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Post by petch on Jun 4, 2022 11:29:17 GMT
I'm almost certain a thread of this type already exists but I've had a quick peruse & I can't find one - greenspine please feel free to merge the thread if it does! Wilf's rankings poll a couple of years back established the forum's 5 least favourite FF as The Port of Peril, Eye of the Dragon, Sky Lord, The Gates of Death & Blood of the Zombies. Personally, I quite enjoyed 4 out of those 5, and would be interested to see which 5 books would be at the bottom of the pile for the individual members here. Here's mine, from fifth bottom to worstest:
5 - Deathmoor
Robin Waterfield is a very good writer. Phantoms of Fear has my favourite opening of any book in the series, and moves skillfully and evocatively from pastoral imagery at the beginning to the darker descriptions of the disease and corruption that infects the forest as you move closer to Ishtra's influence. It conjures vivid and memorable dreamscapes too. Although Masks of Mayhem is far from being one of my favourites, it demonstrates well that writing doesn't have to be verbose to be elegant.
I mention this because that quality is almost entirely absent from Deathmoor. It opens well enough, with some grim body horror in the Background and the town you start in has a bit of character (that said, that weird cameo from Mario & Luigi feels very out of place, and just made me wish Waterfield spent less time playing Super Mario and more time on his book!). But when you venture into the moor, it becomes almost description-free - I found I couldn't visualise the setting at all due to the lack of description and you might as well have been wandering around some graph paper populated by wandering monsters. It culminates in the most underwhelming climactic encounter in the whole series because we know nothing about Arachnos at all. Is he human? Is he, as his name might suggest, some kind of spider-guy? We don't know, because Waterfield couldn't be arsed to tell us.
4 - Chasms of Malice
There's actually quite a lot I like about Chasms. The underground lore of the place is pretty interesting. Giving you a feline companion is a nice touch, although Tabasha doesn't get nearly enough screen time and she ceases to be useful just at the point when you need her the most. And Sharp's unique take on book design with its labyrinthine, overlapping pathways gives decent replay value to the opening section at least.
Then, just past the midway point, there's that strange moment in reference 203 where Sharp breaks the fourth wall and more or less tells you that the adventure is about to become rock hard. And that's where it starts to all go wrong. Straight after this is the notorious 'one-strike combat' section, surely the most poorly thought out supplementary rule in all of FF. I kind of get what Sharp was going for, to show the lethality of his underground setting, but it's just so poorly designed. True, Chasms isn't even the most mathematically difficult FF to complete, but at least Spellbreaker and Crypt of the Sorcerer had the decency to conceal their unfairness better than 'toss this coin several times and if it ever comes up heads, you die.' And then, even if you negotiate this part, towards the end the book descends into a series of decisions where if you don't pick the right compass direction, it's instadeath. It even gives you some clues for the first few if you managed to learn the Cyphers, but then it abandons that completely for several decisions in a row with arbitrary death by wrong direction to the point where it becomes almost parodic. Bleurgh.
3 - Star Strider
I find it harder to pinpoint why I didn't like Star Strider. I think it's essentially because I found it so characterless. I was able to forgive Fangs of Fury and, especially, Daggers of Darkness for their lack of atmospheric writing because there were some fun set pieces and interesting ideas, but I found Star Strider almost devoid of that. Maybe I'm harsher on this one because in a fantasy setting, I know what an Orc looks like, I know what a forest looks like, so that helps me to overcome the limitations of the writing. In Star Strider's futuristic setting, without strong descriptive writing to aid me, I couldn't picture the world Sharp was trying to present and as a result, just found the whole thing empty and dull.
2 - Eye of the Dragon
Poor Ian. I often think Livingstone is given too much of a hard time around here. True, his books can be formulaic, but you know what you're getting with them, and sometimes, if you're in the right mood, a bit of warm, familiar, fuzzy nostalgia is good for the soul. And when he did try something different with Blood of the Zombies, it was near-universally panned (okay, I liked it, but I'm all too conscious I'm very much in the minority there!).
