Favourite gamebook reviewers & websites

[CharlesX]

Just for your take on any big gamebook review sites you've found. Some that've interested me:

Mrs. Giggles reviews - While she is entertaining, and well-written, often bases her views superficially on whether a gamebook matches or doesn't match her own favourite literature, and doesn't allow not only for a gamebook's gameplay but for different views about what constitutes good writing and other things. Reviewed many gamebooks though, I haven't visited her site for her take on the two new FFs if she's still going.

Malthus Dire - Has reviewed most FFs although focuses on the more traditional ones before Eye Of The Dragon, includes a lot of evidence and basis in his reviews but tends to take FFs to task about their shortcomings, and can be opinionated at times rather than praising FFs that he doesn't already like.

Demian's Gamebook Page - An extremely comprehensive database of gamebooks, most of which have reviews by several people, ironically the author says in his FAQ for the site he "doesn't think most gamebooks are very good". Can focus on narration rather than gameplay aspects, in fact we're quite into gameplay here compared to many who have no qualms about cheating.

[kieran]

I agree completely about Mrs Giggles. Her reviews are always entertaining but she rates books more on a vague impression they give rather than really drilling into the mechanics.

I find Malthus' reviews are very detailed, he really gets into every aspect of a book to the extent I would only really read his reviews if they're for a book I either know extremely well or I have no intention of ever reading

Demian's website is hard to beat, it covers pretty much everything. I believe Demian handed the site over to Guillermo Paredes and I don't think anyone knows more about gamebooks than him. His personal reviews on the site are always excellent and very careful about spoilers.

Per Jorner's reviews are in my mind the high watermark for gamebook reviews. Pity his site seems abandoned now. The site also has a few hilarious reviews by Leigh Loveday that literally make me LOL.

Dragonwarrior8's blog has excellent reviews though can be a bit spoilery (though not to the same extent as Malthus Dire's). Well worth a look.

[slloyd14]

May 11, 2023 19:00:28 GMT kieran said:

I agree completely about Mrs Giggles. Her reviews are always entertaining but she rates books more on a vague impression they give rather than really drilling into the mechanics.

I find Malthus' reviews are very detailed, he really gets into every aspect of a book to the extent I would only really read his reviews if they're for a book I either know extremely well or I have no intention of ever reading

Demian's website is hard to beat, it covers pretty much everything. I believe Demian handed the site over to Guillermo Paredes and I don't think anyone knows more about gamebooks than him. His personal reviews on the site are always excellent and very careful about spoilers.

Per Jorner's reviews are in my mind the high watermark for gamebook reviews. Pity his site seems abandoned now. The site also has a few hilarious reviews by Leigh Loveday that literally make me LOL.

Dragonwarrior8's blog has excellent reviews though can be a bit spoilery (though not to the same extent as Malthus Dire's). Well worth a look.

I loved Per Jormer's reviews on Yahoo groups. If anyone has saved any of the, I would love to get them!

[kieran]

May 12, 2023 20:33:46 GMT slloyd14 said:

May 11, 2023 19:00:28 GMT kieran said:

I agree completely about Mrs Giggles. Her reviews are always entertaining but she rates books more on a vague impression they give rather than really drilling into the mechanics.

I find Malthus' reviews are very detailed, he really gets into every aspect of a book to the extent I would only really read his reviews if they're for a book I either know extremely well or I have no intention of ever reading

Demian's website is hard to beat, it covers pretty much everything. I believe Demian handed the site over to Guillermo Paredes and I don't think anyone knows more about gamebooks than him. His personal reviews on the site are always excellent and very careful about spoilers.

Per Jorner's reviews are in my mind the high watermark for gamebook reviews. Pity his site seems abandoned now. The site also has a few hilarious reviews by Leigh Loveday that literally make me LOL.

Dragonwarrior8's blog has excellent reviews though can be a bit spoilery (though not to the same extent as Malthus Dire's). Well worth a look.

I loved Per Jormer's reviews on Yahoo groups. If anyone has saved any of the, I would love to get them!

You can get them here: archive.is/PSFS#selection-589.226-589.230
Unfortunately, it's missing his reviews of Sorcery and Star Strider.

[slloyd14]

May 12, 2023 20:59:24 GMT kieran said:

May 12, 2023 20:33:46 GMT slloyd14 said:

I loved Per Jormer's reviews on Yahoo groups. If anyone has saved any of the, I would love to get them!

You can get them here: archive.is/PSFS#selection-589.226-589.230
Unfortunately, it's missing his reviews of Sorcery and Star Strider.

Many thanks. Per didn't just review FF books. Are they around?

[kieran]

May 13, 2023 7:25:15 GMT slloyd14 said:

May 12, 2023 20:59:24 GMT kieran said:

You can get them here: archive.is/PSFS#selection-589.226-589.230
Unfortunately, it's missing his reviews of Sorcery and Star Strider.

Many thanks. Per didn't just review FF books. Are they around?

Doesn't seem like it sadly

[paperexplorer]

Oh wow, that link has reviews I wrote over 20 years ago from when I was writing for Mark J Popp's site. What a throwback seeing them again

[a moderator]

Per Jorner's reviews of Star Strider and Sorcery!? Guess what I found in an old Yahoo! Groups digest email that turned up while I was searching for something else entirely.

FF27: Star Strider

Another Luke Sharp title, another checklist.

* Providing the player with a role and then undermining it: You are a Rogue Tracer, a cunning and rigorously trained bounty hunter, ranking 97th in the entire galaxy. Then upon taking some action offered you are flatly told that Rogue Tracers never do this, presumably because it's not the proper thing to do and also dumb. So I guess you must be playing some sort of imposter? Or are there only about 98 Rogue Tracers in the galaxy? There's a lot of things happening that probably shouldn't be happening to someone who's previously been on undercover missions, or missions period, and phrases like "approved Rogue Tracer style" become empty euphemisms for inelegant reactivity.

* Time limit: You have 48 "gravity hours" to liberate the Galactic President from the devious Gromulans before they extract defence codes from his brain. The decision to bestow upon the player 48 time units - which will only ever be deducted in twos and a single four - initially seems flavourful but is ultimately arbitrary and unnecessarily cumbersome as the units don't correspond to in-game hours: you may be told to deduct time in the middle of an action sequence, to deduct time several times during an exploration sequence that couldn't possibly span six or eight hours, or to deduct only two units for several hours of travelling. This is all the more grating as the adventure is much more likely to land you in instant death (time-related or otherwise) than to drain your time units to zero. Arguably you shouldn't even have to manage time for a large part of the adventure since you need to follow the fixed schedule of the Silverhound bus; how then could you arrive at each destination with a variable amount of time units left? Finally, as another reviewer pointed out, it's never explained why leaking the defence codes would be such a problem if everyone's aware of the matter.

