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Post by hynreck on Jan 26, 2017 16:03:48 GMT
Well, Ian seems inspired by television, last time it was The Walking Dead (perhaps), now it could be Game of Thrones...
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Post by hynreck on Jan 25, 2017 14:47:24 GMT
Maybe Yaztromo's death will be the catalyst for a new adventure...
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Post by hynreck on Jan 20, 2017 20:38:24 GMT
Did he confirm Yaztromo? Sounded like fan wishes to me.
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Post by hynreck on Dec 29, 2016 15:54:28 GMT
My favourites Livingston moments are probably those (and yes I recall quite a few from Eye of the Dragon alone):
Any time your adventurer finds something hidden away, most likely in a pile of filth, but sometimes in plain sight, and the text goes: eh, idiot, this thing fits in your mouth, you want to eat it? Say you do, I know you do... And while your character is seriously pondering this option, usually the reader's reaction is more among the line of: WhyTF would I ever do that?? Yes I found some green goop drying at the bottom of a vase, this must be 6 months old jello, yummy!
Or everytime the option is to either break something or totally ignore it. You've found a mysterious glass sphere full of swirling purple gas. You want to break it?? Come on, you know it's fun to break stuff!! Me: Can't I just bring it along? Hell, I could throw it at the next fool who attacks me, see what it does then. Book: NOO! You must break it against your forehead or forever lose it buddy. ...you know, there's a slime chance in Razaak's hell that it will do you good, come on take a chance!!
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Post by hynreck on Dec 28, 2016 20:30:00 GMT
Now that's more like it. Of course, once you've acquired all 7 magical throwing hammers and assorted stuff, you'll be asked if you took them to the fairy spring to have them blessed by the Oracle of random questions, and that's another trial in itself. Plus once all that's done you got to throw them at the bad guy, seven times, requiring you to pass some type of Razaak test, which is unfairly hard even with the glove of dexterity on.
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Post by hynreck on Dec 28, 2016 17:15:45 GMT
This is a Livingston book we are talking about; chances are you will be long dead before you witness Littlebig's demise.
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Post by hynreck on Dec 28, 2016 17:11:06 GMT
Funny, and kind of true...
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Post by hynreck on Dec 20, 2016 15:36:57 GMT
Welcome aboard.
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Post by hynreck on Dec 9, 2016 20:40:35 GMT
Hear hear.
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Post by hynreck on Dec 9, 2016 16:13:15 GMT
Yeah, well, the way I see it, anything with a fresh coat of paint is just that, but it's better than nothing. The official site was dated anyway and looked kind of bad, at least now something's being done. Of course, it could be better, but for my money, until they start giving those out-of-print books a fresh coat of paint (how about pristine retro-style new editions of FF, with green spines?), allowing new generations to enjoy forgotten gems (or duds...) then I don't really care.
I do care about new books, though, that goes without saying.
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Post by hynreck on Dec 8, 2016 19:37:15 GMT
The Official Site's got a facelift too. With our Jon Green acting as the Warlock.
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Post by hynreck on Dec 2, 2016 17:05:54 GMT
The mighty Mudworm knows how my mind works, if you can call that working.
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Post by hynreck on Dec 2, 2016 13:33:24 GMT
So sad indeed. I bought Flight from the Dark when I was really young, I think it was maybe my third gamebook at that, and I've been a fan ever since then, the flame sometimes faltering but never fading.
I learn of that sad news a few days ago, but couldn't bring myself to create a topic here, I couldn't find the strength, or the words, I just couldn't. So thank you greenspine for doing it for me.
And thank you Joe for all you did. For imprinting your tales upon my soul, for putting an indelible mark upon my imagination. I couldn't tell the lots of you how many battle my young self fought against countless imaginary (lucky me, really) Drakkarims and Giaks (yes, I know, Drakkar, but my younger self didn't know that). Thank you, I lack the skill to praise you for all your worth, but rest easy now in confidence that the fans will carry your work with them through eternity, at least as long as us men still stand. Rest in peace.
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Post by hynreck on Dec 1, 2016 13:23:30 GMT
Great, now there's a cow in this thread.
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Post by hynreck on Nov 23, 2016 16:49:51 GMT
Alice is a tough, but fun book. Not a chore to play through multiple times, well, you know, until you've reach that point where you can't take it anymore, but it shouldn't be until at least a few good try. I'm guessing the more familiar you are with the Lewis Carroll classic the better it gets, though.