But I think for Eye of the Dragon those familiar criticisms often directed at his works are well deserved. Bare, descriptionless corridors and rooms with a series of 'do you go left or right' or 'do you open the door or don't you' decisions leading to half-formed ideas presumably left over from previous works or 'I'll just chuck a goblin or an evil wizard in there, that'll do' type encounters. Uninspired, bland, boring.
1 - Starship Traveller
Is Starship Traveller the worst FF gamebook? Probably not, to be honest. But it is my least favourite because of what it represents - a huge missed opportunity. It could - should - have been the sci-fi equivalent of what Jackson did with Appointment with F.E.A.R or even Sorcery!, with its grand Star Trek inspirations leading to epic adventures across different planets, your hardy crew in tow, with the limitless possibilities of the genre being explored. But its slim length, the flaws in its design that mean you can beat it without picking up a pair of dice, the lack of imagination, all point to Jackson giving up on the project, rush releasing it and moving on to other things. I know I'm being harsh here - Jackson doubtless had a lot of plates to spin, and the series was very much in its infancy at the time, but since he demonstrably didn't care very much about it, I don't either.
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Post by CharlesX on Jun 4, 2022 12:53:02 GMT
I knock Blood Of The Zombies quite a bit, but I haven't read it, so it would be heavily hypocritical to include it here, otherwise I'm pretty sure it'd be in the top two. A lot depends on a binary calculation of priority, gameplay versus book description. I think like the majority, I tend to prioritise gameplay, although the two can coincide. For example, there's no question Spellbreaker is excessively difficult, but it doesn't appear here because I like the world-building, and it's errors just don't grate on me in the way these 5 do.
5. Revenge Of The Vampire
Not the worst Fighting Fantasy gamebook by a long stretch, but by that point I was getting tired of the Keith Martin template. But what really made me hate Revenge was the errors. I hate mislinked paragraphs, I could accept several of them, but the horse gold issue, where you simply technically can't get a really important item, and maybe make up your own rules? There are other Fighting Fantasy gamebooks more broken in terms of being too tough or too easy in terms of gameplay, but like I say this gamebook just didn't work for me. In the unlikely event it were reprinted, I hope more than a nominal interest is taken in fixing the errors, and it'd become a middling gamebook instead of a rubbish one.
4. Eye Of The Dragon
@ Petch, Is it us who give Ian a hard time, or FF Facebook who don't criticize him enough? Either way, Ian's book isn't quite the single worst FF gamebook, but it's seriously average. I wouldn't give Steve or Luke or Jonathan or Andrew a pass for the templates they write, and they develop over time. Ian's work has only become worse over time.
3. Chasms Of Malice
The one-strike-combat alone is beyond ridiculous and one of the worst game mechanics in any gamebook series. The underground section is dull. Boring description. It's saving grace is some interesting enemies and The Spell Of Life.
2. Sky Lord
Combines outrageous difficulty with an extremely boring gamebook, more inane, random and tedious than most CYOA books. As a CYOA fan, I think R. A. Montgomery pisses all over this, even on one of his bad days.
1. Gates Of Death
A failed experiment, which has different rules for weapons, Knightmare-esque items, but doesn't work. The items are too overpowered, the humour tries to be scatological but is instead childish, there are a ton of errors, the writing and artwork is poor. It feels like it was 100% machine-written for money with no soul, making Eye Of The Dragon look like a World Cup winner in terms of human art (it really isn't).
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kieran
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Post by kieran on Jun 4, 2022 14:38:52 GMT
I quite like some of the books named so far for reasons I've probably bored this forum with before so I won't repeat them here. But my Bottom 5:
5. Starship Traveller Managing a whole crew is fun. Exploring loads of planets is fun. But everything feels rushed and underdeveloped and you never really get any sense of agency. Your crew are completely colourless to the extent they can die and be replaced without the text acknowledging the change in any way. It's the shortest book by far and there are even hints at content being abandoned. Just an extremely lazy gamebook. Oh, and it has a boring maze with an abrupt instant death in it to boot.
