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Post by paperexplorer on Jul 28, 2023 7:57:38 GMT
I guess I'm prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt regarding knowing his own game back then. He does seem genuinely proud of having invented the five finger bookmarks, as he calls it, knowing a lot of players hold onto past references just in case, so he accepts cheating is part of it.
I know there is evidence that suggests he doesn't know the game well (like giving stamina increase on the first reference of a certain recent book) and we know the books weren't tested for playability before release (Chasms of Malice says hi), so his overpowering could genuinely been an error, but lean towards him wanting to create the coolest, meanest, hardest baddie in the series which, as series inventor, he has a right to do.
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Post by pip on Jul 28, 2023 13:38:25 GMT
I do like Crypt of the Sorcerer, which IMO is a great gamebook as long as you skip the fights and other dice rolls. I don't mind the narrow one true path, but since a 12/24/12 character has a ridiculous 0.5% chance to win, there's no way I'm going to play it without cheating.
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Post by petch on Jul 28, 2023 14:15:24 GMT
38 - Spellbreaker
It's apt in some way that along with Crypt, the two books that are the epitome of 'great to read, a pain in the arse to play' fall slap bang in the middle of my ratings. If anything, Spellbreaker is an even worse offender in the unplayability department than Crypt - the latter being only a badly broken boss fight away from being a very hard but nonetheless beatable book, whereas Spellbreaker seems to be making a conscious effort to kill the player off basically throughout. Fail one of the multiple mandatory attribute rolls against any of your stats? You die. Fail to drag a combat out long enough against a pair of relatively low-Skilled militiamen? You die. Drag a combat out too long against a different opponent? You die. Feeling good? Still alive? Then consider yourself accused of witchcraft and unless you pass this 50/50 die roll, uh-huh, you die.
Perhaps the unremittingly unfair gameplay can be attributed in part to Green's naiveté (he was a young man working on his first gamebook, after all), but then again you can tell from his prose that he clearly isn't stupid, and must have had some inkling of how probability works. I think it's more likely that he was trying to make a statement by purposefully creating a dead hard book, and he really didn't need to as that impact he was looking for should have come from his excellent writing.
The world he creates in Spellbreaker is deep and rich, inhabited by a believable cast of characters that bring your journey to life. Take the poor peasant family tormented by the Grimalkin for example - their misery seems so palpably real that it's incredibly satisfying to free them from its curse. The streets of the towns you visit are humming with activity and you get a real sense of how religion affects daily life, for the good with its kindly Abbot, or for the worse with its unsettling parade of self-flagellating zealots and witch-burning fanatics. It's intelligently designed too in terms of finding the path to victory (the 'good' kind of difficulty, if you like), which is intricate and well concealed, and contains some nasty but clever red herrings - I especially like the number of useful-sounding but ultimately useless items in the market sequence designed to drain your limited funds and divert your attention away from those few items that you do actually need to win. As good as all this is, Spellbreaker's gameplay issues prevent it from being a top-tier entry to the franchise, but Green would later acknowledge that he learned lessons since his early works and would go on to find a much better balance between story and playability later on.
37 - Tower of Destruction
Tower of Destruction has more in common with Caverns of the Snow Witch than just its setting in the icy wilderness of north Allansia. Like Livingstone's earlier work, it also unfolds over a few distinct-feeling chapters; here you have the initial pursuit of the fiery Sphere, the exploration of the Ice Palace to understand the true nature of the ancient evil you are up against and finding the tools to help you deal with it, and the final raid into the titular tower to take it on once and for all. What particularly impressed me about Tower was Martin's adept use of pacing as you progress through the story. The initial segments feel suitably frenetic as you try to catch up with the Sphere's trail of carnage, helped by giving your character a personal investment in bringing its slaughter to an end as it has wiped out your village and family, and build to a head in an exciting mid-point miniboss battle against a man-orc champion, your first glimpse of Zeverin, the wizard behind it all, and a subsequent dramatic escape from the exploding Sphere. He then slows it down for a much more thoughtful and methodical investigation of the Ice Palace, which is excellently designed, beautifully atmospheric and also massive, with a plethora of areas to explore, and explore most of it you must in order to get what you need to be able to take on the final section. Speaking of, the tower itself does seem quite short in comparison to what has come before, mainly because Martin put so much detail into the opening two chapters, but it does culminate in a fantastic final encounter where you find yourself having to take on both Zeverin and the night demon Relem in quick succession. Great fun from beginning to end.
