dare (entertaining claptrap) and the last of the Terry Goodkind series of novels that I'd not yet read (regular novels with like just words n that, via ebook) - the Scribbly Man ones.

And, of course, I've read the 17th-day-of-Christmas-Special of the Chefs of Death   Hi bdk.

I read a lot.

Good write-up! Every time I read one it makes me want to get back to playing. Then I remember that right now my reading copies are stored where it's awkward to get at them, ready for renovation work. Not impossible, though. I should dig them out.

I should also put ink in my printer and print out my scanned 'n' vectorised adventure sheets too.

I've never been all that keen on the idea of the vampire ones though, since I don't really like vampires as a stock mythological and fictional creature (over-rated). Same with zombies, although that's more because of disillusionment with zombie stories in general - they mostly start with an interesting and/or original setup and then descend into generic running about with the characters being picked off one by one. That said, I'm quite interested in playing Blood of the Zombies. It tends to get forgotten because it's not a proper numbered title in any series. How come Scholastic haven't reprinted that one?

Also, I'd no idea that Martin McKenna had died. Not merely died, but committed suicide. He was only a couple of years older than me.

Morning chaps. Thanks for the responses! I think that Funt's A-Z is clearly the best resource of these as it covers everything, and lists things in tabular form. The only downside is that each table is very often grouped by series, and within that a sort of 'story phase'

What I'd need is everything in one table with those series, stories and phases in their own columns - so I can list each story in date-first-published order regardless of groupings. Easier to do with the A-Z than for that wikimedia pdf, but still a lot of work!

[far]

Is there one?

I was curious which stories had been collected and which hadn't, which got me searching for a complete list of all stories that I could use to work it out.

Since I've read few 2000 AD stories I wanted to see if I could read each one in more or less the order they were published (since that seemed the best for not having to worry about working out continuity), and maybe look to getting collected volumes where I fancied (availability and cost allowing), or picking up old Progs off eBay over time. I already have several hundred from between the mid 80s to the early 2000s, though they're not all consecutive issues. The earlier stuff might be only readable in trades.

Anyway, I can't find much of a list in a useable form. I found this but it's not tabular so I can't sort by date, story, series, etc, or add my own notes, and it's far too much of a faff to convert it to a tabular format. It also doesn't factor in the Meg or annuals/specials as far as I can see, or the characters/stories that might have begun outside of 2000 AD. Nor any stand-alone related publications (should there be any)

The 2000 AD wiki is... hmm...

The Power

My vote would be for this, but the world really has enough superhero stories, so I'd make the recipients of the crystals more like victims ultimately, and have the "powers" more like bizarre side-effects. Not silly. Just odd. Like contact with water causes the individual to catch fire, along with anything around them, or another could have the "ability" to pass through solid objects, but only at times of great anger or arousal. These could leading to some unfortunate encounters at bars.

And after only a short time the crystals' 'energy' causes them to go mad like their original owners, not just mad from residual loneliness, but also schizophrenia due to the extant personality embedded in them. The only one who doesn't show any negative symptoms despite being equally effected can be an estate agent, for obvious reasons.

Number two

*gasp*