4. Robot Commando Explore empty non-descript cities and occasionally battle a dinosaur or a robot using uninspired and unbalanced rules. In theory it's extremely replayable but it's so boring that I can't bring myself to explore all it has to offer.
3. Chasms of Malice I like Luke Sharp's other books but this one is pretty poor. There is zero atmosphere (think it was only in my third go I realised you're underground the whole time) and zero explanation for anything (what are the Khuddam and why are they such rapid breeders?). It repeatedly kills you off for turning the wrong way or rolling the wrong number thereby punishing exploration which is a shame given the plethora of paths open to you.
2. Blood of the Zombies I think there's some decent writing here and I really like the streamlined combat system which really makes you feel like you're wading through a sea of Zombies, lopping off multiple heads with a single swing of your chainsaw. Unfortunately, it's impossible to play by the rules and, unlike Crypt of the Sorcerer or Spellbreaker which would be beatable with some minor tweaks, you'd have to give yourself 10x the initial Stamina to stand any sort of a chance. Throw in the extreme linearity (the first half is basically a single corridor), ammunition rules that were clearly abandoned, characters with nonsensical motivations (including your own) and this is sadly a stinker. Also Escape from Zombie Castle was the better title.
1. Gates of Death This is an odd book. In some ways it feels like Higson is very familiar with the FF world and its rules, other times it feels like he's never so much as picked up an FF before. Some of the encounters are quite likeably quirky but they just don't gel very well together. The apocalyptic scenario doesn't really fit Titan and the whole thing just drags on and on and on. There's definitely good stuff in there but the whole is less than the sum of its parts.
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Post by philsadler on Jun 4, 2022 15:49:53 GMT
Baring in mind that I haven't played all of them: 5.) Scorpion Swamp I start with a fairly controversial choice because it was innovative and tried something which perhaps no other FF has done, namely by letting you revisit almost any location. However, I thought the adventure became much smaller because of this, understandably. I also thought it just wasn't as good as some of the others. Awful cover too and bad interior illustrations. 4.) Crypt of Sorcerer I often wonder if IL (a) simply doesn't care how impossible some of his books are or (b) genuinely doesn't realise. Either way, BITD, I played this many times when I was young, all without cheating, until I got to the boss. Once I realised what a slap in the face he was, I put the book down and never went back. I even checked if there were any secret refs for that fight. There weren't. 3.) Eye of the Dragon Just formulaic, generic and not very interesting. The best things about it are the cover and illustrations. The worst are the ludicrous plot, nonsensical dungeon and the ridiculous encounters, not to mention the absurd mandatory skill 12 fight.
2.) Chasms of Malice One-strike combats. 1.) Blood of the Zombies A book like COTS is like fighting Frank Bruno with one hand behind your back, whilst driving a car with your feet. Almost impossible, regardless how good you are, lucky you are, strong you are. Almost nothing will help. But, who knows, there might be a few people on earth who could manage it. BOTZ, on the other hand, is literally, mathematically, physically impossible. Not only that, but the enemies are just normal zombies 99% of the time. Imagine if Resident Evil were like that? It would've got a bit boring. Add to that the fact that he took a very simple system and dumbed it down is a real kick in the balls. The less said about the final 'puzzle' the better.
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Post by tyrion on Jun 4, 2022 16:44:22 GMT
5. Port of peril
I like Ian Livingstone, his style of writing is to me what FF is. I even like botz and eotd (the illustrations in those two help a lot - why couldn't scholastic have hired kev crossley?). I don't like port of peril. IL is taking the mickey with the list of items and the stamina bonus in paragraph 1. The illustrations are terrible, and yaztromo is at his most annoying.
4. Daggers of darkness
I've tried this so many times, but it just annoys me. The writing is dire (and I'm not having the excuse that the author is not a native English speaker, this is a published piece of work for which he got paid), mapping it out is frustrating and again, the illustrations aren't the best. Yes, they are by a young Martin McKenna, but they aren't that good. Why not get an adult to illustrate it instead?