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Post by CharlesX on Jul 28, 2023 14:36:51 GMT
My take and rating of these two books is different from petch's as well as others so I might as well share it. I have said I do not have a high view of Spellbreaker - gameplay is pretty fundamental to me and Spellbreaker isn't hard-but-good like Knights Of Doom, revised COTM or Bloodbones - it's outrageous, and the elephant in the room is we don't criticise it about that. Neither am I personally particularly impressed by the world-building, which I would say is too dark and unfriendly for my tastes. Tower Of Destruction is well-written and original - I don't disagree at all with your positive comments - although has the normal Keith Martin cliches (long, linear, hubs, unsurprising, heavy book-keeping). The two things which ruin Tower are the many errors and the heavily difficult puzzles (which I bet weren't playtested for kids), which compound their difficulty with errors. So, again, that depends how important those things are, for me they unfortunately dominate my view and alter my opinion from above-average to below-average.
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trialmaster
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Post by trialmaster on Jul 28, 2023 15:20:52 GMT
I must agree with Petch regarding Spellbreaker. I think the atmosphere created in the towns and countryside is superb and I was thoroughly absorbed when reading through it before realising that as a game it is broken. It felt like there was so much to explore. It's a real shame about the gameplay issues / errors as otherwise I think it could have been one of the classics, similar to Legend of the Shadow Warriors.
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Post by philsadler on Jul 28, 2023 17:09:37 GMT
38 - SpellbreakerIt's apt in some way that along with Crypt, the two books that are the epitome of 'great to read, a pain in the arse to play' fall slap back in the middle of my ratings. If anything, Spellbreaker is an even worse offender in the unplayability department than Crypt - the latter being only a badly broken boss fight away from being a very hard but nonetheless beatable book.
Again I disagree. I mean we all know the boss fight is the biggest joke in all FF, but the rest of the book is also chock full of 'do or die' rolls, and some don't even involve your stats, even right at the beginning. In this way, it's just as bad as SB, if not worse because Ian was very experienced whereas Jon wasn't.
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Post by CharlesX on Jul 28, 2023 17:26:36 GMT
38 - SpellbreakerIt's apt in some way that along with Crypt, the two books that are the epitome of 'great to read, a pain in the arse to play' fall slap back in the middle of my ratings. If anything, Spellbreaker is an even worse offender in the unplayability department than Crypt - the latter being only a badly broken boss fight away from being a very hard but nonetheless beatable book.
Again I disagree. I mean we all know the boss fight is the biggest joke in all FF, but the rest of the book is also chock full of 'do or die' rolls, and some don't even involve your stats, even right at the beginning. In this way, it's just as bad as SB, if not worse because Ian was very experienced whereas Jon wasn't.
I agree with philsadler. Take what you're saying about Crypt and apply it to Spellbreaker - once you take away the broken fight you're supposed to lose Spellbreaker becomes much, much easier rather than just a little easier as is the case with the broken boss fight in Crypt. I don't know what hand Jon had in the revised version of Curse which applied quite a few changes where Livingstone continued to write broken book after broken book such as AOD and RTFM.
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Post by pip on Jul 28, 2023 20:25:41 GMT
I'd need to do stats on Crypt and see how much your chances improve if you ignore the fight against Razaak (I might do that when I have more free time, which I don't really have right now), but IIRC, it is still an absurdly difficult book even without Razaak, so I also have reservations about it becoming "beatable" (not in the literal sense) if Razaak wasn't there.
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Post by petch on Jul 28, 2023 21:49:40 GMT
Neither am I personally particularly impressed by the world-building, which I would say is too dark and unfriendly for my tastes.
