Fighting Fantasy VIi

[davidn]

Did anyone else have the Fighting Fantasy books? They were like a version of Choose Your Own Adventure for people who would later grow up to be able to name at least fifty power metal artists and know all of their direct lineages back to Helloween. Written primarily by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone of Games Workshop, they were set in the sort of science fiction and fantasy environments that you would reasonably expect, with dice-based RPG elements and inventory playing a part along with the player's decision-making. I found out by chance that a few of them had been released as iOS games, and bought the one for Deathtrap Dungeon to see how it played.

This was one of the more famous Fighting Fantasy books, having been turned into a moderately rubbish PC game some years ago. It's set in a town that houses a twisted labyrinth underneath its foundations - not a natural phenomenon explored for curiosity and fortune like in Etrian Odyssey, but a custom-built monster-filled dungeon constructed by a sadistic Dungeons and Dragons-playing baron that really let his obsession get out of hand. Each year, champions come forward to brave its depths despite the count of survivors remaining at zero since its inception, and here you are cast as one of the people stupid enough to attempt it yourself.

As soon as I started reading the first paragraphs on the iPhone, I was surprised by how straight the conversion was from book to game - it's actually almost like something you'd expect from a Kindle in that while you get full-colour illustrations, the text and mechanics are basically unchanged from the paper version. The numbering and text of entries remains the same - choices are presented as hyperlinks that are disabled and highlighted according to whether they're valid or not, rather than the game making any effort to force the narrative even when a choice depends on something that it already knows (like whether you have an item in your inventory). For example, rather than splitting entries when a dice roll needs to be made, the classic challenges of "Test your luck. If you are lucky, turn to 94. If not, turn to 172." are still present - you first have to click the link after "Test your luck" which brings you to the dice-rolling screen, and then one or the other of those links will become enabled depending on the result of the roll.

Fights play out in exactly the same way as they used to, as well - you're taken to the screen where shaking the device causes a couple of dice to tumble around, and you can tilt it around to try to influence their landing even though this naturally doesn't help at all. The most you get in terms of extras is a decidedly Statbuilder-like little fanfare and "YOU WON" when fights end. They could have done a lot in transplanting this to a handheld game, taking you to an RPG-type battle screen to fight enemies or at least give visual representations of the monsters, but instead it's obvious that they made a conscious decision to keep it very firmly in its tangible roots.

Converting a gamebook to computer format also makes it extremely difficult because of removing one major option from the player - you can't cheat. With any gamebook of this type, I believe the usual protocol is to mark places where you think you've made a bad decision by sticking all your fingers gradually into the pages as bookmarks, followed by rulers, bits of Lego and whatever else you had lying around. There's no such luck here, as once you make a decision there's no going back - a "Continue" option is provided on the main menu, but in a Pythonesque twist, using it after you die will continue from literally the same place you left off, and you get to read about your demise once again. Mercifully, though, if you die during a fight you can freely retry it.

The game - and the general Fighting Fantasy philosophy - says that no matter how poor your initial dice rolls are in setting up your character, the true route through the game should allow you to pass fairly easily. This is blatantly untrue - in fact, there's no reason not to just keep trying the character creation until you end up with the maximum possible skill score of 12 (a crucial statistic in fights). And even with that advantage, the setup of this particular book is such that you really need to do everything perfectly to have a chance of completing it - if you don't have three specific gems near the end, then instead of getting the promised reward, you get roped into a lifetime of maintaining and setting up traps for the dungeon, then presumably hiding away and hoping to see some passing gamebook designers fall into them.

Comments

[kjorteo]

Based on your description, I'm going to go ahead and assume you forgot to mention Roberta Williams in the prominent authors.

Also, that thing from the book version cover would be cute if it only had two eyes, but the eyes are a little unnerving as it currently stands.

[davidn]

Cute...! You're the only person I know who could look at the legendarily hideous Bloodbeast, one of the climactic fights at the deepest levels of a dungeon of unspeakableness, and say that he's a bit unattractive but could be really nice if he smartened himself up and used some Colgate tooth-whitening strips.