3. Chasms of malice
Like Daggers of darkness, but worse. The illustrations are good, but they are all orcs and goblins, and I'm pretty sure there are some new creatures in the book that could have been illustrated.
2. Crystal of storms
Childish writing, rubbish illustrations, some weird loop. Yes I know these are children's books, but so is talisman of death and slaves of the abyss, and they didn't talk down to you.
1. Gates of death
Ignoring the (yet again) rubbish illustrations, the plot holes, the childishness and the brokenness, this for me commits the worst crime for an FF book: it's just boring. I tried it again recently and couldn't even be bothered getting out of port blacksand.
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Post by nathanh on Jun 4, 2022 18:09:17 GMT
I'm excluding books that I only played when I was young, and also Starship Traveller and Blood of the Zombies where I've only played the app version which doesn't let me score them properly (but from what I've seen, neither would trouble the bottom 5---I'd expect that Blood would be in the bottom 25% and Traveller a little higher).
I evaluate gamebooks based on three criteria: how fun are they to play by the rules, how fun are they to try to solve without playing or mapping (so just reading and trying to work out the right route), and how fun are they to just read for the fun of reading. This is because this is the three main ways I interact with FF.
First of all, looking at my ratings there is a 4-way tie at 4th--7th: Curse of the Mummy, Shamutanti Hills, Sky Lord, and Space Assassin. I'm going to put Hills as the best of these four: I don't like Sorcery mechanics and this book isn't particularly fun to solve, but it is basically functional. Next, I'm going to give a boost to Sky Lord because it actually has a bunch of stuff I enjoy, they're just mostly towards the end and I never get there when playing. But actually playing by the rules is the rarest way I have to interact with FF, so I'll weight it slightly lower than the other two aspects. And I like the final planet in Sky Lord, whereas with the other two I don't like anything except the combat mechanics in Space Assassin. So:
#5 SPACE ASSASSIN
This book is very minimally written and isn't much fun to read or explore. It does have some of the better sci-fi combat mechanics though, so it does better than the rest on this list.
#4 CURSE OF THE MUMMY
Way too difficult and has no redeeming features from either a solution or story perspective. I struggle to find anything interesting to say about this one.
#3 BATTLEBLADE WARRIOR
Painfully bland. In competition with Curse of the Mummy, it has reasonable difficulty but isn't as interesting to read, and Katya is annoying. So, down in #3 it goes.
#2 APPOINTMENT WITH F.E.A.R.
This is one of the most technically impressive gamebooks, but this doesn't make it interesting to me. It is of no fun to pick up and read or explore, since there is so much hidden behind mysterious secret references (some of which are vague to reach). It is probably fine to play as long as you stick to one power until you've solved it, but I'm not going to play four times so all this means is that it has a lot of wasted pages. If the secret references were instead explicitly called out via codewords or similar, then this wouldn't be in the bottom 5.
#1 CRYPT OF THE SORCERER
Obviously no fun to actually play. And no fun to solve either, since it was in the later Livingstone trend of not putting much effort into the false routes. And in this book I don't find Livingstone's prose to his usual standard---unlike some people I quite like his writing in most books even though it is pretty simple. But that simplicity means that if it's below standard it's rather bad.
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Post by CharlesX on Jun 4, 2022 18:32:00 GMT
nathanh I personally disagree Space Assassin hasn't got areas to explore, I enjoyed some of the non-true path routes growing up, although they probably had little or no replay value, and that's probably because I like Andrew Chapman's gamebooks. Space Assassin is Andrew Chapman's first Fighting Fantasy and as such comparatively cautious and underwhelming. Number 5 isn't exactly a slamming so the two of us can agree to disagree. Curse Of The Mummy is tough whatever edition you play, but you are aware the Wizard edition is slightly less so?
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kieran
Baron
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Post by kieran on Jun 4, 2022 19:00:27 GMT
not to mention the absurd mandatory skill 12 fight Technically there's two of those given the penalty you suffer against the Doppelganger. Though at least your attacks don't do half damage to him.