Yeah I get what you mean. Personally I liked its grimy medieval authenticity, but if you're looking for escapism, I can see how that wouldn't be everyone's cup of tea.
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Post by petch on Jul 29, 2023 7:59:01 GMT
Again I disagree. I mean we all know the boss fight is the biggest joke in all FF, but the rest of the book is also chock full of 'do or die' rolls, and some don't even involve your stats, even right at the beginning. In this way, it's just as bad as SB, if not worse because Ian was very experienced whereas Jon wasn't.
I agree with philsadler. Take what you're saying about Crypt and apply it to Spellbreaker - once you take away the broken fight you're supposed to lose Spellbreaker becomes much, much easier rather than just a little easier as is the case with the broken boss fight in Crypt.
I don't disagree with what philsadler is saying, and please don't think I'm trying to defend the indefensible, but I guess the point I was rather flippantly trying to make was that, while they're both as bad offenders in the broken gameplay stakes as each other, Spellbreaker has a lot more checkpoints littered through the book where the dice can kill you which is why it feels more like it is trying to kill the player off throughout. So going by the optimal paths as given in Champskees' solutions, Crypt has: - 1 in 3 chance of death against the Harpoon Flies - 1 in 6 chance of death each Attack Round against the Clay Golem (which you can end in 3 rounds using Luck) - 1 in 3 chance of death against the Hill Giant - 5 separate pass or die Test Skill rolls - Other than the Razaak fight, the toughest combats you face are against Skill 10 opponents - Stupid Razaak fight Spellbreaker on the other hand has: - 5 separate pass or fail Test Faith rolls - 2 separate pass or fail Test Skill rolls - The need for the fight against the militiamen to last 10 rounds or more - The need to keep your Infection score below 15, lots of points where you're relying on the dice to ensure this - 1 pass or fail Test Luck roll - The need for the fight against the Canker to last 9 rounds or less - Fight against Skill 11 The Mask - 1 in 2 chance of death at the witch trial - Fight against Skill 12 Kurakil (with a 1 in 3 chance of an additional 2 damage each round)
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Post by CharlesX on Jul 29, 2023 8:42:03 GMT
I know what you mean.. Because all that also doesn't allow for rolling enough gold, which you might well not be able to get via Eclipse if you don't start out with enough. I think that if you took out the requirement for enough gold, and the bat-shit fight you have to lose, and the 1 in 2 chance (or at least made it 1 in 3 or something), Spellbreaker could become very hard instead of outrageous, going by Champskees table taking out the Militiamen fight and changing the 1 in 2 life-or-death chance would put a max stats Avatar odds of 5-10%. And Livingstone did write Crypt as he did, and it would still be deeply nutty even without the Razaak fight, but even not particularly an admirer of Spellbreaker I reckon his writing is at least as good as Livingstone's Crypt. Plus from a path point-of-view, Livingstone has lots of cursed items, sudden out-of-the-blue deaths, and having to kill the Bonekeeper, where Green's world flows more elegantly - charlatans and necromancers are more what you might expect, really.
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Post by petch on Jul 29, 2023 18:05:52 GMT
36 - Knights of Doom
All that stuff I said about Spellbreaker? You can pretty much copy and paste it in here. Great story. Great atmosphere. Great writing. Lousy gameplay.
Green borrows from Stephen Hand a Special Skills and a special combat modifying weapons/armour system here, but they simply don't work as well as they do in Hand's books and that's because Hand carefully balanced his adventures to make any of the available skills or weapons viable options, and even mix up the experience upon replay. In Knights of Doom, thanks to its formidable difficulty there is very little wiggle room if you are to have any chance of winning, so those points don't really apply.
The main thing that's made me rank this above Spellbreaker is its amazing ending. It's honestly one of the most thrilling conclusions to an adventure in all of FF. It starts predictably enough, with you reaching the throne room of its big bad and engaging him in combat, but then, upon wounding him enough, you're unexpectedly interrupted by a betrayal from a supposed ally. What happens next is a masterclass in how to write a rip-roaring action sequence: the traitor meets a deservedly horrific fate, you chase your adversary to the battlements whereupon your pursuit takes to the air just as you are about to be overwhelmed by Belgaroth's minions, and then finally you are thrust into an aerial battle, you on your divine bird and Belgaroth on a winged nightmare steed. It's electrifying, and almost cinematic in its delivery.