* Countless mini-encounters: The string of European cities you pass through on your search tend to dissolve into lots of brief excursions and happenings, many of which are really bland and involve random robots or random pairs of tunnels, doors, ladders or other types of passages. The vast majority derive no special flavour from their location.

* Instant death everywhere: You crash your latest ride. You get lost in the woods. You blow your cover somehow. You are stomped by a chess piece. A robot decides to whack you. Your adventure ends. In this department, Star Strider unfortunately resembles Sharp's second title, Chasms of Malice. Even when some completely arbitrary death could theoretically be amusing, it probably won't be.

* Haphazard scene transitions: It's easy to get sidetracked from what you thought you were doing, to be rerouted for no particular reason, or just to sort of wander along at random. As always, you will be repeatedly detained, captured, knocked out etc., usually for a very brief time. However, there are comparatively few instances of choosing between options with arbitrary consequences: you are choosing between the right and the left door (and finding different things), not between putting down your left or your right foot first when stepping off a ladder (and having the room be full of Orcs if it's the wrong one).

* Picking up the odd clue from the local do-gooders: There's a number of "planted" or otherwise disgruntled Androids around who will help you in any way they can, and just as in every other Luke Sharp book you can gain the temporary assistance of a female ally. It's very odd about androids self-disintegrating left and right, though; you'd think this would be unnecessarily conspicuous in the case of your allies, and unnecessarily inconspicuous in the case of sentries and such.

* Offbeat humour and details: Apparently some have found the "houlgans" hilarious, and personally I enjoy a moderate smattering of comments like "You have missed the bus in all senses of the phrase." At one point you are served what appears to be paella in Madrid and this made me hungry. But as usual, these little highlights are pretty sparse.

* Piece of largely irrelevant paperwork: You get a Fear score and sometimes need to successfully Test your Fear Factor (nicely filling the quota of terminological mismatches) or lose minor Stamina. Probably meant for added flavour (the Gromulans are into scary illusions for some reason), but like the fuel rules in Chasms of Malice it's so inconsequential it doesn't really add anything in the way of resource management, suspense or characterization.

* Lack of item hoarding: There is in fact not a single item in the adventure that you need to keep track of, which is certainly out of the ordinary in the otherwise item-rich FF series. You do try to pick up some information on the location of the President, although this is used by the player rather than the character, so you don't need to find it in every game, and it may ultimately leave you scratching your head anyway.

* Minor rules ambiguities: It's possible to gain 1 Stamina point in the second paragraph. This would normally only be worth some offhand scorn, but in this case the rules are lacking the normal statement that your stats cannot go above their initial values, so it might be intentional. Still, I decided to consistently apply the usual rule, as the alternative eventually becomes a bit iffy, with Stamina and Luck potentially sky-rocketing. Another oddity concerns alternative outcomes for losing combat: these don't come with any instructions to reset your Stamina to a non-zero level, meaning you must be supposed to play on with zero or negative Stamina. The interesting thing about this is that the default FF rules don't actually say that you die if your Stamina drops to zero outside of combat, although this is how I for one have always played.

* Repeatedly rolling and comparing results to determine whether you succeed at some moment of exertion or survive an instance of random calamity: This happens on occasion. Failure does not necessarily mean death, and often you compare the roll of two or three dice with the roll of one die added to your Stamina, which essentially means you cannot fail unless you've had very bad luck previously. However, there are also places (one of them unavoidable) where you need to roll multiple times and avoid doubles or die. Unfortunately, your chance of surviving four such rolls is about 50%.

* Mini-mazes: There are two of them, one of which is set at the end of the adventure. The latter is also where the rate of arbitrary instant deaths progresses from "too much" to "absolutely forking ridiculous", and you could do worse than provide your character with an extra life or two.

* Some minor lapses in logic or continuity: There's no explanation why having a single "cocktail" at the very beginning of the book makes you drunk forever. The logic in the chess puzzle is off: if the knight is "just behind you" and you move one step to the side, you would be in no danger from it; you might however be captured by the pawn that was directly in front of you, depending on the orientation of the board. The link from 5 to 112 makes no sense. 348 should probably point to 239 instead of 245. The reminder in 371 is unnecessary and potentially confusing. 252 should probably tell you to deduct time units, like 308, and sleeping in 45, 239 or 245 should probably cost time as in 228 and 386; there are likely more inconsistencies of this sort. 296 slaps you with a time penalty for something that isn't time-related. 168 lacks a time penalty despite "several gravity hours" going by.

Short version: Star Strider is like a less charming version of Chasms of Malice, without a cat (Felines from Wistas 4 don't count) and without Russ Nicholson. It takes a good, simple premise and then makes something very unexciting out of it, casting you as a bounty hunter whose greatest skill is plodding around and inviting fatality from all directions. Sharp's books got better after this in some respects, but they never got very different.

Rating: 4/10

Sorcery! 1: The Shamutanti Hills

It's a funny thing about these commando missions: from the premise that a large force would not make the long journey unnoticed or intact, which seems reasonable enough, it is invariably concluded that the only remaining option is to send a single hero. That hero usually ends up in a death paragraph dangling from a snare trap or something. If I were in charge of an operation like this, I'd send out several groups down separate routes, each comprising two or three people so that they could watch each other's back, bounce ideas off each other to cover more angles, command a greater range of skills, and cut each other down from snare traps. I'd expect them to have a much larger chance of success this way; but then my opinion is very seldom asked in these matters, and let's face it, they'd all die anyway.

The Crown of Kings is a magical artefact that makes countries peaceful and prosperous while worn by their rulers. It's now been stolen by the evil Archmage, and must be reclaimed for great justice. Benevolent Archmages? We can't have that. A lone champion is sent out to cross the land in pursuit of the Crown, and not with the same speed and ease as whoever brought the news of its whereabouts. Such is the premise of Steve Jackson's Sorcery!, which in terms of paragraphs is almost as expansive as all his other FF titles combined. It is not without some trepidation that a Jackson fan embarks on this journey.

We can guess there were two principal reasons why the four-book series was numbered separately from the main line of Fighting Fantasy books: firstly, that it was thought the latter could not accommodate a continuous quest spanning multiple books; secondly, that an evolving magic system based on memorizing spell codes, even if optional, might be too demanding to be sprung on readers accustomed to the relative simplicity of early FF. This is not, however, to any notable degree a deeper, more mature or more verisimilar title, especially compared to the books that would later appear in the main series (by Jackson and others).

Echoing several reviewers before me, I could sum up the first book by saying it is short, comparatively easy, and a suitable introduction to the series. There are some famous fatalities to stumble into and you are by no means guaranteed to emerge from the Manticore's lair at the end, but there's no need to thread your path across the hills with paranoid (pandoroid?) care. In the process you will learn about the ins and outs of eating, sleeping, casting spells, and - not least importantly - _not_ casting spells.

