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Fighting Fantasy #33
Égi fejedelem
A zseniális tudós, L'Bastin, Vaaxnak, az Ensulina bolygó királyának helytartója új, félelmetes hadseregével akarja uralma alá hajtani a galaxist – mesterséges úton, klónozással előállított
kutyafejű perfektákkal, akiknél tökéletesebb harcosokat eddig még nem ismert a történelem. L'Bastin az Aarok bolygón épített erődöt magának, mely nagy hadseregek ellen annyira jól védett, hogy csak egy megfelelően kiképzett ügynöknek van esélye arra, hogy egyedül bejusson, és leszámoljon L'Bastinnal. Csak a legjobb csillagközi harcos vállalhatja el ezt a feladatot.
A választás TERÁD esett – ha vállalod a kockázatot!
Félig regény, félig játék. Ennek a könyvnek TE vagy a főhőse!
Két kocka, egy veruza és egy radír: ez minden, amire szükséged van. Te döntöd el, melyik utat választod, mekkora veszélyt vállalsz, és milyen ellenfelekkel küzdesz meg.
kutyafejű perfektákkal, akiknél tökéletesebb harcosokat eddig még nem ismert a történelem. L'Bastin az Aarok bolygón épített erődöt magának, mely nagy hadseregek ellen annyira jól védett, hogy csak egy megfelelően kiképzett ügynöknek van esélye arra, hogy egyedül bejusson, és leszámoljon L'Bastinnal. Csak a legjobb csillagközi harcos vállalhatja el ezt a feladatot.
A választás TERÁD esett – ha vállalod a kockázatot!
Félig regény, félig játék. Ennek a könyvnek TE vagy a főhőse!
Két kocka, egy veruza és egy radír: ez minden, amire szükséged van. Te döntöd el, melyik utat választod, mekkora veszélyt vállalsz, és milyen ellenfelekkel küzdesz meg.
400 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1988
113 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
November 15, 2015
Another space commando adventure
13 December 2012
I must admit that this book was pretty ordinary, but then again I am beginning to find that these later gamebooks are all becoming quite dull. Gone are the good books where you could make an easy map of the area. Now they seem to have all boiled down into random choices which you are forced to make based on not so educated guesses. At least with the early books there was a semblance of being able to chart your progress so that if you did make a mistake, or took the wrong path, you could work out where you needed to go to be able to successfully complete the quest.
Okay, this was not necessarily the case with many of them, and maybe it is because these books are at the stage where I have not read them previously which is why many of them are new to me. However, even some of the early ones suffered from this problem where it was difficult to track your progress (such as Starship Traveller) to enable you to then go back to the book and try again.
In this book you play a 'Sky Lord', which is basically an interstellar commando, who is on a mission to capture a rogue biologist who, after being exiled from your world, is now seeking revenge against your commander. However there is an interesting twist at the end of this book, though I will not reveal it, despite the book not being all that good.
This is one of the science-fiction stories, and the writer is trying to create a better feeling of ship to ship fighting, so a few of the combats between ships have you making choices as to how you are going to steer your ship. This of course requires you to try to guess how your enemy is steering their ship. It can be a little confusing, and could also simply result in you losing stamina. Also, there seems to be a lot of instances were you suffer injuries, but I was baffled as to how you were to actually heal your injuries, but maybe that has something to do with the items that you chose at the beginning.
Oh, and there is also a part where you are provided with a list of say six items, and you have to chose two of them to take. Once again there is little in the way of clues to work out what you actually need, and it is only when you get to the end of the section that you work out what you required: that is when you realise that you have stuffed up. Basically you need to collect thirteen points worth of items, but until you reach the end, you have no idea what points the item is worth.
13 December 2012
I must admit that this book was pretty ordinary, but then again I am beginning to find that these later gamebooks are all becoming quite dull. Gone are the good books where you could make an easy map of the area. Now they seem to have all boiled down into random choices which you are forced to make based on not so educated guesses. At least with the early books there was a semblance of being able to chart your progress so that if you did make a mistake, or took the wrong path, you could work out where you needed to go to be able to successfully complete the quest.
Okay, this was not necessarily the case with many of them, and maybe it is because these books are at the stage where I have not read them previously which is why many of them are new to me. However, even some of the early ones suffered from this problem where it was difficult to track your progress (such as Starship Traveller) to enable you to then go back to the book and try again.
In this book you play a 'Sky Lord', which is basically an interstellar commando, who is on a mission to capture a rogue biologist who, after being exiled from your world, is now seeking revenge against your commander. However there is an interesting twist at the end of this book, though I will not reveal it, despite the book not being all that good.