35 - Stealer of Souls
I've mentioned before that I'm not a huge fan of adventures that seem too generic or safe. I'm willing to make an exception here. For his debut contribution to the series Martin elects to play it pretty safe with a fairly standard dungeon delve, populated by your archetypal tropey monsters - your orcs, your goblins, your ogres. It's how he does it that's the thing though. It's generic done as well as generic can be, the orcs given personality with their crude dialogue delivered as they gobble down their rat pasties, the dungeon plotted out with care with branching corridors and well placed encounters and traps, a thoughtful selection of items that can be employed in various ways to help you out at different points.
It does actually get a bit more creative towards the end, as you enter Mordraneth's Empire of Illusions. I never knew about Martin's previous career in psychology until I read about it on the forum, but now I do it's impossible not to see its influence on this bit, with each of its differently hued chambers seeming to represent a common phobia. Rats! Spiders! Heights! Fire! It's just as well Martin wrote this before wifi was a thing otherwise one of the chambers would probably have had your hero desperately trying to get a bar of signal when he was running late home from the pub. The whole sequence is a fun and surprising shift in gears that sets the climax of the adventure up nicely. Now, tell me about your mother...
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Post by tyrion on Jul 29, 2023 18:36:42 GMT
Neither am I personally particularly impressed by the world-building, which I would say is too dark and unfriendly for my tastes. I think you are missing the point. It's meant to be dark and unfriendly, just as medieval England should be, full of superstition and misery. It's like criticising city of thieves for having too many streets, or deathtrap dungeon for having too many traps.
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Post by CharlesX on Jul 29, 2023 19:04:23 GMT
Neither am I personally particularly impressed by the world-building, which I would say is too dark and unfriendly for my tastes. I think you are missing the point. It's meant to be dark and unfriendly, just as medieval England should be, full of superstition and misery. It's like criticising city of thieves for having too many streets, or deathtrap dungeon for having too many traps. I just don't like city adventures, for one point.
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Post by petch on Jul 30, 2023 8:56:36 GMT
34 - Rebel Planet
The first part of today's sci-fi double feature is this planet-hopper from Robin Waterfield. It's an ambitious debut, as he chooses to set it across four different planets, but he does it justice, managing to give each one of them its own personality and unique atmosphere. I especially liked that each one felt increasingly harder as you advanced, giving a real sense of progression to the book, almost as if you were playing your way up through the levels in a video game. Level One, Tropos, is a believably oppressive dystopian police state, and despite its paranoia-inducing presentation with Big Brother surveillance every way you turn, it's quite hard to fail here and eases you nicely into your adventure. Then it's on to Radix, which despite its more cultured exterior hides a darker underbelly, and you need to be more clever here to get the vital code part that you need. Halmuris, the third stop on your odyssey, is actively hostile to human life, unstable and teeming with dangerous flora and fauna, and accordingly there's a noticeable ramp-up of the difficulty level from Waterfield. If you manage to survive all that, your final destination is the home planet of your tyrannical oppressors the Arcadians, where nearly any wrong decision leads to death. The care and consideration put into each destination means this delivers on what many of the other sci-fi offerings lack: a believable and cohesive universe, and the variety of locations to explore keeps the interest high throughout.
33 - The Rings of Kether
Come in, stranger. Sit down. I gots a story to tell.
Hold my calls, Miss Oh Aitch, I have a visitor. Broad on reception? That's Miss O'Hara. Sweet gal. Little kooky. We had a thing going once, but...well, let's just say it didn't work out. You can't let anyone get too close in this line of work. Someone always gets burned.
So. You wanna know about Kether. Sure, I'll spill. The name's Petch. Petch Malone. Galactic Federation Investigator.