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Post by petch on Jun 4, 2022 19:28:09 GMT
nathanh I personally disagree Space Assassin hasn't got areas to explore, I enjoyed some of the non-true path routes growing up, although they probably had little or no replay value, and that's probably because I like Andrew Chapman's gamebooks. Space Assassin is Andrew Chapman's first Fighting Fantasy and as such comparatively cautious and underwhelming. Number 5 isn't exactly a slamming so the two of us can agree to disagree. Space Assassin is sixth bottom for me. I like Chapman too, but this one just feels like a bunch of disparate ideas (albeit some of them quite intriguing ones) chucked into a book together with little to no cohesion. It's like making a pie with everything you can find in your fridge. Chocolate, sausages and stilton might taste nice on their own but if you mix them all together they're going to taste like shit.
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Post by philsadler on Jun 4, 2022 19:46:18 GMT
not to mention the absurd mandatory skill 12 fight Technically there's two of those given the penalty you suffer against the Doppelganger. Though at least your attacks don't do half damage to him.
Jesus Christ.
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Post by peasantscribbler on Jun 4, 2022 20:16:56 GMT
I realize that you asked for a bottom five, but there are only four FFs that I consistently don't like. I couldn't decide on a number 5.
4. Spellbreaker
If you play with dice, you might get about halfway after 3 or 4 dozen attempts. I don't like the premise that you are on a race against time to recover the Black Grimoire, while you actually need to ignore every sense of urgency and engage in many side missions to win. I really don't like that your hawk is treated as a backpack item when you're in jail.
3. Crypt of the Sorcerer
There is a big drop off for me between number 4 and number 3--Crypt is much worse than Spellbreaker. It's a little better if you re-define winning as getting to the Razaak fight, and you just close the book at that point. The Bonekeeper encounter really bothers me, probably more than it should.
2. Blood of the Zombies
Best way to play is to ignore all stamina loss. Even if you do this, killing all the Zombies is a bit ridiculous.
1. Gates of Death
I think there is potential in this book, but the gameplay is completely botched. There are too many instances in which you have little assurance that you are appropriately guessing how to interpret the rules.
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Post by CharlesX on Jun 4, 2022 21:01:53 GMT
peasantscribbler I like this list, because it emphasises gameplay: to me, the 4 Fighting Fantasy you mention are the 4 broken, unenjoyable Fighting Fantasy's. I've long thought Spellbreaker is not only broken in gameplay terms but also mediocre and unappealing in literary terms.
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Post by vastariner on Jun 4, 2022 21:09:38 GMT
OK, my bottom five...
5. Freeway Fighter
Far too Mad Max, and Joe Dever did it better. Felt short-changed by the lack of references and the hurry on the illustrations.
4. Chasms of Malice
One strike combat, stochastic deaths, a stupid cat, basically this is Orb's Rift done by Ren & Stimpy.
3. Crypt of the Sorceror
1 in 10,000 chance of winning it fairly? Ridiculously linear path and illogicality reigns supreme.
2. Sky Lord
The Timmy Mallet of FF.
1. Blood of the Zombies
...it's not really Fighting Fantasy, though, is it? Which makes it worse - it's a plain cash-in.
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Post by stevendoig on Jun 5, 2022 11:15:43 GMT
I dislike all 5 pretty equally, no out and out worst book.
Chasms of malice - broken and very badly written.
Gates of death - too many (intentional?) circular parts and goes on and on.
Starship traveller - underwritten and badly illustrated.
Curse of the mummy - too hard, very long and dull.
Fangs of fury - I am too thick to crack the code.
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Post by bloodbeasthandler on Jun 5, 2022 12:47:30 GMT
Least favourite books vary with time and mood as much as favourites, and at this moment in time my least favourite are Deathmoor, Freeway Fighter, Blood of the Zombies, Eye of the Dragon, Sky Lord. Maybe Gates of Death too?