The magic system is in and of itself fairly ingenious. In each section where magic can be used, you are presented with five three-letter codes with attendant paragraph references. Instead of fighting or whatever might be the alternative to spellcasting, you can hop to one of these paragraphs, pay the corresponding Stamina cost as instructed and read on to find whether your choice was an appropriate one. To complicate things, there are several ways in which spellcasting can go wrong, taxing your memory, logic, common sense and plain old luck. Some codes do not represent existing spells, hit you with a significant Stamina penalty just for trying them out, and may impose additional penalties like limiting further actions, giving free hits to attacking enemies, or killing you. Many spells require material components, none of which you have from the beginning and most of which cannot be found in this first book; selecting them means you must pay the spell's normal Stamina cost but do not get the effect, and there can be additional penalties as above. Finally, a spell can be unhelpful or counterproductive even if properly cast, which in turn can have any number of reasons: it's irrelevant to the situation at hand, it's unneeded, it only works under specific circumstances, it costs more Stamina to cast than you would otherwise be likely to lose, there's some factor that renders it ineffective, or there's some factor that prevents you from taking advantage of it. You are only allowed to check the spell codes and descriptions in between games, so that gradually learning the spells and their prerequisites nicely resembles a wizard's learning process. Of course, this is kind of a meta-phenomenon, as your characters are only to a limited extent learning magic as they go along (by trying to cast the wrong spells and whatnot), and it is rather that the Analands of the multiverse are sending out progressively more confident wizards from the very beginning.

On another level, the way the magic system has been implemented contributes to the shortness of the adventure. Out of 456 sections, roughly 170 or nearly two out of five are spell options. Of course, in a magic-heavy adventure spell options are an important component in structuring encounters, but at times it can feel a bit overdone. As an example, there is a place where you may explore a mine you come across in the hills. 25 "normal" paragraphs are used for the four sub-encounters in the mine, which are not very outlandish, e.g. fighting some Goblins. But there are also seven opportunities to cast spells, adding another 35 paragraphs to the total, of which you may perhaps visit two or three in each game where you venture into the mine.

As you'd expect, throughout the adventure there are also various Jacksonian gamebook shenanigans, such as items with special properties, battles with special conditions, intentionally confusing or misleading presentation of alternatives, useless options and no-win scenarios, curses and other penalties, and numbered items and "hidden" references (which are relatively few and simple in this first book). There are some places where these tricks feel ineffective or unfair (see the gamebook problem showcase entries below), or where it seems Steve is being random just for the sake of it. In the end I think The Shamutanti Hills stops at being "just" a good gamebook. It presents a likeable backwater territory, keeps you on your toes with choices, is not tacky or obnoxious, and tosses in the occasional Easter egg. At the same time it is often random, sketchy or fussy and descriptions are brief, relying on the illustrations and your imagination to fill in extensive gaps. Although encounters are more complex than "Goblins appear, you fight" on a technical level, there's often not much more than that on a thematic level. Without so much as a "find the hammer components" plot, a little more could have been done to set the various stages of the journey apart beyond "it happened between Birritanti and Dhumpus". Possibly revelations and developments in the later books will cast some elements of this one in a more interesting light.

* Jackson dedicated the second book in the series to artist John Blanche "for bringing a world to life", and no matter your general opinion of his style, it cannot be denied that it carries a heavy responsibility for making Kakhabad a very special corner of Titan. It frequently brings to mind folkloristic or children's books (e.g. the fantastic creatures of Nick Price) rather than typical fantasy art. Unfortunately, the image quality in my Wizard rerelease copy of The Shamutanti Hills is nothing short of atrocious, with some pictures breaking up into a pixelated mess and backgrounds frequently disappearing into a faint scatter of dots. Possibly it's the result of a flailing attempt to preserve some manner of shading, but I've seen scans from the original edition that look like the art in the other books in the series, so I'm guessing that the pixelated shading is just digitally smudged ink texture and that disasters like the "covers" to the spell book are the result of general ineptitude at image processing. This is seemingly borne out by the serpent's head on the title page, where it looks much better than in the full downsized illustration; in any case the result is unattractive enough that someone should have caught it and called for a do-over. The new cover by Nicholas Halliday is much inferior to Blanche's original. The Manticore clusters its paws in a strange perspective- defying fashion, there is no interesting background, the picture shows signs of its computer origins, and the whole thing has just so much less character.

* The Wizard edition Sorcery! box proclaims: "Fight to the very end". It's not that I had expected my character would go out during a game of badminton, but it's still disheartening to be told from the beginning I'm not coming out of this one in a non-fighting state. Stupid copywriters.

* Gamebook problem showcase #1: Extrapolating unfavourable character action from options selected. You come across the clue that white cats are dangerous. Later you are choosing between paths and are told that down the left one awaits a white cat. You choose that one and die because your character, upon seeing the cat, tries to pet it and gets eaten, all in one paragraph. It is true that you could have acted on your knowledge when choosing paths and avoided the cat. But it is also true that you had no reason to believe that the path selection paragraph was the very one where cat knowledge was being tested. It would be equally reasonable to assume that you'd be given the choice between petting and avoiding the cat when encountering it; that there might very well be other, important things down that same road; and that taking it would not necessarily mean you would ever come across the cat.

* Gamebook problem showcase #2: Withholding information that would be obvious to the character. You enter a shop and examine the wares on sale, each in their own paragraph. There is a stone and, if you have your wits about you, you recall that you are specifically looking for a green stone. Since there is no indication that this stone is green you might very well pass it up. However, if you _do_ buy it you are directed to yet another item-specific paragraph afterwards, which informs you that it does in fact have a greenish hue. Why not reveal this straight off, saving paragraphs at the same time?

* Warrior report: It is certainly possible to complete the book without spellcasting, but it requires a fair to high Initial Skill - 11 should be enough if you know exactly where to pick up bonuses and are not terribly unlucky, and you might get by with less if you assume that Libra can be called on during combat (which is supported by events in later books). If you're just starting to explore and making do with suboptimal Skill scores, expect to be knocked out by the Manticore a couple of times, but then so were my first wizards. The book sometimes talks about "your magic" or "your spells", which is sort of to be expected.

* How are you supposed to guess that being pelted with acorns will cost you more Stamina than taking an arrow straight in the chest in FF43? If you go from 201 to 298 you might speculate that the +2 ST for sleeping should replace the -3 ST for not sleeping, but in 318 you seemingly get more sleep and are only told to recoup the penalty; this is slightly odd as elsewhere you get 1 Stamina point for getting a little sleep, and 2 up seems to be closer to that mark than 1 down. I was a bit surprised that after working for what I believed to be shopping money I wasn't allowed to return to the shop. If you sleep at the inn in Dhumpus you are not asked if you ate the previous day. The illustration for the LAW spell is inappropriate, as it doesn't work on intelligent creatures. In the last paragraph you're fixed up good by the Svinn priest; why didn't he do this before sending you away on their all-important mission? It's also unclear whether you should raise your current Luck along with your Initial Luck. I assume that the weapon you lose in 185 should be the one you use to fight and not any one of your choice; oddly enough it seems you can hide up to two weapons completely in your backpack. I also assume that you can take the "replacement" sword in 233 even if you already have one. 194 states you must leave a sword behind if you take the new one, but doesn't provide a specific reason why. 322 shouldn't tell you to deduct 5 Stamina points as it's not a fake entry (it doesn't matter in terms of outcome, but might confuse anyone struggling to memorize the spells). 421 assumes you don't have a Vial of Glue and punishes you, but you could have one and should in that case probably deduct just the one point of Stamina, lose the glue and consider the encounter dealt with (this is the error mentioned in Warlock 5; unlike the secret door bug in Creature of Havoc it was not fixed in the Wizard edition). If you fall victim to the Head Hunters a couple of sections make reference to a clearing with skulls, but you may not have passed this. 221 and 265 don't specify a maximum amount of objects that can be harvested. Why doesn't the Manticore suffer any Stamina loss if you hit it with a fireball? When casting the BIG spell you are often told to "double your Skill"; it can be assumed this should not be capped by your Initial Skill. 330, 349 and 422 arbitrarily dish out an extra penalty for trying to cast a spell without the necessary item. When using the gems from the mines it's implied you can't buy two items for one gem, so does that mean you couldn't for instance use one to pay for both food and lodging at the same inn? The illustration for 425 doesn't seem to depict the interior of a "hut". 405 mentions Elvin wings, although this is in no other description or illustration (and Out of the Pit spells out Elvins don't have wings). 213 should probably reduce your Initial Skill as well, or calling on Libra to reset your stats or otherwise restoring lost Skill would make the curse irrelevant. There's a section for unsuccessfully using the silver key to open the cage, but not one for using the copper key. If you catch the plague but have the medicinal potion, why aren't you allowed to use it on yourself? The GAL spell option in 158 should read GAK. 41 is a bit awkward, firstly because it doesn't define what counts as knowing the name, and secondly because it doesn't mean for you to pick an answer if you don't know it, but doesn't make this out to be anything out of the ordinary (if you were to assume that this also goes for the second question, you could get stuck because there's at least one name in each answer that your character might not have heard). Also, a little unfortunately the correct answer appears on the facing page. 114 is a bit odd in that the consequences of not having the page number is a pure meta-penalty. 8 should probably say that you part with the gold, as such things are scrupulously noted in other places. Why are soaked Provisions spoiled in 390 but not in 260? The word "living" in 273 is inappropriate if you come from 206. Paragraph 319 is orphaned; the only place it could be properly linked from is 361, if after losing the first Giant the player accepted an offer to conjure a replacement (and that would only be half-proper as it deviates from the code selection system). Perhaps it was written before a giant's tooth was added to the bag of teeth. Why don't you get a Stamina penalty for trying to cast the GOB spell without any components? An oddity about the food system is that once you learn to avoid unnecessary fights and hazards it will most likely be in your interest to starve yourself for days on end.

Rating: 7/10

Sorcery! 2: Kharé - Cityport of Traps

Kharé is a city built on the only crossing of the Jabaji river (which is perfectly navigable by ship, so I guess the problem is something other than the river being completely filled with rapids, rocks or giant octopuses). The fact that Kharé is the only gateway to the barren Baklands can't be very important these days, though, since the northern gate is perpetually and magically closed. In order to get on with your quest you must therefore unlock this ancient riddle, because that sounds much more fun and likely to end in messy death than getting hold of someone and shaking them until they spill the deal with this supposedly impassable river.

The city is one not only of thieves but of murderers and random monsters, so there will be all manners of tricks and traps to look out for as you make your way across, even as you search for the people who may know the lines to the rhyme that unlocks the gate. In fact, my greatest beef with the book is perhaps nothing to do with the city or quest but that it represents such a break with the difficulty level of the first one. The introduction of a tricky "find the hammer components" plot that you _must_ solve in order to proceed, though not a problem in itself, means that you won't be sending any characters into the third book until you have this one pretty well figured out. To Jackson's credit, it is structured in such a way that it's still possible to finish it with many different sets of items, at least if you have the right resources from The Shamutanti Hills to draw on. But like it or not, this is where a splash of icy water teaches us that Sorcery! is nothing like Lone Wolf - this isn't a quest anyone's going to finish without lots and lots of accumulated meta-knowledge.

Jacksonian shenanigans, then? Why, yes! There are the secret redirections, options phrased in such a way as to obscure what you're actually choosing between, useful and useless hints scattered across the city, mind games, instant death opportunities, special rewards, special penalties (that may or may not make sense), puzzles with visual components, trickery involving the spell system, and even a way of moving in circles literally _and_ figuratively. The first half has a "left, right or straight ahead" grid navigation system (with several deplorable flavourless "you reach a junction" or "you walk down the road" sections), while the second half to no one's great distress does away with this.

It can't be denied there's a lot to stumble into, even if you may not come across all of it, and it's certainly not every day you find a book so vigorously pushing the envelope of gamebook design. It is what it is, and it's quite true to its concept. I would still have liked to see more stuff, more paths, and especially more flavour; Kharé doesn't quite come alive for me. There are a number of houses you can go into but most of the rest are flat props. Sometimes there are references to other people or goings-on in the streets, and the illustrations come to the rescue every now and then, but a lot of the time there's silence and emptiness, like someone somewhere is turning the city life on and off using a big switch. I wish it could have been left on, global warming be damned.

* As you'd expect, you will be able to pick up some spell items that weren't in the first book, meaning there are more eligible spell options. There are much fewer instances of fake options; perhaps Jackson figured that readers would have wised up after the first book and would have to be tricked in different ways, as there is a corresponding increase in the number of valid yet ineffectual spell options (and you will find out there are ways in which spells can go awry that are not mentioned in the spell book).

* As Iain McCaig gave life to Port Blacksand, so John Blanche provides ample character for Kharé. The style is a bit scrawly and random but the level of detail makes up for it. The image quality is better than in the first book, but instead of being too faint, it is now too blotchy in places. For instance, are you supposed to make out no more than a hint of eyes, nose and cheekbones in the inky silhouette of the scholar, and should the Mantis Man have no discernible facial features at all? I think at least one visual hint is impossible to spot because of this, though thankfully you can solve the guillotine puzzle. Again, Nicholas Halliday's cover is not a patch on the original; it doesn't seem to depict a Slime Eater so much as a fat Elvis impersonator propped up against a wall and left to quietly mutate (something which sounds disturbingly likely to have actually happened).

* "You don't need to have read a previous book to move on to the next." But coming from the previous book is what "moving on to the next" _means_. Stupid copywriters.