Island of the Lizard King on the other hand

Anyway. I think that, as much as I never thought I'd be saying this, Roberta Williams' games seem positively generous compared to this book if you follow it to the letter of starting again every time you die (I have since found out that you can actually step back in this version, but it's difficult to find the feature and you only have a limited undo buffer). It definitely shares the love of instant deaths, with absolutely no way to know which choice is right and which is wrong - fairly early on, you're confronted with a large statue and given the option to climb up and retrieve one of its eyes. Pulling out the left eye activates two undead flying guardians that you have to fight in turn (with a penalty for being in an awkward position). Having died to those, I restarted and pulled out the right eye instead, whereupon it sprayed poisonous gas into my face and killed me instantly.

And because you need a very specific three gems at the end of the book, chances are always high that you're already on an unwinnable path and don't know it - and there's no way to find out until the very end after you've overcome every other obstacle ahead.

[kjorteo]

Um, about that Lizard King ... yes, please. <3

And the funny thing (which just happens to be on my mind since I'm currently replaying it thanks to GOG) is that Roberta Williams' game design actually is generous if you play King's Quest 7--unfathomable, considering the game that came a mere two entries in the series before it, yet true. I just beat chapter one, as part of my "I beat this game before but it's been so long that I only remember about half the puzzles" replay, and was completely unaware that you actually have options in chapter one. That's not something I forgot; it's something I didn't even realize.

The game tricks you with what looks like a classic KQ5 "choose carefully because it's gone forever" exchange in which helping a certain wanderer gets him to lead you to a place with a horn lying on the ground and an inaccessible bag which he makes accessible for you. Inside is a certain magical powder (much like the Ghost-B-Gone/No Ghost spray from Uninvited, I can't even say the full name of the item without revealing the painfully obvious puzzle it solves) and a rope. As soon as you take one, the entire rest of the bag disappears forever. (Also, this is unconfirmed since I chose the powder, but I think I read somewhere that taking the rope makes the horn disappear too?) Hope you chose wisely!

Except that you're actually all right either way. There are two major puzzles left at this point, and one requires the horn or the rope, and the other requires the powder or a certain combination of other inventory items you probably already had before even doing this. Thus, either choice leaves you with the ability to solve both puzzles ... actually, you can even complete the chapter without helping the wanderer at all and without getting anything from him at all, though it's a little non-intuitive. (You need to just take it upon yourself to go to that area without him leading you there, take the horn since only the bag is guarded, and use the horn and your other items.)

Now, if this were King's Quest 5, the dual solutions for both puzzles would still work, but would consume the items, and you'd have to just know in advance which ones you need to use now and which ones you'll need to save for the unwinnable situation coming up four chapters later, but ... it's not.

[davidn]

I should probably mention that his 'crown' - I'm not even joking here - was revealed to be a parasitic spider that's attached itself to his brain

King's Quest 7 (and the counterpart I played by Al Lowe, Torin's Passage) definitely came at a softer time in Sierra's life... instant revival on death (which is exactly how death in adventure games should be) and a distinct lack of unwinnable routes. I'm really very impressed to hear about the choice of items and puzzles that they were used for - I remember being fascinated at the first of these games I ever played (the remake of King's Quest I) and how the puzzles seemed to have many different solutions that gave you points according to their cleverness. Keeping the idea of multiple routes like that without making so many of those routes "dead" would have still been a great way to set their adventures apart from Lucasarts, rather than going for distinction through brutality.

I remember only two specific things from King's Quest 7 - that wanderer in the desert who wants fresh water (and who throws the cauldron away if you give him salt water, but notably doesn't kill you for it), and seeing just how much Sierra wanted to be Disney at that point in their life. (Except Sierra still kills protagonists a lot, and Walt disnae).

[kjorteo]

Oh my god, even better. I must have him that book immediately.

King's Quest 7 is ... very notably Disney-inspired (or, if you've seen the "Land Beyond Dreams" number recently, it's Disney-"inspired" in much the same way that Gamma Ray songs are Judas Priest-/Iron Maiden-/Helloween-inspired) but for a game that finally got tired of Graham and Alexander and chose to feature Valanice and Rosella as the playable characters this time around, it actually works remarkably well. It has quite a lot of charm to it. And the soundtrack is great, too. And there may be one or two poisonous monsters, but there is a notable lack of owls to warn you about them.

And yes, it is rather strange that the wanderer doesn't kill you for giving him salt water, especially since he directly threatens your life (well, "go, now, this thirst drives me mad, and I know not what it will make me do" is pretty direct for a Sierra game, anyway) right before you have the chance to do that, and even KQ7 has no qualms killing you over less serious offenses. (With the instant "oops, let me try that again" feature, but you know.)