In general the later (more recent) books are over-represented on our lists here which is a great shame because we would have wanted the newer books to learn from the mistakes of the older ones. Not only has the output of the books slowed compared to the 80s and 90s, but the quality has fallen away too.
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Post by thealmightymudworm on Jun 7, 2022 14:47:19 GMT
I dislike all 5 pretty equally, no out and out worst book. Chasms of malice - broken and very badly written. Gates of death - too many (intentional?) circular parts and goes on and on. Starship traveller - underwritten and badly illustrated. Curse of the mummy - too hard, very long and dull. Fangs of fury - I am too thick to crack the code. Which code – the stick men? Finding numbers to escape '...A NON-EXIT IN REVERSE...' etc? I can't recall offhand a code in Fangs that you aren't given an explanation of somewhere. Unless you just mean that applying it is a pain?
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Post by stevendoig on Jun 7, 2022 18:13:00 GMT
Yep, the stick men....
I work in a shop
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Post by thealmightymudworm on Jun 8, 2022 15:36:38 GMT
Yep, the stick men....I work in a shop Fair enough, I just thought that – given that there's not much discussion of this book on here and about half of what there is of this code mentions people using 'cryptography skills' – that it was worth checking that you had at least had the benefit of reading paragraph 247! I don't think that you need to declare yourself as thick to excuse stumbling over a puzzle in an FF book.
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Post by bloodbeasthandler on Jun 8, 2022 19:36:22 GMT
1. Gates of Death This is an odd book. In some ways it feels like Higson is very familiar with the FF world and its rules, other times it feels like he's never so much as picked up an FF before. Speculation: Was someone like Jonathan Green initially helping him out a bit by giving advice, perhaps? That's one way to explain what's going on here. I don't know, maybe someone mapped out a path for him - Blacksand to Salamonis via Trolltooth Path together with a brief synopsis of what the locations were like. Explained the rules. Explained gameplay. Either that or he researched the genre and played through some of the books and read the source material, but i don't recall him really name-checking the books in interviews, do you?
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Post by daredevil123 on Jun 8, 2022 19:52:14 GMT
1. Gates of Death This is an odd book. In some ways it feels like Higson is very familiar with the FF world and its rules, other times it feels like he's never so much as picked up an FF before. Speculation: Was someone like Jonathan Green initially helping him out a bit by giving advice, perhaps? That's one way to explain what's going on here. I don't know, maybe someone mapped out a path for him - Blacksand to Salamonis via Trolltooth Path together with a brief synopsis of what the locations were like. Explained the rules. Explained gameplay. Either that or he researched the genre and played through some of the books and read the source material, but i don't recall him really name-checking the books in interviews, do you? I seem to remember he cited 'Creature of Chaos' as one of his favourite FF books...
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kieran
Baron
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Post by kieran on Jun 8, 2022 21:25:15 GMT
Speculation: Was someone like Jonathan Green initially helping him out a bit by giving advice, perhaps? I have heard that Green helped both Higson and Pratchett out but not sure if that's confirmed or just speculation. If he did, Pratchett seems to have taken his advice on board a lot better - bar the annoying variance in how much provisions heal you, Crystal of Storms displays a great grasp of the FF mechanics.
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Post by terrysalt on Jun 8, 2022 22:07:40 GMT
Which confirms that it wasn't Ian helping Rhianna out!
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IoannesKantakouzenos
Traveller
Being slowly eaten alive by a Ghoul
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Favourite Gamebook Series: Fighting Fantasy (Aventuras Fantásticas)
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Post by IoannesKantakouzenos on Jun 9, 2022 14:25:37 GMT
5. A Nave Perdida (Starship Traveller): I genuinely wanted to like this one, because it has some potential. However it ends up being a wasted effort, it defies the laws of physics (we all wished a black hole would be a tunnel to another dimension, but even a toddler knows that everything caught by one is pulverised) and you end up wasting more time setting up the adventure and creating your crew than in the proper adventure. And SJ couldn't even be arsed to make 400 paragraphs of it...
