Stephen Thrave's Adventure Gamebooks

[deadshadowrunner]

Anyone has any of the books in this series?I only own Murder in the Dark.

It's a classic whodunnit(gamebook) with 180 references.On the back cover it boasts: It's someone different (the killer) every time you play!Except that there are only six suspects,so there are only six different games.

But it still sounds interesting,right?The paths are probably intertwined with each other,making it like a mini Appointment with FEAR.Wrong.The six different games are like I said,different.Totally different.So it's actually six different gamebooks with the same plot combined into one book.Still not too bad,right?

Wrong.There is absolutely no deduction in the story,only memorisation.Then it asks you something from previous paragraphs that you did not think to memorise,a bit like details of some items in Curse of the Mummy.If you get it wrong,the murderer tries to kill you.If you get it right you get a clue.This is the part where you compare and delete,not deduce.For example the clue is:A short person could not have reached the shelf.Then you compare to the details of each person and cancel the one who is short,because he is not the murderer.And so on until you reach the end.

If you collected all the clues,you should be able to guess who it is easily.If not,too bad.Even if you win,the book doesn't state the murderer's motive.

If you've read until here,you'll probably realised that I don't like this book.You're right.The only good thing about this book is that it is small and portable.But it's so bad,you probably wouldn't even want to bring it along with you.

Don't let this review stop you from buying it.You may find it interesting.

[a moderator]

I have two of Thraves' Compact Adventure Game Books, plus a few of his gamebooks based on licensed properties (Asterix and the Famous Five). I'd say that Murder in the Dark is actually the best of the ones I've read - the rest have way too much randomness. For example, the 'puzzles' which must be solved to win Secret Agent A.C.E. (the other CAGB) are all in the format 'guess which of the four words listed here is the right one'. No clues, no logic, just a 1 in 4 chance of being right every time.

There is actually a bit of 'intertwining' in Murder. After the first two or three 'clues', you'll wind up on one of two tracks to the endgame, so the last few memory puzzles become quite familiar if you can be bothered to play the book more than three or four times.

[deadshadowrunner]

Oh well.I spotted a copy of Secret Agent ACE in a second-hand bookshop and was contemplating buying it.But after what you stated,bye bye SAA.

Stephen Thrave wrote Famous Five gamebooks?Is it the Famous Five and You series?I have one of the books in that series,Take Off.

[a moderator]

The Thraves Famous Five gamebooks came with lots of losable props (see here and here for examples), and had titles like The Wreckers' Tower Game. As I recall, they're even worse than A.C.E. At the start you take some of the props (one of which will enable you to find the answer to one type of puzzle). Then it goes something like:
1) Roll the special d6 that came with the book to see what type of puzzle you get.
2) If you have the appropriate prop, you solve the puzzle, and might get to start using another of the props.
3) If you do not have the appropriate prop, you might be allowed to make a guess, which gives you a 1 in 3 chance of solving the puzzle as above.
4) If you guess wrongly, or don't get the chance to guess, you gain nothing and may even lose a Picnic Card (equivalent to a 'life').
5) Repeat the process from the start until you run out of Picnic Cards and fail, or make it to the end of the book and win.
Not a whole lot of fun.

[deadshadowrunner]

Haha,I guess he isn't cut to be a gamebook writer.

[yvoire]

No he really isn't.
He was translated in Italian too. I wanted to love Secret Agent A.C.E. but as Greenspine pointed out, it's terribly linear and has the guess mechanic that had no meaning whatsoever. There were some other mini-puzzles, like the sabotaged vehicles, but it was the same thing. Just guess randomly unless you have a list of all sabotaged vehicles which you can acquire during the game. It was very meh in the end.

I also have Shadow of Doom. The structure is the same as other Compact gamebooks. You have to retrieve six gems, each guarded by a number of monsters and you have to choose which to fight in order to get the gem. it is much better in removing the 1 in 4 random chance, because the choice of monster only determines the difficulty in the combat. The combat mechanics I actually kinda loved. They were something genuinely new, and rather cute. The fiction felt forced in the way monsters are separated so that you only have to fight one at a time, and the plot is ludicrously linear and bland. Still, a little better written than A.C.E., if only slightly.