* Warrior report: It is no more difficult to finish the book with a non-spellcaster as long as you know where and how to find the spell lines (we must assume that your warrior-ness does not prevent you from speaking this "spell" properly!). In fact, in one location it is significantly easier. You need a little money, but there is plenty to be had in this book and the preceding one. Of course, carrying over all the bonuses to Attack Strength from the first book doesn't hurt, as it basically keeps you from losing Stamina to anything other than self-starvation.

* In one spot there are two ways of returning to an earlier location to seek a spell line, but the condition is simply that you didn't gain any lines yet, which allows for an infinite loop besides the fact that going back makes no sense if you already visited the location and failed to get the line. You can technically gain an infinite amount of a fairly useful item, and even without foul play you could end up repeating another couple of encounters. In order to completely address these problems, 111 and 380 should not allow you to go back if you ever visited 336 or 95; 133 should prevent you from going to 3 if you did so once before; 79 should note that you can only visit the listed paragraphs once each; and 380 should contain an instruction to immediately go on to 263 if you should ever revisit 244.

* In 23 the "dismal hut" furnished with a straw mattress is drawn with pillows and lavish curtains, and its inhabitants are finely dressed (possibly this is how they perceive their surroundings, but there is nothing in the text to suggest this). 229 ends with "You follow him into his study", then directs you to 336 which begins with "You follow him into his study"; there are several similar cases. When you leave the scholar, why does he wish you luck if you didn't get what you wanted from him, considering that both he and you _know_ you are doomed - and by his own decision, no less? Why is your character so ready to rob some townspeople, but at other times willing to make a hasty lootless departure, e.g. after disabling Vangorn or dealing with the double in 67? And why are you allowed to attack and murder some citizens at random when elsewhere you are expected to act charitably and share your food - the number one thing to make players _want_ to kill someone? Why don't you get a Stamina penalty for arbitrarily choosing a VIK option? If you go to 7 you are offered the chance to make a special note of taking out an item, but then before the following confrontation there's no indication of any restriction to your choice of weapons, and of course it would normally never be assumed that you can't use an item just because you have no special note of having retrieved it from your pack - you _always_ get them from there! 446 tells you to deduct 4 Stamina points for casting HOW, which should cost 2. 147 is a bit harsh since not only does the Deathwraith likely have a higher Skill than your wizard character, but you need to pass two successive Skill checks to hurt it even once; one can easily imagine a gamebook that would simply pat you on the back for bringing the right weapon and drop the Wraith down a trapdoor. This leaves many characters no realistic choice but to use Libra's help here and nowhere else (and you're still likely to lose a few Attack Rounds before you get to do this), which I guess may have been intentional. There's a million different ways of handling combat between multiple opponents (on one or both sides), some of which are more cumbersome than others. In 11, after you have won a single Attack Round, you deliver a blow that "would have felled any mortal being" - where's that deathblow capacity when you really need it? Sand is said to be "a rare commodity so far from the sea" - what about the river down the street? I can understand if there are no glacial deposits, but ocean waves are far from the only cause of erosion. Maybe the spell simply needs ocean beach sand specifically? DOC options ask if you have "any medicinal potions or Blimberry juice", but they are the same thing. 49 offers you an opportunity to Test your Luck in order to get off the horse, but you must be Unlucky to get off. If you fail to threaten the Flayer, then try to cast a non-existent spell, it forgets that it was attacking you. The mention of a bend in the road should be moved from 244 to the beginning of 294, removing the need for the mention of a bend that has been shoehorned into 322. Why is it that knowing that a Portal Trap is dangerous lets you avoid it easily, but trying to avoid just in case doesn't? The Enchanted Compass should probably say that once you get to 319 in whichever way you eat the compass and can no longer use it. 401 and 461 contradict each other on a significant point. Since you can evidently begin The Seven Serpents with a Jewel of Gold, I take it this refers to the Golden Locket (I hadn't made the connection), but you can get to 425 with the Locket and be told you don't have a Jewel of Gold. Why _are_ those Red-Eyes looking at the Portal in the monument?

Rating: 7/10

Sorcery! 3: The Seven Serpents

The Analander's journey continues beyond Kharé, over barrens and through woodland, spanning most but not quite all of the way to the gates of Mampang Fortress. As in the previous book, there is a framing device which also defines an objective: find and kill seven evil Serpents who are bringing news of your extremely surprising quest to the Archmage, such news making all the difference in his deciding whether to turn on the electricity to the spike traps. You don't actually need to kill them all to continue to the next book, although you will be at a significant advantage if you do, and by the time you manage to finish the book you may be likely to have found all the Serpents anyway.

If The Shamutanti Hills was an introductory transition stretch and Kharé felt like a self-contained puzzle outing, The Seven Serpents is back to being a transition stretch, and not an overly interesting one, I'm sorry to say. Come on, you can do more than this with 498 sections; it has been proved. There are no more than thirty encounters in the book, a full game spanning roughly fifteen, some of them more elaborate than others, some of them mostly annoying (seriously, _two_ Snattacat encounters, one after the other? They weren't that awesome to begin with), seven of them Serpent-based, nearly all of them with one or more spellcasting opportunities (but as usual you won't ever try out most of the spell options). Although the book is technically competent (in spite of all the bug notes below), it lacks even the basic development and closure that you'll find in a "crossing the wilderness" book such as Daggers of Darkness, with only a slight threat escalation towards the end. The way the Serpents toss themselves in your path is not consistent with their mission; picture yourself walking down a path in Darkwood Forest minding your own business when a gang of hammer components jump out of the bushes and try to club you to death. To round off the list of complaints, depending on circumstances there will be one or two undead puzzle solving moments near the end (die unless you knew to randomly kick the beggar at the last junction), one of which especially feels more like a pointless game-stopper than an interesting hurdle. In summation, another perfectly functional Sorcery! title, but a bit of a disappointment in the bigger picture.

* Now that all spell items can be acquired, there's a very large assortment to choose from, and fewer instances of each individual spell (except for a couple of new ones that appear with notable frequency). This in turn reduces but does not eliminate the importance of the fact that someone who started with this book will lack components to most of the early item-dependent spells. There are exactly two fake spell options, making you wonder why there are any at all.

* The image quality of the illustrations is now fine, although at the same time, the art takes a turn from the weird and busy towards the sparse and mundane, looking somewhat more like standard fantasy art than the characteristic strangeness found in the two previous books. (Here and there I thought it looked a bit like Gary Chalk; incidentally, I have seen Games Workshop art by Blanche and guessed it was by Chalk and I have seen such art by Chalk and guessed it was by Blanche.) Maybe this is a cunning way of reflecting the desolation of the plains, or maybe a little less time was spent on the drawings. An element in the art for 162 may be inappropriate, though unimportant. Nicholas Halliday turns in what may be the best cover of the Sorcery! reprints, with some nice details on the Serpents (e.g. the Moon Serpent has crater-like scales and the Serpent of Time has a kind of double exposure effect). Basically we trade in a proper picture of Fenestra for five more snakes; you can perhaps guess that I would have preferred the original.

* "A pencil and an eraser is all you need to make your journey." That's great, I thought and tossed the book out the window. Nothing much happened after that, though. Stupid copywriters.

* Warrior report: Like the other books, as long as you take the correct path and have an effective Skill of 13-14 or so you should have no trouble with anything (including self-starvation) . If for some reason your stats were low after the second book, Libra's restoration should see you through, and if you're just starting out, something similar holds true as long as you take every opportunity to defeat the Serpents using their special weaknesses. There is one extra oddity in the warrior game: 282 doesn't specify that you must be a wizard in order to turn to 234, but once there, you improve your standing by "comparing spell notes". It is also amusing how a warrior will sometimes stop to pick up items like rock dust or sand (and then easily trade them away to a seasoned merchant in exchange for valuables).

* 48 should presumably add that you gain 1 Stamina point if you did eat previously in the day (that is, after leaving The Wayfarer's Rest in Kharé). Just as pebbles and sand were rare commodities south of the Jabaji, rock dust is a rare commodity in the stone desert, and this is not rationalized in any way. 461 presents "leave" as a sensible course of action, then sends you back to 23 where your only options are fighting or casting expensive spells, and if you win you leave anyway. 153 should perhaps add to Attack Strength instead of Skill, and also I don't see why the damage reduction ability of the chainmail couldn't be rolled into the Skill/AS bonus abstraction; why are there even two separate effects to begin with? A number of paragraphs raise the question what counts as an "item" or "spell item". For instance, if you carry five pebbles, could you trade away each for a number of Gold Pieces? Certainly each goblin tooth or pebble by itself can be used to work a spell. But does that mean by extension that a single ape tooth is also an item? Who's to judge what's "fairly valuable" in a world where anything can turn out to be supremely useful and any mundane object could be the catalyst of unknown magic? 23 and 43 are odd in that they contain the appearance of snakes in sections ending with the number 3, which may have you unsuccessfully trying to use the Serpent Ring; was this intentional, and if so, what's the desired effect - just to make you feel a little silly for looking at an irrelevant section? And why _doesn't_ the ring work in 43? 13 contains fun with carrying capacity, as you can opt to drop one of the four or five weapons you may be carrying in order to pick up some leaves or feathers (but not both!) - except if you have the large backpack from Kharé, in which case you can find a little room for a handful of dust somewhere between one broadsword and another. 155 should perhaps contain a link to 96 for anyone who counted the HOT spell as a source of fire, and also there is no flash-fire powder; it's been suggested that the "fine brown sand" you can acquire previously should be identified as such. 211 doesn't say what happens if you fail the Skill roll, so... nothing in particular, I guess? Or was the idea that you don't Test your Luck unless you fail the Skill roll? Why is it that being able to detect invisible Snattacats lets you avoid fighting them? There are hundreds of perfectly visible creatures in FF, several of them in this very book, for which this is not true. There's a missing Stamina gain for sleeping at Lake Ilklala. 452 is a bit unclear; I interpreted it to mean you don't have to fight at all. I assume the "weight of sand" in 251 is meant to be treated as a spell component, although it feels a bit silly (WHAT SAND OUT HERE IN THE DESERT YOU MUST BE JOKING OR MISTAKING IT FOR ROCK DUST MAYBE NO WAIT THAT IS ALSO RATHER UNUSUAL). Also, when 251 says you may take "any three" out of three items plus two Gold Pieces, does it mean for you to count the money as one item or two? (Pity that it doesn't offer to let you have all three items and the gold if only you drop something, as then the large backpack would have worked its magic, whereas now it just sits there looking stupid.) There's no particular justification for why being unable to row across the lake means you're stuck; of course all the rivers of the region may be as uncrossable as the Jabaji, but why no using the ZEN spell? This possibility of dismal failure suggests that the Analander expected something completely different of these unknown parts, or perhaps more likely that the Analander is pretty bad at this travelling thing. Does the word "must" in 234 mean you have to perform one and only one exchange of the type described, or does it mean you can but do not have to make any number of such exchanges? And since you aren't allowed to look in the spell book, are you supposed to rely on memory in order to decide what's on offer, and if so, can you sort of seem to remember that one of the spells requires a nuclear bazooka? Why does 183 point to 92 instead of 324? Why is it that, if Fenestra told you about her scroll and its whereabouts, you may still be completely unable to identify it when you find it? 316 should say "four", not "three". Why are you at "dangerously close range" if you don't move towards the Horsemen, but not if you do? 391 should perhaps say the affected Horseman will not fire another arrow at you. 260 needn't tell you to continue if you've been poisoned and have no antidote, since it's not possible to find any before sundown (and Libra is seemingly no good against poison); this raises the question why it's not possible to go northeast in 318 and find the caravan. 372 should presumably say "for this battle". 84 is slightly odd: there is seemingly no firing of bows going on, so perhaps the paragraph should say you've resorted to using your normal weapon and are for some reason inflicting damage, or if you are actually doing well stabbing the Deathwraith with one of your silver arrows, why wasn't that an option in the previous book? 364 is wrong about why you wouldn't want to cast the spell in question. Does the golden pendant you get from Fenestra qualify as a Jewel of Gold, or would it have to be capitalized for that, like the Golden Locket? 489 lets you simply pick up a pebble from the ground if you don't already have one THIS IS MADNESS. 272 is another of those "wait, how is this lucky again" cases; apparently each book in the series must have one. 465 says you "take one measure of the potion" and may have you thinking that you retain the rest of it for further use, which is inconsistent with all previous castings of the spell; 348 makes no mention of crossing off the potion at all. You can't have a Staff of Oak Sapling in 481. 320 should perhaps say that you can't call on Libra again in this book. It would be cool if, after 298, there were special options to call on Throff instead of Libra. 247 says parchment is destroyed by water - why, exactly? It's not clear why using the HUF spell to "blow in one direction only" is no good in 428, as it wasn't said that the falling rocks are converging on you from multiple directions. 347 doesn't indicate whether the Yellow Powder is used up in the casting, while 466 implies that you keep some of it (the illustration for the spell shows a discarded phial of powder, which doesn't really help). If you only have one Goblin's Tooth in 343 or 358, do you still have to deduct 2 Stamina points? 474 should perhaps boost your Attack Strength instead of your Skill. Why is it that the Marsh Goblins will let you run away except if you fail to cast the NIP spell and then run away the same as usual, only not as fast as intended, in which case they feel obliged to bop you a good one? As in The Shamutanti Hills, it's possible to fall ill and be unable to use a medicinal potion to cure yourself. Surely "as if the air were being let out of a balloon" is an anachronism. 386 and 496 are unreachable, and 479 should logically be unreachable, although there are also spoiler concerns. Why does it matter exactly how many Serpents escape anyway; are they the ones in charge of ramping up defences? If you kill nearly all of them, wouldn't that make the Archmage think that you're _more_ dangerous and that maximum up-rampage is called for? Who is this "Archduke" person that is suddenly mentioned? And what would have happened if it had been possible to die from the Stamina penalty of letting too many Serpents survive? Random heart attack? Pit trap? 16-ton weight?

Rating: 6/10

Now I'm going to have to trawl through my account (the search function is useless) to see if I also have his review of Crown, and to find out what non-FF reviews also survive. 

[CharlesX]

Thank you a moderator these are interesting reviews. My fond memories of Star Strider's concept, humour and illustrations made me forget this is in actuality a really poor gamebook, primarily because of the poor layout, although gameplay that is uninvolving and poor technical execution is also of no help. I'd also forgotten Steve Jackson's Sorcery! has a truckload of technical errors.

   I don't think Sorcery!'s "flip the page to view the dice if you don't have dice" works well at all (it makes Lone Wolf's one look like Einstein wrote it). It sort of reminds me of the time I didn't have dice to play Citadel Of Chaos, and my mad Dad offered to call out numbers for fighting, leading my Skill 8 Avatar to die in the Dwarf-Goblin-Orc fireside fight.

[kieran]

Jun 1, 2023 15:52:18 GMT a moderator said:

Per Jorner's reviews of Star Strider and Sorcery!? Guess what I found in an old Yahoo! Groups digest email that turned up while I was searching for something else entirely.

What a find!

[a moderator]

I've also discovered his reviews of Virtual Reality Adventures books 1-5, assorted Warlock magazine and Proteus adventures, both Forbidden Gateway gamebooks, and several amateur adventures.

No sign of his original reviews of Seas of Blood (written as a joke before he'd seen a copy of the book) or Sky Lord (critique in the form of a short story), alas. 

[CharlesX]

Jun 2, 2023 1:47:11 GMT a moderator said:

I've also discovered his reviews of Virtual Reality Adventures books 1-5, assorted Warlock magazine and Proteus adventures, both Forbidden Gateway gamebooks, and several amateur adventures.

No sign of his original reviews of Seas of Blood (written as a joke before he'd seen a copy of the book) or Sky Lord (critique in the form of a short story), alas. 

So a moderator any chance of very kindly providing a link\paste? Unfortunately the things you weren't able to find sound like the most interesting .

[kieran]

Jun 1, 2023 15:52:18 GMT a moderator said:

see if I also have his review of Crown

I don't recall him actually posting a review of Crown but I could be mistaken.

[petch]

Jun 1, 2023 18:14:02 GMT CharlesX said:

It sort of reminds me of the time I didn't have dice to play Citadel Of Chaos, and my mad Dad offered to call out numbers for fighting, leading my Skill 8 Avatar to die in the Dwarf-Goblin-Orc fireside fight.

This made me laugh more than it should have. I think this should be written into the rules section for future books as a less elegant but more hilarious solution to the not-having-a-pair-of-dice-to-hand issue than them being printed on the page: 'simply ask a family member / friend / confused stranger to bark out numbers at random.'

[a moderator]

Jun 2, 2023 8:50:38 GMT kieran said:

Jun 1, 2023 15:52:18 GMT a moderator said:

see if I also have his review of Crown

I don't recall him actually posting a review of Crown but I could be mistaken.

You may well be right. I'm continuing to trawl through the undeleted digests, but haven't yet found any more of his reviews.

[a moderator]

Jun 2, 2023 7:07:54 GMT CharlesX said:

Jun 2, 2023 1:47:11 GMT a moderator said:

I've also discovered his reviews of Virtual Reality Adventures books 1-5, assorted Warlock magazine and Proteus adventures, both Forbidden Gateway gamebooks, and several amateur adventures.

No sign of his original reviews of Seas of Blood (written as a joke before he'd seen a copy of the book) or Sky Lord (critique in the form of a short story), alas. 

So a moderator any chance of very kindly providing a link\paste? Unfortunately the things you weren't able to find sound like the most interesting .

The VRA reviews have now been added to the appropriate threads. I'll post the others when I have a bit more time.

[a moderator]

While searching for something unrelated, I discovered that a copy of Per Jorner's first review of Sky Lord has survived after all. So here it is:

SPOILER: Click to show

Dawn creeps up slowly on Spitflak's Street, another lousy day on another lousy backwater planet. I don't even remember what I'm doing here. I've got a job to do. Or maybe that's somewhere else. Maybe I missed my turn. I don't know. Curling up against the cold, I just want to doze away another leaden hour. Then there's the tinkle of glass in the street outside. There's a commotion. I flick my eyes open and my brain races. Is that a rescue patrol? Are they friends? Are they my executioners? I bound up and there are two options: the door or the window. Maybe I have just this one moment to act. With heroic speed I make my choice, step up and -

I twitch, sending fragments of dry mud and rotten wood across the dusty floor. Was that a dream? I don't remember. Nothing's quite real on Spitflak's Street. Roused by a premonition, I gather my weapons and stride out. As I pass through the doorway, it's like someone had flashed a cold knife across my throat. But I look around and there's no one. I squelch my way up the wet dirt track, leaving the mud houses and villas behind, on to the high moors and ridges, away from cursed Spitflak's Street... ... and then I have to go into this house to beat someone up, I don't know why, I think I promised to do it, why? I don't know. It's not just any old house though. It's a huge pulsating mushroom of living metal. Now that's something, I tell myself. Why is it a mushroom? I don't know. But now I'm inside it and it's like any old dark tunnel, why is the mushroom like any old tunnel, and there's the guy and I beat him up, that always seems to be the easy part, beating them up, and I find some thing that could be important. Maybe it'll help me not miss my turn. Yes, maybe this is it, wait, who's there, stay back, you can't have it, no, I just wanna LOOK -

Spitflak's Street. Some mornings there's just no point in getting up. Outside, small pools of dirty water gleam bleakly with stolen pre-dawn radiance. My body lies sprawled in a corner of a run-down hut, tossed there, part of the rubble strewn about this forgotten town. Am I dead? Is that it? Am I cursed to repeat these things forever? Am I the ghost haunting Spitflak's Street? I must remember how I got here. I had to go somewhere and I was asked, east or west, and I made my choice and then suddenly someone was on my tail, and I was outgunned and outmanoeuvred and taking fire, and I had time to think, "The most important mission in the universe and of all the ships in all the spaceports in the galaxy they had to put me in THIS one -"

It's just like in space academy. How they used to dangle the promise of advancement, of improvement. It'd get easier with experience. The lying bastards. You'd claw your way through B level, you'd yell and cheat and flounder, but you'd do it somehow, eventually, knowing it wasn't something you'd earned, not truly. And that's when they'd congratulate you, and send you to F level with the flick of a switch, and there'd be F-drones all around you, and not a shot would go straight, and your dashboard would explode in a scatter of sparks, a million evil little strips of magnesium making a bid for freedom and going straight through your face -

Yeah, that's how I got here. I went east instead of west, up instead of down. I missed my turn. There must be a key to it. Maybe the answer's in the words. Maybe the answer's right here on Spitflak's Street. Maybe I'm dead. I hear the sounds again but I don't want to move because I could be dead... ... and I'm walking down dark corridors, much as I imagine being dead would be like, except now there's a door, what use are doors to the dead, but there are handles, that's good, I know handles. They're for turning, so I do that. Nothing. I turn them the other way -

I wake up trembling in the darkness. This is the wrong house. I know that now. The house is doing it. I collect my weapons, did I get all of them, there are so many, why do I keep so many weapons, I run out and off Spitflak's Street and down Winsome's Way. Everything's better on Winsome's Way. The mud's better. The flaking walls are better. But I'm not the only one who thinks so and I go down in a flurry of stabbing beaks -

With a shivering sigh, I roll over and try to steal another hour of sleep from the teasing clutches of early morning. The unseen crumbling wall in front of me blends into hazy visions and drifting mirages. A woman laughs scornfully. "... do not trust to the power of magic. Well, soon now, you will..." I'm being chased and shot at by an entire armada, and I stop and leave my craft and suddenly it's like there never even was a battle... A merry bulbous face divulges, "... dead - or in pieces anyway...!" My steps are guided by the whims of others, I distrust them but I'm never able to act on my suspicions, I'm never permitted to change my course... The voice of a strange old man echoes oddly under a hollow sky: "... a false reply...!" He points his finger at me -

But there are many different dreams and a few of them I like better. I'm not even in the first one, just a succession of people walking around an estate dusting things. In another, it's a dog-eat-dog world and there just ain't enough damn dogs. And in yet another dream there are rooms full of stuff and I'm given a list of things to look for and I find them and point to them and they get crossed off my list and I go to the next room. I'm taking these things for a purpose. But even then I don't think it'll help me not miss my turn. I'll still be caught somewhere, the way still isn't clear, everything is fragmented: "Pieces enough, it's certain!" Why couldn't there have been a greater purpose? Why couldn't they have given me a better ship. They gave me all these weapons. I'd trade some of them in... ... and I'm trading something in for my freedom but there's a puff and a bang and a man comes running and shouts, THE END -

Out of the blue, I'm reminded of something I once heard in space academy: the tale of the Moron Quadrant. It tells of an entire sector of the galaxy, secluded away in a web of its own delusions, lost to reason and mourned by none. The residents of this world tinker madly with technology beyond their comprehension, assign words at random to describe what happens to them, and ascribe dread significance to pursuits with no meaning. Here, fierce struggles are fought over reins of power strapped to nothing; and would-be galactic conquerors oversee ramshackle establishments; and challenges are issued and duels fought for no gain; and grave missions are bestowed upon fools to pit themselves against other fools with nothing riding on the outcome. And this, it was said, would serve to explain why our own world looks the way it does, why it functions thus and so, how it can at once have trappings so grandiose yet conduct itself with such bluster and whimsy, how even those we term our very finest can bumble about as if constantly bemisted. For we are actors all, dressed up for a great play, then left without a script and floundering, weaving about drunkenly and hollering whichever words come into our minds, as if the stage itself provided the desired weight for our gestures; for we are also morons all, and capable of nothing better. And we can conceive of this, and nod sagely at each other, and still not understand what it means... ... and in a desperate frenzy I try to nod sagely, because apparently that's how you direct this craft I'm operating, but it fails and I sink and water starts filling up -

A trained warrior on a world of cutthroats, I turn my back on a stranger who cuts me DOWN -

I have this recurring dream where I forget even the basic functions of my ship and I FRY -

There was a solution to this game of floor plates but it's of no use and I'm ZAPPED -

Maybe it's not so bad here. Here in the confines of Spitflak's Street. As long as I don't try to get away. Mud's good. I hardly feel the cold now.

But I'm seeing that woman again and she shoots me out of the SKY -

I check some cargo and it talks back to me and KILLS me -

I step up to examine something but this means FALLING -

Did I miss my turn? I think I missed my turn somewhere.

And I'm seeing my ship going up in FLAMES -

I'm getting my HEAD bashed in -

And there's a BOMB -

There's STICKY GOO -

I EXPLODE -

DIE -

I wake up. Again. In the hut. I lie frozen, not moving, not sleeping. The only time they can't get me is when I'm not doing anything. I prod the wall with a nail, scraping off mud-plaster, then stop. They can hear that, too. That's doing something. Only when the sun paints fanciful polygons across the dirt floor do I stretch my cramped muscles, reach for my weapons and go outside... ... and the sky breaks open, an armada of drones and fighters and starcruisers falling down like steel rain, mutants hopping from the roof, jet-scooters closing in, jelly blobs rolling all along the street, cyborgs sniping, dog-men cackling, ogre-bots stomping, and every one shouting and burbling and buzzing, "Wrong!" "False!" "Die!" and all I can do is stand and scream into the wave of fire and metal converging on Spitflak's Street -

I give a mighty twitch, knocking an instrument panel aside. Where am I? The view is familiar. Did I sleep? Did I nod off here, in the pilot's chair on the Starspray, the pride of the solar troopers? Did I dream? I can't remember. Only one name lingers: Spit... something. The dream's gone to pieces. Pieces enough, it's certain. Ah, yes, now I remember. I attempted the time-warp. It plays tricks on you. That thing can do all kinds of bad things to your timeline if you're not careful. I'm not ever using time-warp again. Not for the rest of this week, at any rate. That's the problem with time-warp, isn't it? Never make a promise you may already be going to have broken. I set the controls for light-warp and press the buttons; the ship hums hoarsely like a tusked arcticat from Skloon and now we're away. Good old light-warp. It'll take point four seconds to reach my destination in real time, in subjective time that'll be just... But now the computer's giving off a proximity alert, that's typical, an ambush, there's an ambush in the 11th colourspace and I'm getting a first look... FREAKING SHIT THAT SHIP'S FREAKING P-LEVEL HOW'M I GONNA -

FF33: Sky Lord

Rating: 1/10

[CharlesX]

Per Jorner's Sky Lord review seems to capture with immense eloquence the awfulness of this FF, whatever its fans may say in its support I say it should be down there with CYOA at its most average, and Per Jorner would seem to say the same.
   I think I would enjoy playing Eye Of The Dragon or Port Of Peril but I'd have to be high (not drunk) to enjoy playing Sky Lord.