4. Os Círculos de Kether (The Rings of Kether): I'm not saying that TRoK is bad, mind you: I'm just stating that is on my "least favourite" pile. I dislike the plot, that's just it, not being cast in Titan or some Sci-Fi shenanigans, dealing with something serious like drug trafficking. I have to admit it has a bit of a feel of a film noir, missing only a femme fatale (Zera Gross doesn't qualify, sorry), but in the end it still doesn't have the same appeal as the medieval FF, per example.
3. Cavaleiro do Céu (Sky Lord): despite being one of the first books I got (third, actually), and despite my usurpation of Jang Mistral to a few fantastic scenarios I created and as a general moniker in the web, Sky Lord has got to be one of the most messed-up things ever created inside the FF universe. It's a mess. A pure mess. I think Martin Allen's idea was to not going into details since "we" were used to this Universe (not sure if I am making sense here), but anyway it ends up being a ludicrous mess. Up to this day I still have no idea why I need to make the choices I have to to beat the Valioog ship and the Grand Archipellago (and what's the point of losing shield points permanently, anyway?), I dislike Marsatu's character (what's there to like, anyway?)... With a (tremendous) effort, maybe this book could be redone in a way that would make sense. Maybe.
2. Abismos do Mal (Chasms of Malice): just three meagre words are enough to ruin a whole book: "One Strike Combat". But, not happy with that, Luke Sharp had to make something un-mappable, confusing, unfair, capable of killing you after the most random choices and, if you can be arsed to go through all that grief and, by some ginormous stroke of luck, reach (400), you end up with a bland three-sentence paragraph. The only thing I enjoyed about it was the Cyphers.
1. Resgate em Arion (Deathmoor): nothing more to add about this one than this.
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kieran
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Post by kieran on Jun 9, 2022 14:48:35 GMT
and what's the point of losing shield points permanently, anyway? It makes some of the later ship-to-ship combats more difficult.
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IoannesKantakouzenos
Traveller
Being slowly eaten alive by a Ghoul
Posts: 106
Favourite Gamebook Series: Fighting Fantasy (Aventuras Fantásticas)
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Post by IoannesKantakouzenos on Jun 9, 2022 15:41:32 GMT
Yeah, but what's the point of reinforcing the fact that you are losing them permanently or forever? After all, it's not like you can repair your ship at any point in the adventure
... which reminds me. Martin Allen put so much focus a ship, even giving a name and spending one page drawing it and its shields, of which you need to gray out after being hit (there you go, permanently or forever)... and you just use it for a dozen paragraphs or so. At the end you are not even told you recover it (and if), you are just told you return to Ensulina "on a disused starship". At least on Freeway Fighter you use the car for 4/5 of the adventure...
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Post by a moderator on Jun 9, 2022 16:52:10 GMT
Maybe this is a translation issue. The basic rules for ship-based combat in the original text say that if you win, the shields regenerate. Therefore, in circumstances where regeneration does not occur, that needs to be pointed out.
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Post by sleepyscholar on Jun 11, 2022 8:09:48 GMT
In general the later (more recent) books are over-represented on our lists here which is a great shame because we would have wanted the newer books to learn from the mistakes of the older ones. Not only has the output of the books slowed compared to the 80s and 90s, but the quality has fallen away too. I'm tempted to make some sort of comparison with Boris Johnson's government, but despite Lee Mack getting away with a Partygate gag in the Platinum Jub Bash, I guess that would be pushing things a bit. What I would say is that it's clear that Charlie Higson wasn't a spectacular success at FF. It's interesting, as several of you have done, to speculate on the reasons for this. I suspect that he was interested, at least mildly, in FF. I don't think he'd have written a book if he wasn't. While it's true that it's easy to overestimate the earnings of writers, he has a fairly lengthy portfolio of titles, and he's still acting, so the 'Just for the money' explanation doesn't sound likely to me. To be honest, it's much too much work for the return. Although maybe -- and if this is true I have greatly overestimated his intelligence -- he didn't realise how difficult it would be. He may have agreed to do it without realising how much work it entailed, and then perhaps Jon Green got roped in to try and sort out the resulting mess: but that's a phenomenally difficult task in its own right (I've heard stories from Dave Morris about having to try to rescue books by other authors he was working with). I wonder if it would be possible to ply Jon Green with drink at FFF4 and see what he has to say about it? As for the book not feeling quite FFish at times: I think there are reasonably explanations for that. If you're not a fan it's possible to read several FF without really noticing details. Moreover, if you read a weird selection of the books you can sometimes get a skewed idea. And finally, there's always those ornery individuals who feel the necessity to try to shake things up a bit. As for my bottom 5 books, I'm going to keep schtum, for reasons of diplomacy. Though I daresay if I'd read it, Gates of Death would be in there.