[kieran]

I think his best gamebooks were the Ghost ones. They were as random as anything else he wrote, but they were amusingly written with great supporting characters and the randomness was better disguised. They had you searching for treasure in haunted places with your companions an elderly professor of the paranormal and a spiritual medium. The amusing thing was that the two of them were both frauds and complete cowards and were both hopeless at covering these two facts. The random element came from the medium always rolling her special die to see which of the three of you was best suited for each task (and she generally feigned disappointment if it selected the professor or you, and happiness if it selected her). If you don't like randomness in gamebooks they will not appeal, but otherwise they're worth checking out.

[deadshadowrunner]

Now would be a good time to say I bought Secret Agent ACE.I loved it!It was the best gamebook I'd ever read!Great!Two thumbs up!

Actually,no.

[a moderator]

I remember an amusing and pretty savage review of one of Thraves' Battle Quest books on the Gamebooks group at Yahoo! some years back. One criticism that's always stuck in my memory is that opponents don't even have names, just stats, and it wasn't nearly as much fun to proclaim, "I killed the monster I had to hit 6 times!" as going "I smashed the LARD GIANT's stupid face in!"

[deadshadowrunner]

Today I bought a huge haul of 35 gamebooks(had a pretty hard time lugging them home), including 3 STAGs(nice acronym). They were Haunted Island, Shadows of Doom and Ghost Ride. I will most likely be posting about them here after I read them, which will be after I read the rest of the 32 gamebooks.

[a moderator]

Mar 30, 2014 16:47:11 GMT a moderator said:

I remember an amusing and pretty savage review of one of Thraves' Battle Quest books on the Gamebooks group at Yahoo! some years back. One criticism that's always stuck in my memory is that opponents don't even have names, just stats, and it wasn't nearly as much fun to proclaim, "I killed the monster I had to hit 6 times!" as going "I smashed the LARD GIANT's stupid face in!"

The discussion of Thraves' Asterix books in another thread reminded me of this review, and a search of my undeleted emails revealed that I still had the one with the review in. Since it no longer exists at Yahoo!, I shall reproduce it below.

BATTLE QUEST: TUNNELS OF FEAR

Stephen Thraves

Hodder & Stoughton, 1992, £5.99

Reviewed by Leigh Loveday


At least now I get it. Stephen Thraves' relative anonymity in the gamebook world, despite the number of titles he's managed to kick out over the years, has always been a bit of a mystery to me. Now I see that there's a solid justification for pretending his gamebook career never happened, and I would recommend Tunnels of Fear to anyone who's still a bit hazy on that score. This is also, I'd like to clarify, the only way I'd ever recommend it.

The Battle Quest series (just this and Caves of Fury, as far as I can tell) is something of a departure from Mr. Thraves' usual work, which largely consists of licensed fare covering characters as diverse as Asterix, Biggles and the Famous Five. And that's probably another reason for his lack of recognition amongst the gamebook cognoscenti who'd be more likely to fork out 50 bones for Fabled Lands 6 on eBay than 50p for Asterix and the Magic Bum Trumpet in the nearest Oxfam. Even his other unlicensed work was heavily kid-orientated, a bit gimmicky and... well... not very good. It also didn't start appearing until fairly late in the day as far as gamebooks were concerned. Fighting Fantasy had hit no. 50 by 1992, for instance - not really the time to start fishing for new readers.

Having said all that, Battle Quest's overall presentation is a cut above most other gamebook series, from the slightly bigger format and higher-quality paper to the extra bits and pieces (stylised combat dice, treasure/hit counters, reference cards with names like 'Book of Ciphers' and 'Gift of Foresight') that come with it. And yes, that is novel for a while. But it's also £5.99. This was 15 years ago, and frankly I wouldn't pay £5.99 for a gamebook even at today's rates. So it's not like you're really getting any of these extras for free, which instantly negates much of the appeal. I paid about 75p for my copy a few months ago, but that's not the point - I'm doing contemporary market analysis and stuff. 

Bereft of the benefits of presentation and with its contents exposed to close scrutiny, what's left of Tunnels of Fear in no way stands up to its peers. It's plain bad. When the introductory sections are full of people declaiming "o fearless warrior" and "you are our last hope" without a trace of irony, the clouds begin to form; by the time you've reached your fifth or sixth identikit pick-a-potion 'puzzle' or thoroughly fun-deficient battle with some charmless, nameless tunnel lurker, the black rain of depression is coming down in sheets. 

It doesn't take long to click that imagination is not one of Mr. Thraves' strong points. The setting of this book is tedium itself, the structure as basic as can be and surely none of the encounters took more than a few seconds to brain-splat onto the page. These particular crimes against literature and fun can be divided into two types: dull monster encounters, which you can either tackle head-on (with no way to discern how hard the enemy is until you're committed) or avoid in favour of the next, near-identical, dull monster encounter just around the corner; and 'puzzles', which consist entirely of having to choose one option from a range of either two or three.

The things that you're choosing from in these RSI-inducingly regular situations can be potions, weapons, people, tunnels, items of clothing, lifts, ladders, pools, ropes, shovels, spirits, stray lightning bolts, just about any old tat you'd care to name, and only on rare occasions do you get any kind of hint as to which choices will leave you with a nice warm glow and which will kick your arse right through the back cover. Usually this involves fishing out one of the extra bits and pieces that came with the book, to translate a symbol by consulting a chart or to decode a message by laying a... decoding thing... over the page. It's not as exciting as it sounds. Not that it sounds exciting. Because it isn't. 

Illustration duties for the duration of the Battle Quest 'series' were handled by Terry Oakes, a well-known face on the gamebook circuit, not that I'm trying to make him sound like a prostitute or anything. He doesn't seem to be trying particularly hard here, but to be fair he doesn't have a lot to work with - there are monsters by the dozen, but they stick almost without exception to a minimum-effort 'ugly humanoid with sword' template. In another baffling design choice, they're identified by the number of wounds they take to kill rather than being individually named. Which was always half the fun. "I killed the Lard Giant! I smashed my Magic Axe of Goddammit through the Lard Giant's stupid face!". Here you're reduced to "I killed the 8 WOUNDS TO KILL monster! I WOUNDED him no less than 8 TIMES! Go me!".

The number of hits that each monster takes before dying (usually with a graphic description of them bleeding to death, the only time the author seems to take an interest) also gives the impression of being set at random, and considering that ANY damage inflicted upon you in battle automatically causes you to run away like a little girl, the odds aren't too good on you successfully laying a combo of eight or nine very palpable hits on an opponent. So the combat system's fundamentally buggered too. 

Other uninspired, ill-judged or broken things about the book: the plot, which links the treasure-collecting aspect to the level of eventual success in as ham-fisted a manner as Alec Baldwin attempting to have a gentle heart-to-heart with his daughter; the wasteful distribution of paragraphs, with as many as eight different monsters appearing in any given 'chain', only one of which you'll be able to fight thanks to the book's structure; the overall quality of writing, e.g. "But as you move nearer, however, you see that there is also a monster with two heads nearby"; and the ending, which I won't give away, primarily because there isn't anything to give away. Wait - does that count as giving it away?

Good points: well, on a totally superficial level (and putting aside the impact on price) it's quite a classy package as gamebooks go, and there's plenty of text per page. This helps the 330 sections to feel like more, despite the fact that you'll only run through a fraction of them on each attempt. Beyond that there's not really much to be said in its favour. Your mileage may vary, but for me ploughing through to the end of a gamebook has never felt more of a chore.

I don't choose these things on purpose with the sole intent of tearing into them, I honestly don't - once in a while I'd love to stumble across a random gamebook that confounded my expectations in a *good* way. But the only way I could apply the words 'pleasant surprise' to Tunnels of Fear is if I walked into a charity shop and found a member of staff ritually setting fire to a copy on the counter while innocent children stood around cheering.