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Post by hynreck on Oct 13, 2016 12:32:33 GMT
All good advice ^^ I am working on an FF thing at the moment (and if hynreck is reading, yes it's the thing I was intending to finish in June, and it's still nowhere near finished) so I'll see if I can make it closer to error-free than this one. You should know by now I can't read, so don't get your hopes up!
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Post by hynreck on Oct 13, 2016 12:28:09 GMT
It got funded! By a thin margin, but still! Looking forward to my copy, in due time. I'm currently playing Alice's Nightmare in Wonderland and it is quality, for the most of it. But... I knew it would be.
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Post by hynreck on Sept 26, 2016 12:34:36 GMT
Well, Mudworm, you've managed to intrigue me with your comments, and would very much like to tackle your story once more to see what I can find. The hell I know when that's going to be, though. I keep being surprised by how many... surprises (grunt) you can hide in such a little story. You'd think it would be a straightforward affair, but I'm often wrong.
Thanks for the wedding wishes, I shall make good use of them. It's perfect, as I had left a blank spot right through my wishes and wondered what to put there. I thought a little improvisation, some cliché Trek stuff like Live long and prosper or maybe more cryptic Twin Peaks stuff like "The Owls are not what they seem" might fit the bill but yours are better. And everybody will understand, so there's that to consider. In any case, I've already envisioned Transformers (cough, giant Transformers fighting) crashing through the chapel at the end of my speech and ruining everything in an awesome way, so I've not left everything to chance, just so you know.
As for the fruit cake comment, it's just that I don't like the taste, that's all. They do make good repellent or throwing weapons.
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Post by hynreck on Sept 23, 2016 16:49:28 GMT
Hey just a few months later, no troubles...
To be fair (?), I've tackle this little game story quite a while ago, but then end of summer vacation, and a month of preparations until my (very soon) wedding has transformed me into a busy man with no time to spare. Well... one thing replaces another, right? In any case, here I am. It won't be much of a review I'm afraid, but here goes nothing:
Basically I had fun with it and I assume it does what you wanted it to do; entertain without much pretention. I had a go at it three times: first time I aborted my attempt not because I failed but because I got too swamped with work to go real far, and enough time passed that I went "let's just start over". Second time is that start over that finally allowed me to finish (and win), and third time is, well, technically it is more or less a third time since I was just not satisfied with my end result on that second try and wished to improve my confort/joy score, so I went for specific parts of the story where I knew I had failed at guessing properly which way to go (more specifically the ending, as is usual for me, a wrong turn taking me straight to the villain, too soon (I mean I'd probably be an incredible blood hound, but as a FF-like adventurer, such direct approach sucks)).
I must admit I cheated on battles, because with as much time as I've got, I would still be at it right now if it wasn't the case. I was still able, overall, to judge the fairness of the presented confrontations, and it seems to me fair enough. Last confrontation seemed overly tricky, perhaps a bit difficult, but hard to tell if it will suck the joy and confort out of anybody. I have less patience today for such things but perhaps I'm in the minority.
Other than that, it was pretty fun to go through that story of yours. As I've said before you have a nice flowing prose, easygoing, and your humour is very... fitting? I guess I'm not very good at criticising humour. But you've put a smile on my face, and since I'm rarely the type of laugh-at-loud guy, that's an accomplishment alright.
To close with some general stats/info that probably only you will enjoy: Comfort/Joy points: I ended my second run with 110 points, third one with 130.
Items in my possession: Icicles, Brandy, Fruit Cake (how annoying), Chesnuts, Cinnamon Sticks (second try only if memory serves)
Meet and greet: Snowman, Pine Dryad, Nog Monster and of course the big bad, a certain Donald Trump (who's that supposed to be, anyway?)
In the end, I didn't go for the highest score. I could of course go and peruse every last paragraphs, but where's the fun in that? I guess I do like my gamebooks to keep mysteries to themselves, for perhaps further adventures, and that includes cute little virtual stories like yours. Good job, and cheers for sharing with us.
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Post by hynreck on Jul 22, 2016 12:29:41 GMT
You, Sir, are one passionate individual. I salute you without sarcasm. And I feel you, and get what you mean.
You are also very intense, and I doubt I could ever be as intense as you, even though I dearly love my gamebooks, pay due respect and proper care to each and everyone of them, even smell the paper at moments. I've backed quite a few also on Kickstarter. I do feel it's important.
Right now I can't get into much more of a response than that, I'm at the job after all and don't want to type words just for the sake of it. But I wanted to encourage you because I feel, and that's my big criticism for your "essay", that not many here might. Because whether you realise it or not, you've written one hell of a wall of text here. And that's daunting and hard on the eyes. I read your whole wall of text, and that's hard. You might want to spread it out a little in the future.