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Post by bloodbeasthandler on Jun 11, 2022 20:39:58 GMT
Although maybe -- and if this is true I have greatly overestimated his intelligence -- he didn't realise how difficult it would be. He may have agreed to do it without realising how much work it entailed, and then perhaps Jon Green got roped in to try and sort out the resulting mess: but that's a phenomenally difficult task in its own right (I've heard stories from Dave Morris about having to try to rescue books by other authors he was working with). I wonder if it would be possible to ply Jon Green with drink at FFF4 and see what he has to say about it? This got me looking for Charlie Higson's own words about this and I found a Guardian article dated 04 Apr 2018 entitled Dare YOU face the orcs? 80s game books Fighting Fantasy return. Some extracts: “We went out for a couple of drinks,” says Higson, sitting in Scholastic’s London offices. “It was a bit of a meeting of minds,” agrees Livingstone. “We started talking and got on OK, and I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be a hoot if he wrote one of these with his twisted imagination, adding a new dimension to Fighting Fantasy?’”-----“It was a real mindfuck,” says Higson. “I should have planned it a little bit more than I did. I just sort of launched into it and I was about a third of the way in when I suddenly realised I was lost in one of Steve Jackson’s mazes.”-----Higson, whose Young Bond books, and his young adult Enemy series, in which adults have been turned into zombies, have been bestsellers. But he found he “couldn’t just use the old tricks” to write his Fighting Fantasy title. “You’ve really got to guard against telling it like a story; it’s got to feel to the reader that they’re driving it forward,” he says. He worked out soon enough that he needed “a couple of pinch points”, so that “you cannot progress to the next part unless you’ve been through there”. It meant that rather than thinking of the whole book as “this huge great amorphous thing”, he approached it in three shorter acts. “And then I did start having to do charts and maths. There’s all these things you don’t think about. I mean, Ian did try to warn me.”There is also a radio interview with Higson on Youtube Fighting Fantasy Gates Of Death InterviewHe sounds like he genuinely enjoys the idea of the books and wants them to be a success. He talks about the difficulties he encountered at time 3:35 when creating multiple storylines.
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Post by tyrion on Jun 11, 2022 21:33:47 GMT
That just makes it worse. Of course it's difficult, we all realised that when we wrote our own when we were 12. And to be offered a book deal after a drink with the boys on a nod and a wink? Ffs.
When are scholastic going to reissue Jonathan Green's books, just so we can see what a good one looks like?
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Post by CharlesX on Jun 11, 2022 21:44:58 GMT
That just makes it worse. Of course it's difficult, we all realised that when we wrote our own when we were 12. And to be offered a book deal after a drink with the boys on a nod and a wink? Ffs. When are scholastic going to reissue Jonathan Green's books, just so we can see what a good one looks like? I know Jonathan Green might be reading this, but I would say his books are as variable they are good, particularly with regard to difficulty. Spellbreaker is just as tough as Crypt Of The Sorceror, Knights Of Doom plays like a Warhammer FRPG done by Ian Livingstone, and Curse Of The Mummy is dull as a desert (forgive the pun) with excessive difficulty even according to the editors and very little replay value. But I know what you mean, after he found his feet Jonathan Green wrote some very good Fighting Fantasy's.
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