This is one of the science-fiction stories, and the writer is trying to create a better feeling of ship to ship fighting, so a few of the combats between ships have you making choices as to how you are going to steer your ship. This of course requires you to try to guess how your enemy is steering their ship. It can be a little confusing, and could also simply result in you losing stamina. Also, there seems to be a lot of instances were you suffer injuries, but I was baffled as to how you were to actually heal your injuries, but maybe that has something to do with the items that you chose at the beginning.
Oh, and there is also a part where you are provided with a list of say six items, and you have to chose two of them to take. Once again there is little in the way of clues to work out what you actually need, and it is only when you get to the end of the section that you work out what you required: that is when you realise that you have stuffed up. Basically you need to collect thirteen points worth of items, but until you reach the end, you have no idea what points the item is worth.
June 8, 2018
I loved these books as a kid. Must go back and re-read them to make a proper review. But just look at that art work too... amazing!
April 26, 2023
You're a four-armed bountyhunter type, tasked by your king to track down a renegade scientist and the race of genetic supersoldiers he's creating. Along the way, you may encounter unstoppable blobs, space dogfights, and strange creatures, and it will all, for the most part, be very frustrating, annoying, and nonsensical.
Kind of tipped my hand a bit at the end, but this book regularly winds up very high on the "worst FF book" lists. There's a lot of reasons for that, but the chief three are probably tone, lack of rewards, and indiscernible choices. Tonally, this story is a wacky romp, with the player character as the straight person in a universe of weirdos. I can see that working, but it does mean that pretty much everyone you encounter is unnecessarily hostile, incompetent, or, usually, both. It feels kind of like it's going for a 2000 AD vibe, but without any satirical targets or style that make the better 2000 AD stories work. Despite the variations in mechanics and the outer trappings of the creatures, it winds up feeling one note.
The encounter design is actually not bad--it's a structure that could work just fine in another book. Basically, there's a choice of two "adventures" to go on; this choice of two is repeated for a total of four encounters, and then you have the final area. It starts with a choice of a space station infested with blobs or a planet overrun by "magic mutants"; then there's a fight against a giant ship or a chase against another; fend of a dog people attack or a spider people attack; partake in a series of pub challenges or rescue a mad scientist; then the final dungeon. That structure works--it keeps things varied. But a number of other issues means it doesn't work very well. Most of these encounters have nothing to do with the main mission, which makes them feel like pointless diversions, especially the parts before landing on the planet. For a lot of the bifurcations, one path feeds into the option to go to the adventure you didn't take, which means you can wind up accidentally with a very long, long adventure.
And most importantly, very few of the encounters have any reward that makes victory feel good. Other books have items that grant mechanical benefits (your +1 skill sort of things), or at least items that serve as keys for checks later on. I don't like that design, but at least it makes you feel like the adventure has consequence. Some reward with information--put a clue on that blob-infested space station that leads me to the planet, for example. Even something that's unskippable can at least make the adventure that lead to it seem more relevant. Heck, it could even be a reward that serves no purpose in the story: give me a doodad or a mcguffin. Even a cool text description would be better than how most of these paths end.
Finally, and this is the element that makes everything else worse: 9 times out of 10, the book's choices are just not discernible. Being given a choice without any basis for making that choice means you're just making a meaningless choice. The blob-infested space station is a good example, and probably the worst offender. It's basically a mini-game: you run through the space station avoiding the blobs and accumulating items, usually choosing two from a list. At the end, you take those items, and throw them at the blob, hoping to poison it. Each item has a point value, and if you have a high enough point total, you don't die instantly. You not only have to have chosen the right items, but also have gone to the right places to get enough items. That's a cool idea, but the indiscernibility makes it incredibly frustrating. First, the point value doesn't always make sense. A compressed air-canister is worth 2 points. Fine, that kind of works. Chewing gum is also two points. A bottle of acid is one point. A cinnamon stick is 3 points. Second, you don't know why you're gathering items the first time through until the end. And third, the space station itself has no particular logic to its layout. You just have to replay until you happen upon a combination of rooms that have the right item set up to offer a chance of success. And again, the rewards stink. Fail, and it's a one sentence death passage. Succeed, and it's a two sentence passage before asking where you want to go next.
None of this has to be this way. Yes, if it's designed in a more accessible manner, it will mean fewer re-reads. But better one read than gives a real moment of satisfaction than a half dozen frustrated ones. And it's particularly frustrating because it feels like I put more thought into this than the author did.