The notion of playing as a sort of space gumshoe is pretty irresistible, and in the first part of the book that's exactly what Chapman delivers. There's hardly any dice rolling, and instead you are in full investigative mode, whether it's mingling with dodgy locals in gloomy dive bars to pick up clues, playing the bad cop and using threatening tactics to extract the info you want out of your marks, or getting your hands dirty and bending the law by breaking into offices to search filing cabinets and such to get what you need. It is perhaps a little too forgiving in the amount of avenues there are to complete your investigation, making the opening section very difficult to actually fail, but I'm willing to overlook that because of the sheer variety of options there are available and Chapman's authentically clipped, noirish delivery of prose, complete with rat-a-tat-tat dialogue from its shady cast of characters of corrupt officials, sassy barmaids and the like.
It does lose a bit of momentum in the second half, as it casts aside its detective trappings in favour of becoming a more standard sci-fi blastathon, but at least it adds some action to the proceedings and means that the dice see some use.
Bourbon, stranger? No? Hope you don't mind if I do. I skipped breakfast.
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Post by CharlesX on Jul 30, 2023 9:29:46 GMT
Going back to 36 Knights Of Doom - I wouldn't quite cut-and-paste about Spellbreaker, because Spellbreaker has more varied encounters and a deeper world than Knights Of Doom, which is full of generic encounters such as Chaos opponents, mercenaries, hellhounds, cockatrice and other things that wouldn't look amiss in Shakespeare's first two plays. Absolutely nothing wrong with that - I like generic work - but they read like different beasts to me. Like Spellbreaker the test you have to fail very much should have been corrected, as JG himself once said in a social media post (no link sorry).
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Post by petch on Jul 30, 2023 10:41:04 GMT
Like Spellbreaker the test you have to fail very much should have been corrected, as JG himself once said in a social media post (no link sorry). I very nearly referenced that bit in my writeup but chose not to since as sylas and greenspine have pointed out in the past, there is a way to get around this if you use codebreaking skills. Still, the fact that Green included a key to the code suggests to me that it was the authorial intent for you to need to collect this on the true path (even if there is a legitimate way around it), and having to fail a Skill test to get it in a book where high Skill is elsewhere a necessity due its tough fights is indeed ridiculous.
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kieran
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Post by kieran on Jul 30, 2023 10:50:38 GMT
I think in terms of design, Rings of Kether is one of the best books in the series but I just wish the writing was stronger. Take the car chase for example - brilliantly designed but dull as dishwater. Compare it to the drag race in Freeway Fighter which is nowhere near as intricate but feels much more exciting due to strong writing.
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trialmaster
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Post by trialmaster on Jul 30, 2023 13:15:10 GMT
I completely agree with Kieran. In fact, I think Andrew Chapman's writing was always pretty weak despite having some strong, original ideas. Because of this, I was never able to feel fully immersed in his books and, added to the fact I was less keen on the sci fi FF's, none of his books would feature in the top half of my favourite FF's (including Seas of Blood).
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Post by petch on Jul 30, 2023 17:28:46 GMT
32 - Island of the Lizard King
The third in a consecutively released trio of (extremely strong) early contributions from Ian Livingstone that also included City of Thieves and Deathtrap Dungeon. Island of the Lizard King rarely gets mentioned in the same breath as those two classics, and I think a large part of the reason for that is its extreme linearity - it really is more or less a straight line, with one of the only bits of agency the player has is determining how poor Mungo dies at the beginning (crushed by crab or stabbed by pirate). That's a shame, as otherwise Island of the Lizard King is excellent. It captures the adventurous spirit of the Ray Harryhausen Sinbad films, in terms of both the lost island setting and the various monstrosities you come up against. The Lizard King himself is simply a cool villain, made even more fearsome by the brilliant concept that he is a slave to a pitiless parasite, and so can't be reasoned with but is nearly impossible to defeat in combat too thanks to that same parasite granting him near-invincibility. The climax when you take him on is one of the most thrilling that Livingstone wrote; it's a desperate fight against your adversary, his insectoid controller and his black lion pet all against the backdrop of a pitched battle going on outside between the freed slaves and their reptilian former captors. When on form, Livingstone certainly knows how spin a stirring yarn, and here he does it again.
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Post by CharlesX on Jul 30, 2023 18:03:40 GMT
32 - Island of the Lizard KingThe third in a consecutively released trio of (extremely strong) early contributions from Ian Livingstone that also included City of Thieves and Deathtrap Dungeon. Island of the Lizard King rarely gets mentioned in the same breath as those two classics, and I think a large part of the reason for that is its extreme linearity - it really is more or less a straight line, with one of the only bits of agency the player has is determining how poor Mungo dies at the beginning (crushed by crab or stabbed by pirate). That's a shame, as otherwise Island of the Lizard King is excellent. It captures the adventurous spirit of the Ray Harryhausen Sinbad films, in terms of both the lost island setting and the various monstrosities you come up against. The Lizard King himself is simply a cool villain, made even more fearsome by the brilliant concept that he is a slave to a pitiless parasite, and so can't be reasoned with but is nearly impossible to defeat in combat too thanks to that same parasite granting him near-invincibility. The climax when you take him on is one of the most thrilling that Livingstone wrote; it's a desperate fight against your adversary, his insectoid controller and his black lion pet all against the backdrop of a pitched battle going on outside between the freed slaves and their reptilian former captors. When on form, Livingstone certainly knows how spin a stirring yarn, and here he does it again. I've always liked Lizard King a lot, as much as other Livingstone that is given credit such as City Of Thieves and Warlock Of Firetop Mountain, but never worked out just what was lacking about it - and you've done that (aside from the difficulty level).
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Post by petch on Jul 31, 2023 10:53:01 GMT
31 - Dead of Night
I like how certain FF writers carved out a little section of Titan for themselves in which to set their gamebooks - you know, how Mason's are set in the Isles of the Dawn or in or around Kallamehr, or how Sharp and Darvill-Evans used particular parts of Khul. Stephen Hand chose to set all three of his books not just in a specific geographical area of Titan, Gallantaria in the Old World, but in a particular part of FF's timeline as well, in the aftermath of the War of the Four Kingdoms. It's a little bit of attention to detail and respect and research into FF's history and lore that gives an indication of what a special talent was joining the team.
The fact that all three books are set around the same place and time gives a consistency of tone across Hand's works as well; chiefly, a grim and forbidding flavour where times are hard as the lands are just recovering from the ravages of war, and where Hand's clear love of horror influences can play a major part. Nowhere are these horror elements perhaps more overt than in Dead of Night (co-written, I should add, with Jim Bambra, in his sole contribution to the series), as the entire plotline revolves around your character's lifelong struggle against the diabolical residents of the Demonic plane, in particular the Demon Lord Myurr. To help you to this end, you have a selection of Talents appropriate to your occupation as a Demon Stalker. Hand wasn't the first writer to incorporate a Special Skills system into his books (Sword of the Samurai and Midnight Rogue spring to mind), but for my money no one did it better than him; they're incorporated into the storyline as an integral part of fleshing out the protagonist, and your selection of skills can have a fairly major effect on your chances of victory depending on the route through the book you choose to take, making replaying it with a differently built avatar always a pleasure.
To be honest, the only thing that's prevented me from ranking this higher is the quality of the books I've put above it...I'm getting towards what I consider to be the cream of the crop now. Dead of Night is darkly compelling throughout, but I think Hand took lessons from the writing of this one to make his stellar two follow-up contributions even better. Still, if the best criticism I can think of is 'It's really good, just not quite as good as his other ones', then it must be doing something right.