[terrana.livejournal.com]

I remember the Fighting Fantasy books well. I seem to recall that the spiel about how "the true route through the game should allow you to pass fairly easily" was repeated verbatim in every book, with varying degrees of truthfulness. I also remember Deathtrap Dungeon being particularly brutal in terms of difficulty, although that may just be the book's theme introducing a bias.

Funnily enough, when I first started reading this post, my initial concern was the same one you voiced later on: cheating. I maintain, as with all games one plays solo, that this should always be an option if one chooses to use it. Even a choice at the start which asks, "should valid choices be enforced?" that stops you cheating if you tell it to or lets you get on with it otherwise would have been sufficient on that front.

[davidn]

The 'cheating' option would be nice, actually, if the game is keeping deliberately so close to the book anyway - just activate all the links no matter whether you have the required piece of inventory or not. I know I just said "Yes", "Yes", "Yes" during the sequence of being asked whether I had the three required gemstones at the end, in the book... in the game, I've got there a couple of times with various combinations of wrong gems (and it's odd that the path is so short, because I had remembered them as being immense.)

This book really is sadistic, as you'd expect from an unsurvivable dungeon - though it would be nice in the context of the game if the choices presented could be reasoned through with more than arbitrary guesswork! That, and it likes putting you in corners and not telling you until you've gone much further down a doomed path. To give another example in addition to the statue, above - there's a point where you're being pursued by an army of evil little elves. You have a choice - you can run over a bridge or dive into the water next to it. If you run over the bridge, you come to an unopenable door (you need a key much earlier in the game) and are shot by a thousand arrows. If you dive into the water and have a hollow pipe, you can hide and breathe through it while they look for you, then re-emerge when they're gone. Then you walk over the bridge, find the door, have to try to barge it down and are shot by a thousand arrows.

[kytheraen.livejournal.com]

I loved Fighting Fantasy <3

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

It probably doesn't come as a great surprise to learn that I was a huge fan of the Fighting Fantasy series, as well (although I preferred their fantasy-themed ones; the space-themed ones always seemed a little awkward, to me). One of my favourites in terms of story was Creature of Havoc, although in terms of gameplay it's probably one of the least fair things ever devised (the plot revolves around you being magically mutated into some sort of lizard monster thing, and until a certain point decently early on in the game, your instincts decide which way you go - which means that survival beyond the first left/right choice in the game depends on a 50/50 die roll, since one way leads to nothing but death by Dark Elves).

Also of interest might be this site here, which I found a few months ago; it's a fan site, but features a number of home-made FF-style gamebooks, playable online, of varying levels of difficulty. Enjoy!

http://www.ffproject.com/

D.F.

[davidn]

I'd forgotten we'd talked about these :) I do vaguely remember Creature of Havoc and how it said, fairly early on, "You've probably realized by now that you won't have the same control over your character that you had in other books..." They had a lot of experimentation with the base formula (Scorpion Swamp was surprisingly free-roaming, and contained the fantastic feature of being able to sell out at the beginning of the game instead of going on the quest!) - though how many of them fell within the bounds of good game design...

I think Space Assassin was my favourite - it's certainly the one I remember the most, having been the first one I read. In fact I had a go at recreating it in Megazeux but never got very far into exploring all the paths and recreating them in a live-action game... I have no idea of all their relative difficulty because when I read them I was just picking any choice I liked and not keeping track of inventory, but playing Deathtrap Dungeon with enforced rules really made me realize how hard it is to choose the one true path through the game without venturing into the useless sections...

I'm definitely impressed with that site! There seem to be active fan communities producing new material for a lot of nostalgic things, now, and I was just thinking how difficult these things were to write and playtest - persumably they had to lay it all out in branches first and then use a computer to organize it all into randomly chosen section numbers...

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

I actually own Space Assassin! If this trip to all meet up at FF works out, I'll bring it with me!

I'm trying to remember the name of the other space-themed one I used to read at the school library: it had some angry tentacled creature flying a hoverbike on the front of it; it had a theme of the bad guy using cloning to create an army of wolf-man (or dog-man, I don't remember any more) soldiers and needing table salt to stop them from taking over, and it had some bit at the start that I didn't really understand about having to choose whether to travel through light or time to reach your destination. Any thoughts?

D.F.

[davidn]

I don't know, but I want to read it :) Are you sure it was a Fighting Fantasy? The theme seems a bit... weird, with the table salt versus werewolf storyline.