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Fighting Fantasy VIi
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.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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