30 - Daggers of Darkness
From some of the comments I've read on the forum before, I don't think I'm the only one here for whom Daggers of Darkness is a guilty pleasure. Let's get the negatives out of the way first: it can't be ignored that Sharp's clumsy writing is still in evidence here, the pacing is sometimes off and the references sometimes have a garbled quality as he tries to pack in too much action at once. But...and I'll say but again and I'll put it in capitals this time...BUT I honestly don't care about that, because this is, in all of the best senses of the word, an adventure. There's so much to see and do on offer, and that strange mazelike way that Sharp designs his books, with overlapping and intertwining paths that would probably make no sense if you tried to map it out but means that any one area can seemingly feed into another, makes this enormously replayable with a vast range of viable routes to the win. And, for me anyway, I found myself wanting to replay it again almost immediately after finishing it, because I wanted to see if I could find my way into one of the Clan Mazes that I had missed as each one has a different creative and fun little minigame you have to pass to claim its Medallion, or because I wanted to get to the end section again to try a different combination of ingredients to see what other Powers I could gain to help me take on the book's final challenges. The delightful ideas just keep coming and there isn't a dull moment.
As some of my previous writeups have probably indicated, I'm a sucker for a good story or an engaging narrative and I'm perhaps a little too willing to overlook mechanical faults or gameplay issues if a book is well written enough. In this case though? This one's all about the gameplay.
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Post by CharlesX on Jul 31, 2023 11:02:42 GMT
I wouldn't want to have to choose between Dead Of Night and Sword Of The Samurai, as that would be like comparing a German beer with a French cheese sandwich.
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Post by pip on Jul 31, 2023 13:31:51 GMT
Dead of Night would probably be in the top 10 for me. It is excellent gameplay-wise, and like you said, it is highly replayable thanks to the different skills you can pick at the beginning. Being a fan of the horror genre, I also love how appropriately sinister the whole world feels. House of Hell is the only other book in the series that managed to slightly scare me as a kid, but House of Hell is more childlike in its scares, while Dead of Night's darkness is more adult.
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sylas
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Post by sylas on Jul 31, 2023 16:50:44 GMT
Dead of Night ranked this 'low' is unexpected.
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Post by slloyd14 on Jul 31, 2023 17:15:31 GMT
Daggers of Darkness is a guilty pleasure for me. Even though you can barely go a section without being threatened, ambushed kidnapped or thrown into some dungeon, I think Luke Sharp gets away with it by making the encounters not instakills and instead making them lead to another section of the book. It makes me think of my character as a poor adventurer who can never catch a break. They always get thrust into deadly situations only to escape them by the skin of their teeth.
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Post by CharlesX on Jul 31, 2023 17:26:00 GMT
Dead of Night ranked this 'low' is unexpected. Think this is because while the gameplay in Dead Of Night is near-stellar (although its still unclear if the Potion Of Heroism should have been an attack strength bonus), the world-building is impressive but not the most ambitious or indeed unique. The game can be over comparatively swiftly, as well.
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kieran
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Post by kieran on Jul 31, 2023 19:24:36 GMT
Nice to see Daggers get some love. I wouldn't even call it a guilty pleasure because while it has its flaws, what it does well, it does very well indeed.
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Post by petch on Aug 1, 2023 11:07:15 GMT
29 - The Crimson Tide
I think I struggled with the ranking of this one more than I did any other book, and that's because it's a title that I wanted to love a lot more than I actually did. I wanted to love it because of its fantastic writing. In many ways it's the gold standard for the heights the writing in the series could achieve. Just as a small example of this, take reference 72, from which the book takes its title and which I think is my favourite fail ending in all FF. If you have a copy of the book handy, grab it. Have a quick look at it now. It's bloody great. Edgar Allan Poe would have been proud of its brutal, chilling economy of language.
I wanted to love it because of its ambition. Taking place over many years, your character develops and matures, not just physically with the gradual enhancing of your raw attributes that that brings, but as a person, moulded to an extent by the decisions that you the player make for them. Do you want them to be completely fixated on pursuing that crimson tide of revenge? You can do that. Or, you can abandon it and become a monk, or a gladiator, or just return to your simple life as a peasant. It's rare to see actual character development in FF, let alone give the player control of shaping it.
I wanted to love it because of its heart. The Crimson Tide is not alone in starting with the killing of the protagonist's family or friends, but it is unique in making the player question whether single-mindedly hunting down and slaying those responsible will allow them to heal. In the black and white worlds of other titles, you kill the villain, you are avenged, game over. The Crimson Tide is mature enough to introduce shades of grey and moral ambiguity.
I wanted to love it because of its setting. Taking place in the aftermath of the events of Black Vein Prophecy, Mason is once again confident enough in the sophistication of his readership to understand that that book's conclusion, where good ruler overthrows bad ruler, doesn't automatically make everything instantly a-ok, and the lands are rife with unrest, civil war, marauding bands and political vacuums.
The reason I didn't love it as much as I wanted to was down to its complexity and difficulty. That's unusual, because these are normally positives in my book; a well concealed, intricate solution to a title shows that care and intelligence have been put into its planning. It's just that the difficulty of The Crimson Tide is so slippery that it caused me no small amount of frustration. The key to solving it is in the collection of code words. That's nothing new to FF, code words had been used before. Usually, however, they're treated as a substitute for a key item - as in, you reach a reference, it asks you whether you have such-and-such a word written down on your Adventure Sheet, if so, turn to x. Paul Mason, being the great defier of FF convention that he is, takes them and uses them in a completely different and original way. So, in my numerous failed attempts at the book, I had been travelling along different paths, collecting different code words, and getting nowhere, when suddenly I realised I had not seen any instruction as to what to do with these words. And that's when it struck me, in a moment of Joycian epiphany: 'Oh Christ yeah, it's spelling out a phrase isn't it?'. It was simultaneously exasperating and a moment of grudging admiration for the cleverness of the solution that had been eluding me. The problem is, even once I'd worked that out, I still couldn't fricking do it. Such is the labyrinthine complexity of the book's design, I was repeatedly finding myself wandering aimlessly, desperately trying to find the exact combination of code words from the multitude of ones available that the book demanded. I get the impression that the correct code words are supposed to have been placed strategically at key points of your character's road to maturity, but unless I'm missing something, that didn't seem to marry up with where they actually are. I mean, I get why learning inner calm at the monastery would be such a moment for example, but why is one hidden behind the encounter with the Death's Messenger? Further, at the point in the text when you actually put the phrase together and apply its instruction, what you've learned doesn't really correspond to what is happening at that time. When I did finally manage to solve it, it just left me with the impression that the book was so focussed on concealing such a fiendishly complicated puzzle, it forgot to implement it in a meaningful way. And the process of actually trying to solve it was so draining that at some point I forgot all of its very admirable qualities, and was enduring rather than enjoying it.
Oh and it also has a messed up Mudworm fight too.
28 - Bloodbones
I like to view Bloodbones as being a transitional book in Green's development as a gamebook author, coming as it does between his first three brilliantly written but far too hard contributions, and Howl of the Werewolf when he finally hits the sweet spot between story and gameplay. Going by the account of its creation in You are the Hero, it seems to have gone through more publishing hell than any other book in the series, originally being commissioned for release as part of the Puffin run, then needing to be rewritten to be significantly shorter as part of a short-lived plan for new titles to run to only 300 references as opposed to the standard 400, then cancelled when Puffin pulled the series, then rewritten again to be released as a Wizard title. Perhaps in this time Green reconsidered his approach to creating gamebooks, as while it remains ferociously difficult, it is a lot more playable than his Puffin output. Consequently, what we have here is more of Green's wonderfully evocative prose with the added bonus of legitimately being able to play the thing. Green also shows once again his talent for turning his hand to a wide variety of genres, so the nautical themes that run through the book, with its undead buccaneers, voodoo curses and fearsome creatures of the deep are all beautifully presented.
I should probably have used more piratical patois to liven this writeup up and make it fit with the theme better really. Instead of saying 'publishing hell' I could have said it was consigned to Davy Jones' locker or something instead. Yeah, that's what I should have said.
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trialmaster
Wanderer
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Posts: 62
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Post by trialmaster on Aug 1, 2023 11:39:56 GMT
Thanks Petch. I am really enjoying these write ups. The Crimson Tide was my favourite of the Paul Mason books despite its difficulty as you describe. As we know the Mudworm battle was not his error.
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