I'm armchair designing, of course. I have no idea what the original intentions are, or the work that was put into this. There are some interesting one-off minigames here, and some interesting encounter designs. But it's all held back by a bad tone, lack of meaningful reward, and lack of discernible outcomes.
Kind of tipped my hand a bit at the end, but this book regularly winds up very high on the "worst FF book" lists. There's a lot of reasons for that, but the chief three are probably tone, lack of rewards, and indiscernible choices. Tonally, this story is a wacky romp, with the player character as the straight person in a universe of weirdos. I can see that working, but it does mean that pretty much everyone you encounter is unnecessarily hostile, incompetent, or, usually, both. It feels kind of like it's going for a 2000 AD vibe, but without any satirical targets or style that make the better 2000 AD stories work. Despite the variations in mechanics and the outer trappings of the creatures, it winds up feeling one note.
The encounter design is actually not bad--it's a structure that could work just fine in another book. Basically, there's a choice of two "adventures" to go on; this choice of two is repeated for a total of four encounters, and then you have the final area. It starts with a choice of a space station infested with blobs or a planet overrun by "magic mutants"; then there's a fight against a giant ship or a chase against another; fend of a dog people attack or a spider people attack; partake in a series of pub challenges or rescue a mad scientist; then the final dungeon. That structure works--it keeps things varied. But a number of other issues means it doesn't work very well. Most of these encounters have nothing to do with the main mission, which makes them feel like pointless diversions, especially the parts before landing on the planet. For a lot of the bifurcations, one path feeds into the option to go to the adventure you didn't take, which means you can wind up accidentally with a very long, long adventure.
And most importantly, very few of the encounters have any reward that makes victory feel good. Other books have items that grant mechanical benefits (your +1 skill sort of things), or at least items that serve as keys for checks later on. I don't like that design, but at least it makes you feel like the adventure has consequence. Some reward with information--put a clue on that blob-infested space station that leads me to the planet, for example. Even something that's unskippable can at least make the adventure that lead to it seem more relevant. Heck, it could even be a reward that serves no purpose in the story: give me a doodad or a mcguffin. Even a cool text description would be better than how most of these paths end.
Finally, and this is the element that makes everything else worse: 9 times out of 10, the book's choices are just not discernible. Being given a choice without any basis for making that choice means you're just making a meaningless choice. The blob-infested space station is a good example, and probably the worst offender. It's basically a mini-game: you run through the space station avoiding the blobs and accumulating items, usually choosing two from a list. At the end, you take those items, and throw them at the blob, hoping to poison it. Each item has a point value, and if you have a high enough point total, you don't die instantly. You not only have to have chosen the right items, but also have gone to the right places to get enough items. That's a cool idea, but the indiscernibility makes it incredibly frustrating. First, the point value doesn't always make sense. A compressed air-canister is worth 2 points. Fine, that kind of works. Chewing gum is also two points. A bottle of acid is one point. A cinnamon stick is 3 points. Second, you don't know why you're gathering items the first time through until the end. And third, the space station itself has no particular logic to its layout. You just have to replay until you happen upon a combination of rooms that have the right item set up to offer a chance of success. And again, the rewards stink. Fail, and it's a one sentence death passage. Succeed, and it's a two sentence passage before asking where you want to go next.
None of this has to be this way. Yes, if it's designed in a more accessible manner, it will mean fewer re-reads. But better one read than gives a real moment of satisfaction than a half dozen frustrated ones. And it's particularly frustrating because it feels like I put more thought into this than the author did.
I'm armchair designing, of course. I have no idea what the original intentions are, or the work that was put into this. There are some interesting one-off minigames here, and some interesting encounter designs. But it's all held back by a bad tone, lack of meaningful reward, and lack of discernible outcomes.
December 9, 2023
A Three Stooges take on the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. If you like the challenge of tiresome mini-games without any visual input, sound or sense of accomplishment, this gamebook is for you. A disjointed adventure of disconnected scenes, pointless encounters, random and meaningless decisions, and lacklustre illustration that leaves you wondering why you're still playing.
January 15, 2023
Impossibly sloppy Fighting Fantasy adventure which pretty much killed off the sci-fi side of the line. Full review: https://refereeingandreflection.wordp...
August 16, 2024
Goofy as hell. Loved the creative spaceship mechanics and the ideas for the plot were fresh but the enemies weren’t too special and just downright silly sometimes. Also some of the critical decisions relied less on logical thinking and were a lot more random which is something I wasn’t a fan of because that meant it was pretty easy to die. This one also has my least favourite illustrations from a classic Fighting Fantasy because they just look…off, and weird but not in a good way.
September 2, 2014
Random (and not in a good way)
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews