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Fighting Fantasy #27
Star Strider
Cunning opponents and deadly Androids await you - as an intergalactic bounty hunter!
The unscrupulous Gromulans, who have long been based on the obscure planet Earth, have kidnapped the Galactic President. YOU are the top Rogue Tracer of that sector of the galaxy. You have forty-eight hours before the top-secret contents of the President's mind will have been extracted by Gromulan brainscan. Can you overcome your lethal opponents, find the President and rescue him in time?
Part story, part game, this is a book in which YOU become the hero! Two dice, a pencil and an eraser are all you need. YOU decide which routes to take, which dangers to risk and which foes to fight.
The unscrupulous Gromulans, who have long been based on the obscure planet Earth, have kidnapped the Galactic President. YOU are the top Rogue Tracer of that sector of the galaxy. You have forty-eight hours before the top-secret contents of the President's mind will have been extracted by Gromulan brainscan. Can you overcome your lethal opponents, find the President and rescue him in time?
Part story, part game, this is a book in which YOU become the hero! Two dice, a pencil and an eraser are all you need. YOU decide which routes to take, which dangers to risk and which foes to fight.
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1987
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
May 27, 2019
Earth an empty, echoing airport terminal
Filled with half-heard traces of forgotten times.
Just sadness, a soundtrack by Klaus Schulze;
Catch the Silverhound, check Gromulan crimes.
The bounty hunter will never find a friend;
In the future past, there's no one to trust.
Through once-great centres of reduced population
The reader sees his own time, through centuries of rust.
Filled with half-heard traces of forgotten times.
Just sadness, a soundtrack by Klaus Schulze;
Catch the Silverhound, check Gromulan crimes.
The bounty hunter will never find a friend;
In the future past, there's no one to trust.
Through once-great centres of reduced population
The reader sees his own time, through centuries of rust.
December 27, 2015
Return to an Abandoned Earth
9 September 2012
I'm not really sure how to categorise this one because in some ways it was quite amusing, and very fast paced, but in other ways it wavered between too easy and too hard. The story is that you are an elite bounty hunter, known as a rouge tracer or star strider, and you are sent on a mission to rescue the galactic president who has been kidnapped by an enemy race known as the Gromulans. The thing is that the Gromulans live on Earth, and the reason for this is because nobody else wanted to live on Earth so when humanity developed interstellar travel, and found other habitable planets, pretty much anybody who could afford to leave, did, and anybody who couldn't, remained. As such Earth has become the cesspit of everything bad in the Galaxy - and you have to go there.
As I said, parts of it were amusing, especially the introduction which tells you about the inhabitants of Earth. In particular, there are a group known as the Houlgans, who are divided into tribes which are distinguished by the colours of their clothes, especially scarves (direct quote). It took me a bit to click that the author was having a dig at English soccer fans, especially since I suspect that at the time of writing soccer houliganism was a big problem in England.
As mentioned, the style comes across as very fast paced. The author describes things in minimal detail and it feels as if you are moving through the adventure quite quickly. Added to this is a time bar, namely you have to complete the adventure in a certain amount of time otherwise the information that the Gromulans are trying to get out of the presidents head will have been retrieved and you will have failed in your mission. This is a new element to the gamebooks, and I find it was done quite well. It is relatively easy to get to the end of the adventure without running out of time (I took about 22 units to complete it), however when I discovered a website which contained flowcharts for these books I noted that you were able to skip large chunks. This is probably one of the few gamebooks where this is necessary.
I found it easy in the sense that you only needed one piece of information to get to the president, and this was a set of co-ordinates for a subway system (namely London's). Some have suggested that this subway maze was quite hard, however you can find a map, and once you have the map, moving through the subways is actually quite easy (and while a modern map may help, the modern map does not necessary reveal the nodes).
The hard aspect of the adventure was that there were a couple of places where there were logic puzzles, and these logic puzzles were incredibly hard. They were like guess the next number in the sequence, or guess the missing number. There was another place where you were given some information, and when it came time to use the information it was difficult to work out the instructions. I also noticed that there seems to be minimal combat, and the combat that you do have is either very easy or very hard. However, the author also makes come clever use of dice in this book, such as rolling one dice, and then rolling a second dice a couple of times and if you rolled the same number as the first, you were fried, or fell down a pit.