But again, always glad to meet another fellow passionate! Never let the flame die down, I say.
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Post by hynreck on Jul 20, 2016 17:00:00 GMT
ARCANA AGENCY The Thief of Memories by Paul Gresty
Some time back, nearly 2 years ago, I bought this book as a mercy move toward Megara Entertainment. That might sound like a bullshit statement to some of you, how much of a mercy move can it be? Buying a gamebook, which is something that I adore? It can’t be that hard, right? And right you’d be. Because that’s exactly what went through my head around that time; finding motivation wasn’t hard. Still, money isn’t always easy to come by, and can be hard to part with, what with two young kids depending on me, you know the drill. All the same, I’ve got to start this review somehow, and a little bit of background info always help to do so.
So, back then, I had helped kickstart Megara’s ambitious project of eight The Way of the Tiger books. But there was some struggles along the way and they were looking for more finances. You know. The Shit Happens type. I don’t want to go into further details as this is neither the place nor the time, for this is a non related (to WotT) gamebook review that I’m doing, after all, not an history lesson. But suffice to say if you’re curious most of the tale can be found on the Way of the Tiger kickstarter page, which should still be up, so browse at your leisure.
Now onto the book itself. As a gamebook written by Paul Gresty and first published by Megara Entertainment in 2013, Arcana Agency refers both to the title of this (yet to be) series and the actual place where your characters work, a shady detective outfit dealing mostly in occult matters or other mysterious circumstances needing investigations à la X-Files. But since all this happens way back in New York, October 1932, to be precise, such detective could effectively be called the ancestors to our not-quite-so-modern-anymore Fox and Scully. But you get the point.
If, for some reason, you’ve read the blurb at the back of this book quickly (well, let’s just say you’ve read the blurb online while browsing the latest YouTube massage videos), you’d be forgiven for thinking that this particular book, The Thief of Memories, contains 4 distinct adventures, somehow loosely connected with each other by characters and purposes. It might look that way but the fact is that these stories are really just distinct chapters of the same story and it would make no sense to play them alone or out of order. It would perhaps have been interesting to be able to start from any one of those 4 stories, but this isn’t a videogame and since the book is already fairly complex as it is, I can’t even begin to imagine how complicated it would have been to have that option.
That said, you start with the first short one, The Case of the Unghostly Ghost, who is really just an introduction setting up the 3 main heroes, your "team": Humphrey Brown (the leader), Joe Strelli (the lancer) and Tom Shanigan (the brute). Of course, this is a rough description, but close enough. Then we have two seemingly unrelated stories, The Mystery of the Morgue Marauder and The Mystery of the Murdered Marvelous Mask (yes the author seems fond of alliterative titles), splitting up said heroes before concluding with the main course, The Thief of Memories, the story that brings them all back together for the grand finale. The better you perform in each one, the easier your time will be in the next one, or the one after that; it all adds up to some beautiful cause and effect, very well thought-out. It ends on a slight cliffhanger, as the author promises more adventures to come, the next one being named The Deathless Wanderer at the moment, but who knows what might happen in the future. We’re not in the heydays of gamebooking anymore.
Let’s delve a little deeper. You probably can tell already that I mostly enjoyed my experience. You wouldn’t be wrong. First, the physical product itself is something to behold. If any of you out there ever saw a finished Megara product, you probably already know what that mean. Big hardbound books, full of thick papers and lushly illustrated, all in colour. Quality-wise, it doesn’t get much better than this. But if I wanted to nitpick, the only flaw that I could find, from my perspective, is that, indeed, Megara’s books are too big: while the founder’s opinion is that he wants book that he can lay on a table flat, without the need to hold down the pages and without breaking the proper book apart, I for my part don’t like to read/play my gamebook at a table, so such a big book might hurt the hand holding it in the long run; it is also so big that it doesn’t fit on anything else but a shelf with lots of headroom, and a deep one too, of course. Like I said, it’s all nitpicking: they do look magnificent on said shelf, but mine ends up in the basement cause that’s the only place where I’ve got shelves that can accommodate them. Such a pity.
But back to the physical product. Illustrations are adequate, and done by a varied bunch of artists (Aude Pfister, Lise Rafalli, Mary Nikol, Faiz Nabheebucus), some of them you might know from different other Megara projects, like the aforementioned Way of the Tiger books. Otherwise, most likely everything you need you’ll find it in this book too, and more, from detectives and main characters illustrated bios, stats (yes, your characters stats are fixed at first, they might change along the course of the game, but they are written in for you), map of New York with legend, checklist of codewords, even a foreword by fan favourite author Dave Morris. What’s not to like?
There are some things not to like, but they are far and few and shouldn’t stop you dead in your tracks from trying this gamebook. They’ll most likely come from some game mechanics, as simplified as they are, or perhaps from the author small abuses of “As you know…”. Those awkward moments are mostly found in the introduction story, so if you have less tolerance for those (kind of like me), rest easy in knowing that they’ll mostly be all gone come the next chapter. That can’t be worst than trudging through all those first chapters from the Harry Potter series book 2 to 6, right?
As for game mechanics, here’s how it goes: you’ve got five stats given, Strength, Reflexes, Knowledge, Insight and Charm for each of your detectives and every once in a while, you’ll have to roll against a difficulty to see if you can achieve some kind of feat, all depending on the situation at hand. Say you need to avoid an incoming fist? You might roll 2 dices, add your reflexes stat and check against a given difficulty. If you score equal or exceed the difficulty number, you succeed, as plain as that. Of course, part of it is luck, and if you are attempting something particularly difficult, or foolish, the difficulty number given will reflect that, or should anyway.
Next you’ve got your health levels, five of them: from perfect to soon to be pushing up the daisies. This, to me, felt like the most archaic part of the gameplay. I get it, somehow you need health as an element of danger other than the instant death paragraph, so you can’t feel invincible while wandering around, etc. But this being set in a relatively modern world, managing to reach that last health level, basically going around on life support instead of heading to the nearest hospital, and wait - careful not to stub your toe along the way or you might die - I don’t know, there’s just something wrong about such a system. A loss of credibility. Granted, I’ve always had that problem with gamebooks, whether it be Lone Wolf or Fighting Fantasy, doesn’t matter: I feel like you should never die from banging your shoulder on a door or scraping your knuckles on the floor, you know? And if I ever get around to write a gamebook of my own, yes, I’ll make sure there is a rule preventing that, but well, there it is. Five levels of health here, and the last one you are basically tenderized meat walking, so careful to avoid those puddles on the ground…
Otherwise, you’ve got no limits to the number of items you can carry, and you also don’t have to write down the common stuff, like money, the author being kind enough to inform you right away that you always carry a few dollars with you, like a sensible fellow, enough to go around anyway. Which I found refreshing because those restrictions usually just feels like a fake difficulty and make you feel like your character is too stupid to manage a simple inventory or money… or life itself. And dealing with money in a modern context, not a fantasy or sci-fi world, can lead to some glaring weirdness and mistakes, as blatantly seen in something like Blood of the Zombies. *shivers* But let’s not dwell on that!
That’s about it, really, without going into spoilers territory. I’d like to add for the records that I managed to beat the game with nearly no cheating involved, only some fudging of the dices here and there, after having failed at the story before. Time is of the essence, for all of us, and around my third try at the book (a dreadful first chapter that necessitated a full restart, a more successful second try but some failings on the next two chapters resulting in a less than optimal last story) I was doing much better overall, but “helping” the dices all along so as not to fail on a technicality, cause my patience also needs to be managed, after all.
So yeah. In conclusion this is a good gamebook overall, a good mixture of classic elements we all know about and mostly love, and some good, innovative and modern ones that makes it worth our time to invest in. If you can track a copy, not necessarily an easy task as I believe you have to buy from the Megara website, I heartily recommend it.
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Post by hynreck on Jun 15, 2016 18:40:15 GMT
Hi Jose and welcome. Just don't go and mention your personal address here or a certain someone might show up at your front door!
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Post by hynreck on Jun 10, 2016 12:13:08 GMT
You can open it up in another window to feel the pain more.
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Post by hynreck on Jun 9, 2016 12:24:45 GMT
The definition of cockblock:
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Post by hynreck on Jun 7, 2016 12:38:49 GMT
You can feud but don't be rude! ^_^
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Post by hynreck on Jun 3, 2016 19:12:45 GMT
Yes, for my part I'm more in the "very sad" stage.
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Post by hynreck on Jun 3, 2016 12:15:49 GMT
Have you tried not saying it?
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Post by hynreck on Jun 2, 2016 15:05:15 GMT
Anything to keep your mind occupied?
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Post by hynreck on Jun 2, 2016 14:01:02 GMT
I know what you mean, everyday that I'm forcibly taken, tied up on a table and nearly killed by a bunch of fanatics I find myself bored to death. The shame I'm so blasé, nothing can stir me anymore.
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Post by hynreck on Jun 2, 2016 12:33:47 GMT
My, feels like you are still in that car and reeling, from the typing!
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