9 September 2012
I'm not really sure how to categorise this one because in some ways it was quite amusing, and very fast paced, but in other ways it wavered between too easy and too hard. The story is that you are an elite bounty hunter, known as a rouge tracer or star strider, and you are sent on a mission to rescue the galactic president who has been kidnapped by an enemy race known as the Gromulans. The thing is that the Gromulans live on Earth, and the reason for this is because nobody else wanted to live on Earth so when humanity developed interstellar travel, and found other habitable planets, pretty much anybody who could afford to leave, did, and anybody who couldn't, remained. As such Earth has become the cesspit of everything bad in the Galaxy - and you have to go there.
As I said, parts of it were amusing, especially the introduction which tells you about the inhabitants of Earth. In particular, there are a group known as the Houlgans, who are divided into tribes which are distinguished by the colours of their clothes, especially scarves (direct quote). It took me a bit to click that the author was having a dig at English soccer fans, especially since I suspect that at the time of writing soccer houliganism was a big problem in England.
As mentioned, the style comes across as very fast paced. The author describes things in minimal detail and it feels as if you are moving through the adventure quite quickly. Added to this is a time bar, namely you have to complete the adventure in a certain amount of time otherwise the information that the Gromulans are trying to get out of the presidents head will have been retrieved and you will have failed in your mission. This is a new element to the gamebooks, and I find it was done quite well. It is relatively easy to get to the end of the adventure without running out of time (I took about 22 units to complete it), however when I discovered a website which contained flowcharts for these books I noted that you were able to skip large chunks. This is probably one of the few gamebooks where this is necessary.
I found it easy in the sense that you only needed one piece of information to get to the president, and this was a set of co-ordinates for a subway system (namely London's). Some have suggested that this subway maze was quite hard, however you can find a map, and once you have the map, moving through the subways is actually quite easy (and while a modern map may help, the modern map does not necessary reveal the nodes).
The hard aspect of the adventure was that there were a couple of places where there were logic puzzles, and these logic puzzles were incredibly hard. They were like guess the next number in the sequence, or guess the missing number. There was another place where you were given some information, and when it came time to use the information it was difficult to work out the instructions. I also noticed that there seems to be minimal combat, and the combat that you do have is either very easy or very hard. However, the author also makes come clever use of dice in this book, such as rolling one dice, and then rolling a second dice a couple of times and if you rolled the same number as the first, you were fried, or fell down a pit.
September 26, 2022
O livro não vale 4 estrelas, é verdade.
É datado e a história muito básica, mas só o gosto de recordar a infância e a guerra que foi conseguir terminar a história foi um bom passatempo.
É datado e a história muito básica, mas só o gosto de recordar a infância e a guerra que foi conseguir terminar a história foi um bom passatempo.
December 5, 2014
O meu preferido!
Complicado na parte de encontrar os códigos certos mas muito bem montada a história e cheia de situações inesperadas.
Quase todos os que se passam no espaço são bons.
Complicado na parte de encontrar os códigos certos mas muito bem montada a história e cheia de situações inesperadas.
Quase todos os que se passam no espaço são bons.
April 14, 2020
Very poor Sci-Fi FF book which I found boring tbh, as hardly anything of note!
January 8, 2023
Mediocre gamebook. The tube map-based maze at the end is cute, but overall the design is lacklustre, and frequently makes the cardinal error of making you lose because you didn't make use of setting knowledge which your character would have had but you don't, because the book didn't explain it to you. Full review: https://refereeingandreflection.wordp...
June 10, 2024
Now I remember why I hadn't won this book as a kid, even with a walkthrough I still don't understand the math problems. That's right, MATH PROBLEMS. Because every kid loves to relax with mathematical brain teasers. Sure, I like sci-fi but I'm no math whiz. Sadly, a cool premise and great illustrations are wasted on this book. Corny writing and death march pacing keep the reader rolling their eyes while skimming through endless do or die tests, blind left/right choices, and a maze at the end. My kingdom for a good sci-fi Fighting Fantasy gamebook.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews